| Sumario: | At one point in Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1995), Jacques Derrida waxes speculatively upon what "might have been'' had late-twentieth century archives and archival technologies been available in the Victorian era. Engaging in an act of "retrospective science fiction" to ruminate upon the "scenes of those other archives," Derrida reveals that what is at stake in archives and archivization is as much the collection, storage, and transmission of data as the construction of meaning and, by extension, material instantiation itself. Inspired by Derrida's "retrospective science fiction," this essay turns to H.G. Wells's "The Empire of the Ants" (1905) and The First Men in the Moon (1901) to probe the scenes of those other archives that are grounded in an incommensurable insect ontology. Such arc-hives destabilize the human-animal species hierarchy and disrupt the utopian impulse for unified fields of knowledge (i.e., the archive-as-utopia) in ways that are relevant to our contemporary informational landscape of digital archivization.
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