Writing a National Colony: The Hostility of Inscription in the Ge ...

Clearly, the following study itself cannot presume to occupy such a vantage point and must content itself with the idea that deconstructing the host in one place means reconstructing it elsewhere. I am indebted in this Quixotic endeavor to Michel Foucault’s deconstructive method of archaeology, though not nearly as optimistic as he that deconstruction can succeed in “suspending” continuities altogether and that discourse can ever be “set free” (Archaeology 26). Foucault describes as an archive the totalizing processes that allow texts to be perceived as belonging, in a variety of ways, together, that is, the mechanisms that forge linkages between a number of discourses in the cultural imagination. While my analysis of the genesis of the Colony of Llanquihue in terms of a host applies this definition inasmuch as it considers the colony as a discursive formation and investigates the power structures that regulated its emergence, my notion of the host prioritizes, contrary to Foucault’s archive, the totalizing forces that the host, in turn, deploys.

Foucault’s archive does not designate a physical repository of cultural memory in the form of a selective and privileged collection of historical records. Unlike Derrida, whose archive in Archive Fever theorizes the phenomenon of a modern media- and technology-driven frenzy that anticipates the future as record and overrecords the present in preparation for its future recollection, Foucault’s archive encompasses both a method of radical deconstruction and the discursive patterns which that method exposes. Derrida’s archive, unlike the host, is institutionalized and conservative; it documents, collects, and preserves. In contrast, the host is impromptu, ephemeral and argumentative. The aggregate of the host is formed and transformed by textual encounters, its physical presence is dispersed; its function is neither to record nor to recollect but to argue and incite. Most relevant to the discussion of the host, Foucault’s archive is defined as “the law of what can be said” and its “specific regularities” (129). These regularities determine the cohesion of discursive formations above and beyond formulating such formations in terms of common themes, styles, objects, or concepts.