On Archiving as Dissensus

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Parts of this ar ticle were also delivered at t he annual conference on New
Directions in P alestinian Studies at Brown Universit y in March ; the
theme was archives and memory. I thank Beshara Doumani and Areej
Sabbagh for the opp ortunity to take part in t hese ongoing conversations
and Lila Abu- Lughod for her thoughtful queries and comments on an
earlier version of this ar ticle.
. This reflection emerged in  from a succession of lecturing and
teaching visits to Birzei t University in Ramallah.
. The archive proje ct was initiated by the historian Roger H eacock, who
has taught at Birzeit for some thirt y- ve years. For a discussion of the
project in its initial stage, se e Heacock and Mall- D ibiasi, “Liberating the
Phantom Elephant.” Resour ces for the project have bee n minimal. A very
small sta works wi th him. I thank him for inviting me both to take part
in thinking this venture and to give the keynote address for the confer-
ence “Globalizing Palestine: Birzeit University’s Archive in an Interna-
tional Perspec tive — Towards a Chaotic Order,” March ,  .
43
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
Vol. , No. ,  •  ./x- • ©  by Duke University Press
On Archiving as Dissensus
Ann Laura Stoler
W
hat follows is an exercise in imagining how a collective might go about shaping the imagina-
tive geography of a Palestinian archive. At issue is an archival assembly that is not constrained
by the command — in form and content — that is dictated by colonial state priorities or even by
Palestinian authorities. It is rather one that is authored and authorized by a constituent as yet unspecified
Palestinian public. What concerns should be weighed and who shall be its archons? How might a principle
and practice of dissensus speak to and through a vastly deterritorialized populace? Might this diasporic
reality provide the very strength of this archive, its exemplary status, and political grace?
This is also a speculative reflection on an archive in formation that must remain virtual to me — with
neither expertise on things Palestinian nor the linguistic skills and wisdom one needs to work in Arabic.
The collection in question is the Palestinian Archive at the Ibrahim Abu- Lughod Institute of Interna-
tional Studies (IALIIS).

In , the archive’s director, Roger Heacock, invited me to imagine what
Birzeit University might do with the then over ten thousand documents collected. I was asked to imagine
what I would do, how I would proceed in the always charged task of sorting — a sorting out in the sense
of pushing aside what those who engineered colonial policies cared to order, a retrieval of what was not
deemed worthy of that order, and attention to what those who lived and live this colonial situation have
sought to gather up and share in paper and objects, in sound and word and image, as well as what they
did not. What follows are those reflections, with the hope that some — though drawing from the specific-
ity of other colonial situations, archives, and other sites of colonial duress — will speak to the import of
envisioning this project here.
What would a Palestinian archive look like that refused the fictive history and imposed borders of
the Israeli state? How could and should such a dispossessed and diasporic archive be imagined? What
might be its charter and what might it chart? How broad would it stretch and how much would it map?
What forms of compilation and ordering would it oer that did not preordain how it would be used by
constricting its categories to those condoned by authorities, Israeli or otherwise? Could it rather oer the
PALESTINE:
DOING THINGS with ARCHIVES
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. I use occupation here to refer to the im-
mediate conditions of checkpoints, permits,
night raids, and arbitr ary outages — conditions
with which Palestinians in the West Bank deal
with regularly — and colonialism to refer to
the more encompassing frame when talking
about an archive and populace that must be
diasporic, both of which go well beyond “the
occupation.”
. For that earlier work, see Stoler, “Colonial
Archives and the Ar ts of Governance”; Stoler,
Archival Science,  – ; and Stoler, Along the
Archival Grain.
. Rancière, Dissensus, .
. Ibid., .
. Brothman, as an archivist himself, offers
these caveats to other archivists in “Orders of
Value,”  – .
. Dissensus vis- à- vis the Israeli colonial state
would not be the onl y kind of dissension criti-
cal to treat in such an archive in f ormation. Dis-
sensus among Palestinians w ith respect to the
form and content of confrontation, collabora-
tion, and demand would need ample room as
well. On those contested memories see Swe-
denburg, Memories of Revolt, esp.  – . I
thank Vasiliki Touhouliotis for discussing this
point with me.
. See the Funambulist newsletter, May/June
, especially the inter view with Eyal Weiz-
man, available at https://thefunambulist.n et/.
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • 38:1 • 2018
44
possibility of new ways of configuring and chart-
ing both the “imaginative geography” (as Edward
Said would call it) of and beyond a colonial occu-
pation and a vibrant Palestinian space far more ca-
pacious than any “occupation” would recognize?

Having worked for some thirty- five years on the
conventions and eects of Dutch colonial archival
production, as well as on archives as technologies
of rule and as force fields of power that excised
and excluded as they incited and aroused — and
whose content and form its masters of writing
sought to guard and control — I see this Palestin-
ian archive in formation as one that invites dissen-
sion from those norms, allowing other defiant po-
litical visions, aesthetic possibilities, and aective
reflections.
On Presupposing One’s Own Equality
For here the questions are dierent as well: they
are addressed to the strategies we might want to
consider, sites of attention, techniques of care, and
what a focus on dissensus can do in the making of a
new kind of archive, and therefore what archiving
Palestine as a political and enabling project might
entail. In Jacques Rancière’s compelling formula-
tion “politics is dissensus,” it is not confrontation
so much as a “gap in the sensible” that makes
“visible that which had no reason to be seen.”

Dissensus puts and presupposes an equalizing of
persons and things (that are not otherwise equal
in a hierarchical order) at the crux of its making.
It invites archival responses beyond conventional
repertoires that instill the arkhe of the archive as
authority, originary, and command. It invites and
enacts ways to disturb and disrupt that imposing
mandate and the serial fabrications that follow. If,
as Rancière argues, “the essence of the police lies
in a partition of the sensible” (partage du sensible)
and an exclusion of “those without part,” then the
conjoining of shared and uncommon sensibilities
and identifying what people feel, hear, and see in
this colonized space — and how they do so — could
be a supremely counter- policing project. If politi-
cal force comes from instilling “dispute over the
distribution of the sensible,”

these archives might
oer an occasion to do just that: to pay attention
to sensibilities that join person and polity in ways
that a colonial archive could not know, recognize,
make room for.
What might we imagine as a Palestinian ar-
chive that is not constrained by the command that
the concept of the archive holds? One embodied
labor would be well prepared for and attuned to
the explicit and implicit demands for (taxonomic)
order that it hides in its folds.

Such an archive
cannot — and ought not to — work as a memorial or
as a monument. Ongoing assaults, dispossessions,
and intrusions that an active colonial presence im-
poses resist an archive in the passé composé. This
archive is accountable to a visceral, living space
of contestation. It would want to be imbued with
subversive, creative, and bold energies: not only in
content — by endorsing in the practice of its mak-
ing those accounts not yet endowed with their
proper space — but in the very medium and mul-
tisensory materiality of form. “Designed destruc-
tion,” as Leopold Lambert’s curated issue of the
Funambulist demonstrates, locates the “precise and
strategic political order behind the apparent disor-
der of debris.” Such designed destruction calls for
an archive that moves between the aggregate and
the detail, between person and polity, and thus on
multiple scales.
Such a venture forces us to make difficult
choices, ones that might run against common po-
litical sense about who should be present (not rep-
resented) and what an unfettered Palestinian ar-
chive could and should address. Those choices may
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. See Sela, “The Genealog of Colonial Plun-
der,” and Ofer Adert ’s discussion of Sela’s
twenty year s of research and her lm, Looted
and Hidden — Palestinian Archives in Israel, in
“Why Are Countless Palestinian Photos and
Fil ms Buri ed?.”
. Online Etymological Dictionary, s.v., “gen-
erosity,” accessed November , , www
.etymonline.com/word/generosity.
. Certeau The Writing of His tory,  , .
45
Ann Laura Stoler • On Archiving as Dissensus • Doing Things with Archives
call into question the ready categories assumed to
be useful and our ideas of what such an archive
would, if anything, categorically refuse to include.
Would Israeli documents be welcome? And how
could they not be if they are bulging, as Rena
Sela’s research attests, to thousands of visual im-
ages and documents confiscated from Palestinians
by Israeli military and security forces? How agile
could such an archive be — and need to be — to
move across the multiple minute and oversized
scales of “designed destruction”? Would this be a
firmly Palestinian archive so powerful that it could
make room for the trapped spaces in which other-
wise impoverished Jews from North Africa became
the cannon fodder of Israeli settlement? We might
ask what measures of achievement, aspiration, and
generosity the task of archiving Palestine might
evince that speak both to Palestinians and to those
forms of justice such an archive might invite the
rest of the world to consider as exemplary sites of
active and protracted dissensus. One might think
here of confiscating the etymology of the term gen-
erosity that so privileges “noble persons” of “noble
birth” and instead privilege that part of its etymol-
ogy that celebrates more the “generative” practices
of “begetting” a more inclusive space.
Even we historians, anthropologists, and
other “prowlers” — who for decades have been pre-
occupied with the power and potential of archives;
have long heeded Michel de Certeau’s warning
and invitation that “the transformation of archival
activity is the point of departure and the condition
for a new history”; and have been committed to
providing the space for “displaced histories” resid-
ing in empowered archives’ long shadows — are not
particularly well schooled for this venture.
Most historians are better poised (if not pre-
pared) to glean from intractable sources, to ques-
tion the nature of evidence and relations of power
in which credibilities are produced, and to dissect
the categories of rule and the distortions they ef-
fect. We are less equipped to address a collection
of ten thousand paper artifacts, photographs, and
objects that anticipate an archive in formation.
Those charged with enabling its making would
need to ask how and how much those who con-
tribute may want to participate and share in the
sensibilities (partage du sensible) embraced, with-
out prompting a “political” response or assuming
what counts as one. Some may choose to relinquish
images to be unburdened of their weight; some
may want to know that the paper trails they have
guarded resonate for others and how they do so.
Some may want these fragments of a history to be
an act of witnessing — not less or more.
For this archive may in this visionary mode
be replete with sundry and unique entries, rehears-
als of stories that have been told too often and of
those that have never been uttered or touched;
there may be unsifted piles of paper, or those worn
at the edges, tattered in their repetitive handling,
smudged with the personal losses inscribed within
them. There may be visual and verbal recordings
signed, spoken, and gestured. What constitutes ei-
ther too much or not enough care on the part of
the historian, ethnographer, or archivist? How to
draw out the personhood called upon and draw on
the ethnographer and historian’s varied capacities
(and our penchant to read archives in recalcitrant
ways) and put that experience to the service of
helping to shape this archive in a form that treads
lightly on what has been culled, that oers ways of
moving across these entries that allow unexpected
associations to appear visible, and do so in a way
that stays close to their handling. Can this archive
in formation be pragmatic, politically astute, and
conceptually enabling at the same time?
If the venture demands a pragmatic feat of
imagination, it is philosophically demanding and
an epistemic foray as well. For it is not only about
thinking the conceptual and concrete tools that
provide space, recognition, and access to what
people know and how they know it. It also calls
for attention to the sensibilities in which dierent
ways of knowing and living are lodged. The term
dissensus as Ranciére uses it is precisely one that
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. Rancière, Dissensus, .
. On the af fective and economic ravages
of what Yael Berda calls “ the permit regime”
imposed on Palestinians, see Berda, Living
Emergency.
. Nixon, Slow Violence.
. Heacock and Mall- Dibiasi, “Liberating the
Phantom Elephant.”
. Farge, Le Gout de l’archive () (translated
as The Allure of the Archives by Thomas Scot t-
Railton, ). I still nd more e vocative the lit-
eral translation of “gout ” as “taste” (The Taste
of the Archives), which conveys texture and
discernments. See the translation provided in
Sto ler, Along the Archival Grai n, .
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • 38:1 • 2018
46
sees policing as a controlling distribution of what
our senses can process and how they are divided
from one another and ourselves — and how they
are thereby dulled. But the work of the partage du
sensible can do an about- face: dissensus recuperates
sensibilities and sensory regimes as elements of po-
litical process and as an active political space.
What archiving as dissensus demands is the
cultivation of a capacity to make new objects avail-
able to thought (one of the ways in which Fou-
cault defined his project). Those objects, if you will,
need not be objects in the usual sense of the term.
Rather they may be dense, impacted, charged sites
of contest and contradiction — the accretion of
bodies at checkpoints, lone figures in the night at
extemporaneous village roadblocks, and arbitrary
blackouts. They may be in homes riddled with bul-
let holes and not plastered over by choice, where
personal grief and political indignation take mate-
rial and durable form. As we have witnessed, they
may enter the archive as a collage of documents su-
perimposed, as a fragment of Mahmoud Darwish’s
stilling prose, or as a studiously careless report
in an Israeli newspaper on the mortal night of a
household “sweep” in a refugee camp — a surveil-
lance operation. Here the sullied content may be
in the juxtaposition of prosaic form.
Dissensus may reside in idioms that hover
below the radar of immediate salience or fit awk-
wardly into the contents of a recognizable counter-
archive. It demands a keen attentiveness to the
subtle and implicit forms in which those who share
their personal collections and pieces of their own
histories, be they deeds, scraps of paper, messy frag-
ments of an oral account, photographs that attest to
what has been made invisible (or too patent to see),
or material things, remain themselves the archons,
the custodians of their personal, historical, and po-
litical ways of living an occupation and a colonial
situation — sometimes in the long, silent accumula-
tions of documents, in the destructive assaults on
person and place that leave debris in their wake, or
in clothing saved, fragments of cloth repurposed.
For no matter how many documents are
amassed as “proof,” they might not be “enough”
for one to receive permission to travel, to obtain a
work permit, to be released from unspecified de-
tention, or even less to take repossession of land
and home.

Can one attend to the silent acts of loss
and damage, to the indignations of intentional hu-
miliations, or alternately and as importantly to the
pleasures and triumphs of the everyday that escape
the purview of occupation and still respect and
register what Rob Nixon calls “the slow violence”
that permeates both the unremarked — muted and
momentous — events of people’s lives?
Should this not be enough, the charge is to
do something else: to anticipate possible uses and
possible connections, to treat what Roger Heacock
and Caroline Mall- Dibiasi have called the “phan-
tom” quality of this potential archive as an invita-
tion to make it possible to actualize connectivities
that are dimly visible or on the horizon.

French
historian Arlette Farge sounds a caution in her
book Le gout de l’archive (The Taste of the Archive).
She writes, “When the archive seems easily to give
access to what one expects of it, the work is all the
more demanding. One has to patiently give up
one’s natural sympathy for it and consider it . . . a
piece of knowledge that isn’t to annex but disrupt.
It is not simply a matter of undoing something
whose meaning is too easy to find. To be able to
know it, you have to unlearn what you think you
know.”

Could this not be a caution meant for us?
For surely we all come with some preconceived,
implicit sense of what the counter- archive, this
dissenting, differently empowered archive, al-
ready holds and what it will show and what it will
do and what it will be. “Archiving Palestine” today
may only be in part to chart the obverse of what
colonial archives set in place. Rather, it might be
to create an archive that is supremely orthogonal
to colonial forms — one that runs oblique to them,
neither attentive nor subservient to the categories
of taxonomically obsessed governing states.
If this is one starting premise, the task is ren-
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. Azoulay, “Archive.” . Adorno, Negative Dialectics, . . Brothman, “Orders o f Value,” .
47
Ann Laura Stoler • On Archiving as Dissensus • Doing Things with Archives
dered more difficult from the start. It might be
agreed that a counter- archive is what we are after,
one that subscribes neither to statist projects nor
to the authority that archives confer. That of which
the act of “countering” consists is neither self-
evident nor a decided aair. To seek the inverse
of what an institutional or colonial state archive
demands is not enough: “to counter” can take on
multiple forms. One might ignore the archive’s
mandates and those imposed and repressive cat-
egories of the Israeli state; or one might choose
to confront its machinations as open secrets and
alter the sense of what counts as truth; or one may
turn the colonial state’s technical armor to other
purpose, to dissemble its conceits and hope that
the political countenance brought to bear on it will
be implicated when the truth claims of the state
and its archives eventually self- destruct, as have the
truth claims of so many other colonial archives of
the past.
Acts of countering may lead elsewhere: tak-
ing the most cherished principles and practices
of archiving, unseating that authority, and using
them for other ends. In such a project, the task may
be to reimagine who the “archons” (or the guard-
ians of the archive, as Ariella Azoulay insists) are.
On the other hand, it may be to question the prin-
ciple of access itself (a term already imbued with
improbable, unexpected stop signs) where some-
thing or someone is implicitly or explicitly “letting
one” in (no matter how much largesse might ac-
company that act, and no matter how “open” that
access might be).
One might take on the very nature of order
by which the archive assumes auto- authorization
and endows authority to itself, that is, to treat
order not as a system of constraint and tidy cat-
egories and determining principles but an order
that acknowledges (as Theodor Adorno did for
concepts) that no matter how strong and capa-
cious our conceptual architecture and no matter
how inclusive our categories might be, there will
always be a surfeit that spills beyond the edges and
that cannot be easily ordered and subsumed by the
retrieval that might originally or eventually have
been agreed upon.

Excess need not be a liability
but a potential, through which juxtapositions of
documents, people, and things can produce new
subjects of reflection, where an archive will change
shape by what is added to it, and in that sense will
be “interactive” as a citizen response with cumu-
lative weight. These are the potentials, the unre-
alized possibilities of connections not possible to
foresee.
Archivist and digital specialist Brien Broth-
man writes about what archivists make into debris
and “lay to waste” with an acuity we can call upon
here. As he puts it:
The principal aim of the archivist is to achieve a
condition of positive order in their domain. This
they do through the exclusion of what is deemed
to be debris, which constantly threatens to under-
mine the existing order. Dirt and rubbish con-
tinually impinge upon archivists’ desire for order
and impede their eorts to maintain it . . . as such
archival appraisal is not merely a process of value
identification, but of value creation and destruc-
tion . . . or to put it in the context of rubbish the-
ory, destruction strategies are the instruments of
an archival ecology.
So might we be invested in other principles of valu-
ation and in another archival ecology than what
is usually prescribed? Might we reinvest in the ex-
cess, the supplements, and the unclassifiable that
has no ready place? Or might there be a need to
think orderings that make room for the disorder,
debris, and excess that archivists are uncomfort-
able with, to the point of throwing way, ignoring,
or excising that “disorder” and clutter of what
could rather be treated as the very tactile matter of
the ethnographic?
Recordings’ rubbish may promise more: it
might be a site of renewal that evinces the tenac-
ity of those who refuse to relinquish their claims.
What might otherwise be considered debris may
be where the lineaments of dissensus are forged.
Waste disposal, water management, road mainte-
nance, electricity “outages” (being intermittently
and arbitrarily cut out and cut off), and tunnel
ecology can tell us where Palestinians have been
forced to circumvent those restrictions and make
of them political moments and sustained asser-
tions nonetheless.
Might there be a need for an entirely new vo-
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. For those unfamiliar with the term shat-
ter zone, see, for example, Kaplan, Revenge of
Geography.
. Azoulay, “Archive.”
. Certeau, The Writing o f History, .
. Ibid.,  – .
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • 38:1 • 2018
48
cabulary? What happens if we take the term shatter
zone, that term favored among mainstream politi-
cal scientists who fret over the fragilities of peace
in the Middle East, to imagine (archiving) Pales-
tine as a shatter zone of a radically dierent sort?
The term derives from geology, designating an
area of randomly fissured or cracked rock that may
be filled by mineral deposits, forming a network
pattern of veins. Shatter zones are where veins of
precious minerals are revealed in the fissures and
folds. Perhaps the new Palestinian archive is just
that — a fissuring of received accounts but not a
prescription for new ones, a zone that shatters the
archive’s house of glass and the formal archival
practices that give credence to its claims to truth.
Archiving Palestine might subscribe to a
political project of a dierent sort, in which Pales-
tine’s designation as a shatter zone takes on a posi-
tive rather than a politically pathologized valence.
It might rather describe a zone that fissures the
fictions of power politics, one that taps the veins
of unarticulated sensibilities, sensibilities that are
the substance of how Palestinian dispositions have
been shaped, where contemporary conditions have
forestalled what were once more open, mixed, and
not separatist alliances.
Alternately, it might entail the need to think
of “archival fever” in new ways, as Azoulay urges,
not archival fever in the fashion Jacques Derrida
named and barely explored, but as a site of subver-
sion in itself. In Azoulay’s rendering, archive fever
“crosses borders.” She sees it as a demand for not
only “gaining access” but also “partaking in the ar-
chival practice through the founding of new sorts
of archives” that “challenge the traditional proto-
cols by which ocial archives have functioned . . .
[with] new models of sharing the document stored
therein.” For Azoulay, archive fever is not what
Derrida imagined it to be, but rather the “retro-
active reconstruction” of a fundamental right “in-
scribed in the logic of the archive from the very
beginning.”
“From the beginning” may be the point.
If this is the case, then the distribution of senti-
ments on which colonial governance depends — a
distribution that may mangle rage, resentment, de-
spair, shame, revenge, and humiliation as well as
intractable refusal to succumb despite the adverse
conditions — must be made visible and resonant
in the categories of retrieval we attempt to install.
These will have trouble not being seen as artifices
of imposition. What if, thinking otherwise, the
rubrics are generated from the archive’s contribu-
tors, prepared as invitations to the archive’s parti-
sans, users and mere perusers, and other potential
contributors to work with and around, to alter,
elaborate upon, or merely to track?
This daunting task provides occasion to
imagine meetings of unpredicted and unpredict-
able connectivities that our conceptual labor and
ultimately our search engines may make more
ready at hand. But this is not work that can be di-
vided between historians and those who specialize
in the possibilities that digital archives open up.
In l Certeau already saw the electronic archive
as inducing not only a major revision of what ar-
chival practice would require but a fundamental
change in the very nature of historical work.

He
imagined, in that emergent moment, the shift as
one that might respond to the initial gesture of
electronic accessibility that imposes coherence and
cueing despite itself. Instead, he urged attention to
the deviations that play on the limits of exclusions
and hardened models and give occasion to vital
remainders. As he put it, the historian is no longer
a person who shapes an empire (I doubt we were
ever of a generation that imagined we did) but who
works in the interstices and undersides of history
making. With respect to archiving Palestine there
seem to be more pressing and specific tasks, ones
that circumvent and confront confiscations, cen-
sorships, and “public secrets” valorized as “classi-
fied knowledge” and confidential.
Michel- Rolph Trouillot once noted that si-
lences occur at four crucial moments: the moment
of fact creation (the making of sources), the mo-
ment of fact assembly (the making of archives),
the moment of fact retrieval (the making of nar-
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. Trouillot, Silencing the Past.
. See Foo, “Interview,” and Mrazek, “Boven
Digoel and Terezín.”
. Derrida, Archive Fever, .
. Tamari, “Memoirs and Biographie s of Child-
hood in Palestin e.”
49
Ann Laura Stoler • On Archiving as Dissensus • Doing Things with Archives
ratives), and the moment of retrospective signifi-
cance (the making of history).

The breakdown
that he emphasized was important two decades ago
but may flatten out what may be the greatest chal-
lenge today: to redefine the very terms of archiving
itself, to reimagine who the figures of the “archon”
or the guardians of documents might be, what an
understanding of “access” entails, and what archi-
val practices implicitly endorse. For if archives are
sites of power and processes of inscription, how
might we participate in redistributing the desig-
nated limits of the field and subvert its force? How
might we register and make room for the “actu-
alization” of frames of reference, as well as ways
of living simultaneously within and outside the
artifice of always distinct temporalities — cutting
o the colonial from the postcolonial — that politi-
cal elites are wont to endorse or even install?
Diaspora, Dissensus, and Archival Design
Here we come to another sort of question: Do Pal-
estine and Palestinians in camps and cities, those
confined and those spread across other countries
throughout the world, make up what one might
think of as the ultimate cosmopolitic space? Mo-
bile, diverse, multilingual, critical, and grounded
in dissensus, this is a people with connectivities
that cut across many places and populations in the
world. Benedict Anderson near the end of his life
came to something of a political epiphany, namely
that colonialism produced a cosmopolitanism
from below of the colonized (many who had never
traveled or left Java). The historian of Indonesia
Rudolph Mrazek has argued in a not unrelated
vein that the prison camps for dissident Indone-
sians were actually dense locations of “concen-
trated modernity,” bringing together some of the
brightest and most erudite intellectuals in one of
the vastest archipelagos in the world — those who
had once fought against Dutch colonialism and
were later imprisoned for dissenting from Soehar-
to’s repressive authoritarian state.

Both A nderson
and Mrazek signal something akin to the concen-
trated “worldliness” of being Palestinian.
Might far- flung Palestinians in diasporic sites
and those who refuse to leave their homes in Je-
rusalem or Hebron constitute the archons of this
living archive vaster than any empire itself ? Can
we think of a “Palestinian order of things”? What
could the font of a Palestinian archive be and
become? Derrida’s metaphor of archives under
“house arrest” — cordoned o, disabling access,
distorting what counts as knowledge and what we
can know — seems an enticing one to work both
with and against. But such a formulation may suc-
cumb to a dubious and well- worn archival fiction,
namely, that the archives of power are successful at
their eorts to remain sealed tight, o limits, and
impenetrable centers of authority and of an order
they confer upon themselves.
We are charged to “free them up,” but I would
argue that they are never as tightly bound and cor-
doned o as Derrida imagined. Housebreaking,
illicit entry, veiled critique, and direct assault on
the command of colonial archives are possible and
could be made more common: such archives are
constantly transgressed and upturned, their prem-
ises of order called into question from both within
and outside of the corridors of power. Derrida’s
use of “house arrest” only makes partial sense.
There are no archives that are hermetically sealed
from the tactical intrusions of those who intend to
countervail their command.
Foucault reminds us that “history is for cut-
ting,” but as Salim Tamari among others remind
us, it is for recutting divisions that have been set in
stone and rendered as natural and common sense.
Can archiving Palestine make evident what Tamari
and a later generation of scholars of Palestine insist
at every archival turn: namely, that the categories
of Arab and Jew were not age- old divisions by which
people lived, not “primordial loyalties” carved but
loyalties more recently forged by British, US, and Is-
rael colonial policies invested in those divisions? If
that is the case, then it is incumbent upon us both
seasoned and neophyte prowlers to ask how much
archival practices of our own and others have abet-
ted the fashioning of that common sense.
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. Derrida, Archive Fever, .
. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain,  – , and
Sto ler, Duress,  – .
. Shehadeh, A Rift in Time.
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • 38:1 • 2018
50
The imagery employed by the activist Indo-
nesian novelist and political figure Pramoedya An-
anta Toer (imprisoned for some seventeen years
and to whom I refer in Along the Archival Grain)
may serve us well. For “Pram,” as he was widely
known, the Dutch colonial archives were “houses
of glass” — fraught and fragile, fraudulent trans-
parencies on which nothing was apparent or nec-
essarily rational at all. Such houses of glass are fun-
damentally as weak as the reason they invent and
the unreasons, or the déraison, of the regimes of
security on which they are built and by which they
self- destruct and fail.
Derrida was right, though, that the question
of the archive is not a question of the past; it is a
question of the future, “of a promise and pledge
and of a responsibility for tomorrow.”

But we are
still left with the question of knowing how best to
honor that pledge, for archives are more than a
promise of the future. In the case of colonial ar-
chives, they attempt to requisition the future; the
very tenses and tensions they inhabit are designed
to be preemptive with the tropes and tactical op-
erations of security directed at blockading move-
ment for some in order to clear the way for others.
As I have argued for some time, colonial archives
reorder the past but they do so invariably as an-
ticipatory gestures in a conditional future tense.
Colonial archives are diagnostics of the fears of
their high and low agents and producers about an
unwieldy present, as well as of what might come,
anticipating possible sites of refusal and disaec-
tion. They craft an enemy of their making, with
accoutrements (beards concealing faces, cloth-
ing concealing guns) that are signs and premoni-
tions of harm. They count on strategies of defense
against enemies in the flesh and as yet unrealized
threats they imagine to be in formation.
But futures are not determined, as we know.
As Palestinian poet activist Raja Shehadeh re-
minds us (with knowledge that one can’t really be
a poet in “the colony” without activating the dire
and damaging reality in which people live), dia-
sporic movement can produce “rifts in time,” where
a future unfettered by checkpoints and barbed
wire is possible.

Imagining the ordering of a Pal-
estinian archive, accessing subjacent sensibilities
that a colonial archive can rarely touch, demands
a “search engine,” if you will, that both works o
what search engines do best and runs counter to
them. Search engines trac in “proximity searches”
and “concept searches,” and they enable what they
call “crawlings” from site to site. Search engine con-
noisseurs take as their goal the “satisfying of user
expectations” by adhering to the principle of rel-
evance and a principle of least astonishment. These
are not the obvious obstacles we ordinarily might
think to counter, but we might do well to heed them
as warnings and to treat them as master plans of
organization to work against.
For if the principle of least astonishment dic-
tates what search engines do, we could do some-
thing else: to allow the “imaginative geography” of
empire to be used for other purpose. This project
of archiving Palestine might provide a mapping of
the dispersion of people and places, of those who
have stayed, of those who have returned, and of ex-
iled Palestinians around the world. If Palestine is
both a way of being in the world as well as a place,
if it includes an intentional community spread far
and wide and a diasporic set of sites and communi-
ties, then this archiving of Palestine can usurp the
colonial cartographies through the archive itself,
as more Palestinians call upon themselves to re-
spond to this archive in formation.
Forging a temporar y, provisional scaolding
that makes visible that which is already there or
only emergent might be one task. Another would
be to animate inscriptions of the vernacular, as-
tute, pointed terms of those who might not have
thought that their own experience and mundane
duress was of sucient pertinence and relevance
to be included as a contribution to this venture.
I think tentatively of provisional categories
of “ordering” that are more plastic than the usual
order of archives. These are rubrics that would
make room for movement and attend to sliding
scales of restriction, objects, and sensory things.
Three come to mind. We might think with
() movement: people in motion, moblilities and
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. See Brudholm, Resentment’s Virtues, and
Hunt, “Redeeming Resentment.”
. See Stoler, “Afterword: Disassemblage,” in
conversation with Carole McGranahan in the
forthcoming work Rethinking U.S. Imperial
Formations.
. Fernando Coronil, Zachar y Lockman, and I
have all independently called on the term re-
lational histories. See Lockman, Comrades and
Enemies, and Stoler et al., Imperial Formations,
for Coronil’s “After Empire: Reections on Im-
perialism from the Am éricas.”
. Foucault, “ What Is Critique?,” .
. Butler, “What Is Critique?.”
. See Said, Orientalism, and Shehadeh, A Rift
in Time.
. Merleau- Ponty, Phenomenolog of Percep-
tion, quoted in Al - Saji, “A Past Which Has Never
Been Present ,” .
51
Ann Laura Stoler • On Archiving as Dissensus • Doing Things with Archives
the forms of arrested and truncated passage, and
the practices and aective conditions that go with
arbitrary and strategic displacements. These dis-
placing practices and conditions include inter-
rupted movement, waiting, impatience, exaspera-
tion, missed opportunities, time eaten up, funds
devoured, arbitrar y detainments, short detentions,
and protracted arrests in which an aective, physi-
cal, financial price may not be overtly demanded
but is exacted and required to be paid. Alternately,
we might look at () aect. In Spinoza’s terms, as
both a power to act and to be acted upon, aect
could provide a rubric that recasts those indigna-
tions, humiliations, and resentments. Could this
archive provide a privileged space in which to treat
the distribution of those sentiments as intimate
and personal but also as formative political sensi-
bilities that embody critique? Some may see these
moments and acts as too ordinary and so much
part of the everyday occupation that they may
not be oered to such a project of archiving Pal-
estine at all. Instead of dismissing resentment as
the debilitating discharge of negativity, we might
turn to those who redeem it as a moral virtue that
gives expression to “defensive actions protective of
self- respect.”

Finally we might call on and attend
to () disassemblage, which would refer not only
to assemblage as the uneven, spasmodic bring-
ing together of component parts but also to how
people and relations and things are torn apart,
conceptually and politically severed from the con-
ditions that made them possible.

At issue here is
the achievement of locating “relational histories”
made into nonrelational ones.

Such imperial
scripts saturate the making of Israel and the un-
making of Palestine.
The Thickness of the Present
The categories that might enable unrecognized
connections and associations suggest an ordering
that wrestles with forms of dissensus, however con-
ceived. If critique, as Foucault defined it, is “the art
of voluntary intractable insubordination” to what
constitutes the policing norm, then this archival
project should embrace those insubordinations in
sensory form.

Judith Butler’s ri on Foucault’s
sense of critique helps us think the sort of embod-
ied dissension that archiving might possess, where
critique is never a single act confined to a “sub-
jective domain,” but “the stylized relation to the
demand upon it . . . not fully determined in ad-
vance . . . [and] a subject who is not readily know
-
able under the established rubric of truth.”
What might this “styling” look like as a dis-
persed people take on and engage this archive
making, attend to its demand, and hold tight to its
fashioning as a shared possession?
My reflection is inspired by Merleau- Ponty’s
enigmatic phrase in The Phenomenology of Percep-
tion, “a past which has never been present,” and
the need to think about new sites of confluence
and earlier, unmarked, and disavowed, if still
troubled, cohabitations. It may seem a strange
lexical construct to invoke in archiving Palestine.
But maybe not: it resonates with a mode of inquiry
that stretches across unlikely terrain, reaching for
a quest similar to that of Edward Said, who sought
to imagine the joining of Palestinian and Jewish
exilic experiences that could be shared, or Raja
Shehadeh’s visioning of another past and another
future.

Perhaps these quests point to that “thick-
ness of the present” to which Merleau- Ponty so
provocatively referred — one “‘thick’ with multiple
temporalities, unevenly distributed.”
To be clear: this is not to suggest the uto-
pian quest for a past of untroubled cohabitation
but rather an eort to mark the exacerbated con-
ditions of racialized discriminations and abuses
that were not inevitable. It is to suggest spaces of
movement, sites of contingency and critique, and
forms of critique lodged in what people did with
their space, time, and things, as well as to appreci-
ate that politics “happens” in unexpected places
and through unremarked practices. If archiving is
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. Al- Saji, “A Past Which Has Never Been Pr es-
ent ,” .
. Williams, “Structures o f Feeling,” .
. Al- Saji, “A Past Which Has Never Been Pr es-
ent ,” .
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • 38:1 • 2018
52
an authoritative and authority making set of prac-
tices, dissensus comes in refusing and questioning
the ready- made concepts, categories, and narra-
tives, in defiance of the thin, one- dimensionality of
Israeli accounts. Such a project resonates with Fou-
cault’s crafting of “genealogy” to track dispersed
histories and “disqualified” knowledge requalified
as resources to call upon. The project may oer a
way to locate what incited Certeau to think “dis-
placed history” — subjacent and unyielding to what
makes for a conventional narrative form. It is to
remember in the sense of rebraiding fragments of
Palestine’s histories that have gone astray, with no
recognized place.
But this thinking about a “history that has
never been present” does something else; it is not
a project of direct retrieval so much as an oppor-
tunity to reengage with what might otherwise be
cast (aside) as unassimilated debris — scenes and
things unyielding to storied form. This “debris”
might be that which resided and may still reside on
the censored fringes — momentary and temporally
sustained — in what are so congealed into habits of
the everyday that they disappear as unheroic and
banal actions. Such practices might include “get-
ting by” when water and electricity are cut; repeat-
edly washing o one’s car when it is splattered with
garbage by Israeli settlers; getting to one’s job, to
school, or to a hospital; or whatever descends to
the clutter of the everyday and unremarked com-
mon sense.
The semantics of the phrase “history that has
never been present” seem implausible: not only
“impossible” in the sense that something of the
past must have been “present” to have been ren-
dered as “past” (the question of course being “pres-
ent’ to whom), but also because the very phrasing
and the asserted reality to which it seems to refer
arguably might be dismissed as beside the point in
this violent climate, irrelevant, and even a distract-
ing point of entry by which to consider what mat-
ters today — the restricting and onerous regimes
in which Palestinians live and what people are
equipped to say and do about it.
But could such a Palestinian archive leave
room, and will it necessarily, not only for the as-
sertive critical exposure that occupation and
colonization confer on those subject to those re-
gimes, but also for what Merleau- Ponty alludes to
as the “delay” of perception, at times immediate
awareness and conscious experience, but at other
times deferred from thought, absent conscious
reflection. The philosopher Ali Al- Saji’s take on
Merleau- Ponty’s insight is that “the sensible world
is not a sum of objects fully delimited and defined
in advance.” Rather we “learn” to perceive; there
is duration and rhythm to that which is “nascent,”
embodied, and perhaps beyond conscious grasp.
We might think, too, to imagine archiving
Palestine with Raymond Williams’s formulation
of “structures of feeling” as those inchoate forms
of knowledge and knowing “beyond semantic
availability,” not (yet) congealed into the ease
of anecdote or, much less compelling, narrative
form.

Could anonymous entries to an Internet
site work, where accounts can be shared, where
people can contribute their documents, letters,
and scribblings, or maybe those objects that con-
dense accretions of relation — a precious piece of
a child’s clothing, a single earring, a bomb frag-
ment lodged in a son’s bedroom wall, or a piece of
shattered glass.
These might be considered forms of “ad-
dress” to an archiving collective, in a vocabulary
that eludes the lexicon of a colonial state. In Mer-
leau Ponty’s rendition, sensory regimes provide a
“vague beckoning” as if “a response to a badly for-
mulated question.” As Al- Saji understands it, “The
call that issues from the sensible is not that of a
thing requiring recognition but rather a response
to a lack or ‘tension’ that calls to be noticed.”

There is an improvisational quality that such an ar-
chive would seek — new mixes and matches of what
had been rendered of incommensurable scale and
value and had not been brought into proximity
before.
The strategies are those that speak to Pal-
estinians close and far, to cross- fertilizations of
political movements across the globe. Oral histo-
ries are key, as the increasing number of current
projects addressing and amassing such accounts
attest. Still, well- scripted narratives may not always
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. See Stole r and Strassler, “Casting for the Co-
lonial,”  – .
. On the Distric t Six Museum in Cape Town,
South Africa, opened in , see the muse-
um’s home page: www.districtsix.co.za (ac-
cessed August , ).
. Al- Saji, “A Past Which Has Never Been Pr es-
ent ,” .
53
Ann Laura Stoler • On Archiving as Dissensus • Doing Things with Archives
be forthcoming, either unavailable or smoothed
into coherence because their specificities are too
painful to rehearse.

Sometimes they have been
rehearsed so often they have been flattened or
circumvent what a community’s listeners rather
not have to hear — yet again. Sometimes, there
are no narratives available — words may settle in-
stead around objects rather than events, around
the odors of nostalgia rather than the unmitigated
dispossession by which even the very yearnings of
nostalgia are cut o and lost.
Lessons can be sought and partially learned
from elsewhere. The venture of decolonizing ar-
chives, of reimagining how those archives might
be reorganized and used is afoot across the world
where imperialisms leave their marks. We might
look to the District Six living archive in Cape
Town, where just after apartheid was abolished,
mixed and colored families who had lived in the
now- empty space of District Six returned to place
objects, documents, pieces of lace, and shards
of porcelain on the transparent floor map that
the District Six museum had traced where now-
demolished homes had been built.

The Palestin-
ian archive we are considering here is not a tribute
to a past struggle but an ongoing one in a dier-
ently violent, digital age.
Merleau- Ponty alerts us to these varied
rhythms of pastness, these fertile sites of the very
different temporalities in which people live, si-
multaneous dierences that are “the generative
grounds for discernments in the present.”

At issue
is how situations, sentiments, and appraisals come
into relief and provide the unremarked turns of
speech that are not constricted by the worn catego-
ries of “resistance” or “domination,” which are too
bound to academic locutions and easy to draw. A
new archive could valorize vernacular idioms and
geste, verbal and visual perspectives, and material
placements and displacements, events that pass as
nonevents. Such an archive might hold often un-
registered, banal moments in store, disrupting the
common sense that one’s physical habitus is full
of stable items and shared. One might take that
fact that blocked access to a Palestinian village can
be a frequent event, arbitrarily enforced with mas-
sive boulders placed as sign and surveillance in
the middle of the night. Inhabitants move around
them, anticipating their presence, so often and so
persistently that they are no longer recognized as
habits — or extraord ina r y act s — at all.
The venture is one that could do more than
make room for congealed memories and sto-
ries that are primed to be received and ready at
hand (into the outstretched hands of us too avidly
eager researchers). The form of the archive and its
process of assemblage would make room for the
wholly unforeseen, the actualization of bits and
pieces of debris, the éclat of a parody, or a maca-
bre joke that brings forth dormant, untapped vo-
cabularies and visions of what was and could be.
If this sounds utopian, it depends on what utopias
are imagined to be.
If perception of the actuality in which we live
is always “delayed” (anthropologists always lament
that they are belated and too late — think Claude
Lévi- Strauss), this delay is what a Palestinian ar-
chive might hold in store. It is this “thickness of the
present” and in the thickness of the past in which
potentials garner their charge. Again, in much the
same way as Adorno saw concepts, as never able to
capture all the sense experience they are created
to hold and always subject to an excess, archiving
Palestine would need to leave its categories as pro-
tean, provisional, and subject to change.
And are categories needed at all? I think they
are — those that bring into relief the duress and
determined capacities of those who have contrib-
uted to this archive and those who have not yet had
the wherewithal to do so: frayed land deeds and
bulging dossiers accompany their bearers across
checkpoints and to successions of administrative
oces. Palestinians and their papers travel absurd
distances to circumvent the highways that only Is-
raelis are allowed to use and cross. Their voyages
are witnesses in themselves.
Such an archive would welcome the vibrant
matter of other sorts — perhaps birthday cards hid-
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. Al- Saji, pers. comm., Ap ril , . . On working with the no tion of “developing
historical negatives,” see Stoler, Along the Ar-
chival Grain,  –  .
. Doumani, “Palestine vs. the Palestinians,”
.
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • 38:1 • 2018
54
den in can or cloth. And perhaps, if we think with
Merleau- Ponty, we won’t be around to see what can
be done with such an archive and what it will yield.
When I suggested that there are “preserved possi-
bilities,” Alia Al- Saji responded by suggesting that
there are pasts that “wait for a present that will do
justice to them.”

That is an insight with which one
could work. At issue may be not to “recover” pos-
sibilities but to work to create such a present, and
then recede and provide only the added traction
and occasion for others to create those possibilities
for themselves.
It is in the intimate, quotidian spaces of co-
lonial conditions where unauthorized, disquali-
fied histories can leave their mark, as well as in the
archives of power themselves. Precisely because
there are always discordant sites in the archives of
power, seen to be transgressive by colonial authori-
ties, I have sought to treat colonial archives as a
negative print that underscores their beleaguered
logics animated by fears about attachments, prox-
imities, and aliations that might threaten their
projects.
Here I think to use those archives for a dier-
ent end, to underscore the contingencies of what
may emerge. For relations of kin, friend, or former
neighbor to those now separated and spread far
and wide might be seen as the active repositories
of precious histories that had been misplaced.
These renewed relations might be emergent signs
of other possible futures as they mark more fun-
damental shifts in how colonial conditions are
countermanded by restoring lively connections,
reshaping how colonial conditions are imagined,
altered, and lived. Some of them may remain lost
in documents that were too trivial to be culled in
historiography. Some may have been deemed so
improbable, unseemly, and idiosyncratic, so coun-
ter to the colonial order of things, that they were
not worthy of a historian’s tale. Yet, they could be
taken as the opening to alternative genealogies
that countermand the rigid ethnic and racial divi-
sions that colonial policies repeatedly seek to am-
plify and to invest with determinate credibility.
This project is a uniquely Palestinian one,
but it is not an exception to the colonial order of
things. It could be directed to those who have suf-
fered its dispossessions in the past and its increas-
ing and persistent incursions in the present. Hea-
cock rightly thinks about this as a transnational
archive, but we should not miss the opportunity to
see it is as a geopolitical and aective one, an ar-
chive at the fulcrum of what constitutes the power
of politically invested fictions for vast peoples
around the world.
Palestine figures as one of the key sites where
US power surrogates its technologies of control
and surveillance, borrows and barters with Israeli
regimes of surveillance as much as or more today
than it has in the past. It is not unrecognized by
those whose struggle elsewhere, such as Australian
aboriginal and native American and first nation
groups in Canada now fighting against toxic waste
sites on their land or, in the latter case, against
American garbage companies using Indian land
for disposal. Some of these are marginalized histo-
ries allocated to the periphery of world conscience,
but they are not unrelated to what some Palestin-
ians continue to experience every day in the stench
of the toxic waste that Israeli settlements insist they
do not heap upon them.
Debris and dissensus have an aligned history
that a Palestinian archive has the capacity to track.
It is an archive and history teeming with life, new
growth, rot, and death, iconic of the imperial de-
bris that is present and persistent in so many other
locations, colonial contexts, and other viciously
tangible and “immaterial” but objective forms in
which relations of power reside. One way to chip
away at the technologies of exclusions would be
to challenge the inevitabilities of the distinctions
a colonial regime has drawn. To call things by
their names is another. Not least, to start with, is
a bottom line: a rejection, as Beshara Doumani
writes, of “the refusal to recognize or to make
room for the existence of Palestinians as a political
co m mu n i t y.”
Years ago in an undergraduate course on rac-
ism as a history of the present, my students and I
asked ourselves what a counter- racial archive might
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Ann Laura Stoler • On Archiving as Dissensus • Doing Things with Archives
look like. Some sought to expose the archives of
power and how people of color were written into it
as degraded two dimensional figures. Some sought
to show how they were erased and defaced all to-
gether. Others, abhorring the racialized reality,
sought to set it aside, refusing to engage or touch
its contaminating force. We blasted our, albeit lim-
ited, surroundings with juxtaposed images and
words that together had more force than any one
strategy alone. It matters less what we do than how
we do it. For in the end we task ourselves to thicken
the present with such alternatives. It is those who
contribute to this archive in the making who have
it in their collective hands to forge an archive not
of the past but of the vibrant present studded with
possibilities for the future. Such an archive would
serve as the inscription for a new contract with
both, both enabling and nourishing productive
dissensus as well as, perhaps, unrecognized sites
when and where politics happens.
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