In what way has our field been determined by a state of the technology of communication and of archivization? One can dream or speculate about the earthquakes which would have made the landscape of the archive unrecognizable for the past century if, to limit myself to these indications, our pioneers, their contemporaries, collaborators and immediate disciples, instead of writing thousands of letters by hand, had had access to portable tape recorders, computers, printers, faxes, televisions, teleconferences and above all E-mail.
This archival earthquake would not have limited itself to the secondary recording, to the conservation of their history; it would have transformed this history from top to bottom and in the most initial inside of its production, in its very events. This is another way of saying that the archive, as printing, as writing, prosthesis or hypomnestic technique in general is not only the stockroom and the conservatory for archivable contents of the past which would exist in any case, and just the same, without the archive.
