“An Archival Impulse”
Hal Foster’s exploration of the implications of the archive for contemporary artists was published in the American journal, October, which has been criticised for its own editorially driven cultural compulsions consistent with an archive fever: a systematic collection of documents and articles about a community/constituency (those devoted to a particular reading of twentieth-century art and theory), and a specific process of selection, categorisation and description (a compulsive totalisation tendency to support that reading). In that sense, such a journal might replicate, in French philosopher Michel Foucault’s terms in his Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), the archive as “the first law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events”.