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.Furthermore, for Steedman (2001: 2), in The Archaeology of Knowledge the archivedoes not so much stand in for the idea of what can and cannot be said, but rather is thesystem that establishes statements as events and things . Archival research thusdemands the writing of a different kind of history, one which would focus not on the dramatic singularities of great events or onthe anonymities of general laws but on the perspective and continuities ofsomething like ordinary or everyday life, work, administration and powerwherever it was to be found (Osborne 1999: 60).In the context of this thesis, the focus is, in particular, on the emergence of the mysticalin and through such structures as ordinary or everyday life, work, administration andpower , with particular attention being paid to the body as the centre of subjectificationthat, like the world around it, is made material through sets of culturally and historicallycontingent social practices and power relations, or technologies of the self , where the intent is neither to reproduce a philosophy of interiority nor todissolve the subject as a mere effect of things beyond itself, a geographyof the object-as-subject emerges whereby an understanding of the object interms of things beyond itself, effects neither to reinforce an object s assumedintegrity, to fetishize its finish, nor to disaggregate, to leave the object inpieces.The life and power of objects may be understood less through anassumption that hidden relations are concealed in a finished form which66 thereby requires dismantling, than by considering that finished form as onesignificantly congealed state within a wider field of relations of which it isan effect (Matless 2000: 336; see also Matless 1997).3.2 The Mystical and Oral HistoryFor Foucault, the transition from the Classical to the Modern is marked by the work ofthe Marquis de Sade, where language is exposed to the tension between simple representation of sexual acts and the limits of representation in attempting to portraydesire (Carrette 2000: 77).There is an experience of mental impotence withlanguage to function according to the male desire for order and control, says Carrette(2000: 78). In this situation men are faced with the problem of how to speak and write with uncertainty, with a language which turns back on itself and turns man backto his finite body. If Foucault is correct in his assessment, then this requires theresearcher to develop a research methodology that can come to terms with a languagewhich turns back on itself and turns man back to his finite body. One suchrapprochement might take place, as discussed in section 3.1, through the understandingof primary archival and secondary published materials in terms of the enfolding ofsubject and object.Another might take place through a close attention to oral historyand biography in the words of Daniels and Nash (2004: 452), to the various ways lives are inscribed in time and space, plotted as both story-lines and routeways.Such plots are shaped by meta-narratives on the course,or development, of nature and society as well as of the self, and theoreticalpropositions on relations of public and private life, thought and action, freewill and determinism.Plotlines are inscribed in texts, institutions andmaterial sites and monuments which portray a culture s collective memoryand destiny.Cultural forms as various as fairy stories, gardens, novels,prisons, professional careers, life insurance, documentary films and warmemorials set out plotlines of various form linear, cyclical, labyrinthine which people draw on to shape their own lifestories.67 A modern autobiographical canon may still be made up of the writings of elite men andwomen, writes Steedman (2001: 45), but in England at least, from the seventeenthcentury onwards, the emerging administrative state demanded that it was in fact the poorwho told their story, in vast proportion to their numbers. Through the administrativerequirement of parishes to determine the place of settlement of those who were claimingfinancial aid under the Poor Laws, and through the parishes own desire to minimisetheir respective charitable burdens by limiting their almsgiving to their own residents,applicants for aid were implicated in the telling of their life-story, and in having itrecorded. The assumption of the modern autobiographical turn , that there exists andhas existed an urge to tell the self, and that it comes from within, is of very little help inhearing these eighteenth-century cases of enforced narration, Steedman (2001: 55-6)continues. And for the moment, it is impossible to move beyond these suggestions, thatthe modern literary articulation of selfhood and character had one of itsorigins among the poorer sort, when their verbal accounts of themselves, toldbefore a magistrate, were recorded by others.What we can be clearer aboutis one of the sites of this storytelling, the Magistrate as the involuntary andnecessary story-taker, and why it is the Archive contains what it does.Geography and biography are far from being strange bedfellows; indeed, on theevidence of the edited collections by Buttimer (1983a) and Moss (2001) they are verymuch complementary. Through our own biographies, says Buttimer (1983b: 3), wereach toward understanding, being and becoming. Of her own biography, she writes: I was born in a land of story-tellers.The knack of telling a good story is stilla cherished art, calling for memory and imagination, dramatic skill and bodylanguage in the telling.It reaches its highest appeal when someone speaks ofhis or her own experiences.Like its ancestral prototype in the epic or saga,the story addresses practical concerns of everyday life and celebrates thesplendor and magic of the faraway
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