This seminar will grow out of my late 1980s BBC 3 radio programme, 'A Barricade of the Paris Commune'. It was one of a series of six describing and reconstructing a photograph as if it were lost to vision, through words and sounds. This one is concerned with weaving together different strands of my researches into the visual cultures of the end of the Second Empire and the Commune. It is a condensation of archival and literary sources, sounds and musics and my aim in presenting to you is to think through a process of working through archives and their histories as ‘finished history’ in order to fabricates an artifact. An artifact that might be composed of different kinds of ‘dispositif’ to invent a reliable-enough effect of truth. I want to think of this as having been immersed in currents and counter currents of French literary and historiographical cultures between the 1970s and more recent years, and how this navigation imposed different modes of writing.

Attendees are encouraged to listen to a (13-minute) recording of the radio programme before the seminar: please access the recording via the link below.