Public library and archive in their epistemic and social aspects coalesced in the context of the broader social transformations of modernity: early capitalism and processes of nation-building in Europe and the USA. These transformations were propelled by the advancement of political and economic rationalization, public and business administration, statistical and archival procedures. Archives underwent a corresponding and largely concomitant development with the libraries, responding with a similar apparatus of classification and ordering to the exponential expansion of administrative records documenting the social world and to the historicist impulse to capture the material traces of past events. Overlaying the spatial organization of documentation; rules of its classification and symbolic representation of the archive in reference tools, they tried to provide a formalization adequate to the passion for capturing historical or present events. Characteristic of the ascendant positivism of the 19th century, the archivists’ and librarians’ epistemologies harbored a totalizing tendency that would become subject to subversion and displacement in the first decades of the 20th century.
The assumption that the classificatory form can fully capture the archival content would become destabilized over and over by the early avant-gardist permutations of formal languages of classification: dadaist montage of the contingent compositional elements, surrealist insistence on the unconscious surpluses produced by automatized formalized language, constructivist foregrounding of dynamic and spatialized elements in the acts of perception and cognition of an artwork.[^1] The material composition of the classified and ordered objects already contained formalizations deposited into those objects by the social context of their provenance or projected onto them by the social situation of encounter with them. Form could become content and content could become form. The appropriations, remediations and displacements exacted by the neo-avant-gardes in the second half of the 20th century produced subversions, resignifications and simulacra that only further blurred the lines between histories and their construction, dominant classifications and their immanent instabilities.
[^1]:  provides a detailed account of strategies that the historic avant-gardes and the post-war art have developed toward the classificatory and ordering regime of the archive.
