Who dares to speak of that which is not authorised?: Archive-based research and the meaning of the Humanities Keynote address

quot;Who dares to speak of that which is not authorized? quot;: Archive-based research and the meaning of the Humanities. Lionel Pilkington Notre hritage nest prced daucun testament (Ren Char quoted in Arendt 1953: 1) This talk considers the relationship between theatre and performance studies and archive-based research in the light of the sharp-post 2009 turn towards absolute capitalism (Berardi 2014: 188), and the development of new anti-democratic socio-political norms and public management systems marked by increasing levels of surveillance and totalitarian control (Lorenz 2013: 629). In such a context, how may we act on Jacques Derridas remark that effective democratization relies on the participation in and access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation (Derrida 1995: 4)? How too may we realise Walter Benjamins insistence (in his 1940 essay Theses on the Concept of History) that revolutionary political agency will never be found in the archive except as a taint only visible if we brush history against the grain (Benjamin 1969: 256-7)? Without being accompanied by a critical methodology that is closely attentive to the issues of democracy and revolution highlighted here by Benjamin and Derrida and, especially, without careful consideration of the collective histories of the un-authorized, archive-based research risks endorsing a facile empiricism which will wrest the humanities even further from their core moral purpose of radical questioning and subjunctive socio-political imagining. The second part of the talk examines the problem of archives, democracy and revolution in terms of current theoretical work taking place in theatre and performance studies. I argue that there is a productive overlap between Benjamins and Derridas famous insights and the recent work of dance historians (e.g. Susan Leigh Foster, Randy Martin, Judith Hamera) who point to the existence of affectual states that transgress the protocols of a dominant critical hermeneutics that is based on the idea of the actor solely as a vehicle or instrument of meaning, and that contradicts the profit-centered ways in which the social purpose of theatre production tends to be understood within capitalism. Developing Rebecca Schneiders conception of history as body to body transmission (Schneider 2011: 104), then, the final section of this talk outlines what such a methodology might look like in practice: specifically, what can we learn about the history of revolution in Ireland from a few off-hand remarks contained in the archive of the Irish actress, Siobhn McKenna?