ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the 'future' of the archive and offers some speculations on how performance-makers will have to come to respond to the fundamental shifts in their everyday use of new technologies. It describes the hegemonic cultural and sociopolitical assemblages, within which both technology in general and the archive as fact and idea are embedded. The chapter proposes that the artist, by refusing to use up archive-technology as 'resource', by obliging it to appear as itself, re-minds them of this fundamental difference between themselves as human beings and technology as non-human. It also proposes a counter-theory that the distinctiveness and efficacy of performance as an art-form are not inaugurated in the instant of its documentation and their subsequent interpretations by historians. The chapter suggests that artists are living through a profound transformation for the human which many scholars have described as the 'post-human'.
