more like Derri – duh! (holds up hand expecting high fives, gets none)

Manoff’s piece provides a great context for an olympic dive into the informative yet recondite piece by Derrida. For Darth Derrida, archiving is way more sinister than you’d think; linked to the two conflicting forces of the death drive, and the conservation drive (linked to the pleasure principle), the structure and role of the archive in society is perhaps a very telling externalization of individual inner struggle. Ironically, while Freud’s work can at times feel reductively alienating, it seems that Derrida’s inclusion of Freud into the discussion of the archive is an attempt to make it personal, universal, primal, consequential. This is not the first time I’ve come across theory in a collegiate/grad school setting that makes me wish I had a doctoral level handle on psychoanalysis. We should have someone with a psychoanalysis degree in every class, hidden in plain sight, ready to spring into action like an academic air marshall.

This week’s readings sent me into a cognitive tailspin (as most readings do). To understand that extant archives are not necessarily of value to people that will eventually comb through them, proportionately to the degree that parts of life which would be invaluable as data never become mummified as such, injects a degree of randomness to the overall use value of the archive. The Hairpin article helps illuminate the extent to which archives are dedicated to context, which values the valueless because of its comparative contribution to something which does or will have value. Much can be understood about archival science (and black magic) by following the reasoning of an archivist as they attempt to answer questions many of us would likely ask them ourselves.

I became quite interested in the idea of the act of archiving as the elimination of personal biases, almost as though the archive itself is a globally scaled hindsight one can retrofit into the catch phrase “hindsight is 20/20”. Perhaps archiving is not preservation, but filtration, the same way short term memories are cherry picked for long term memories in the human brain. Perhaps archivists impose the same filtration style, on a large scale, upon cultural memories by datafying and preserving content and context (according to some specific criteria) to enable future unbiased minds to retroactively assign meaning or use meaning in a way that serves whatever survived early generations of bias-infancy regarding that information.

Perhaps neurons direct each other, to and fro, like a librarian would a genealogist seeking a specific public record.

It dawned on me that, at some point, essential archives may become absorbed, as a whole or in part, by another entity that supplants them. I wonder if all the material transferred in this scenario will be permanently watermarked as having passed through the curation of the previous archive which amassed it, which had its own principles governing the collection process. This might be particularly interesting should a regime, state or region become rearranged or fall to the point of requiring total restoration by another (perhaps invading) state.

If all the physical and digital materials accessible at the NYPL in the year, let’s say, 2017, were one day featured at a recreated site, it might, from a LaCaprian perspective, be a great (if not the most objective) pathway to understanding the geopolitical reality of the aforementioned year; what constituted knowledge, archives explain, constitute reality and cultural memory. I suspect such a future archive might also resemble a bit of an amusement park. Perhaps a future way to understand capitalism would be to visit a preserved archive first assembled during its heyday, and see for yourself the degree to which the profit motive shapes the preserved knowledge, comparing it then to similar source material at an archive intact across the world. What books are tattered beyond repair? What books are immaculate, with multiple copies? Combing through records of cardholders, what did the average political science student check out? My imaginative ramble of a scenario is really inspired by uncertainty as to whether context defines data or corrupts it.

Hopefully, one could then compare data at this future archive to the “truth” by jumping in a delorean. I’ve always thought this to be an unappreciated perk of the prospect of time travel; the illumination of the impact of human and societal biases on historical event, i.e. we travel through time not to see the past, but to sample it for comparisons that allow us to retroactively understand how much of any given present we subjectively take with us into the future (an issue that I now understand governs much of the minutiae of an archivist’s work).

One Reply

  • First, if it’s any consolation, Emil, my own grasp of psychoanalysis is pretty tenuous. Perhaps we have a closeted Freudian among us who can shed some light on these issues in our next in-class conversation?

    Second, regarding archival value: yes, it’s interesting to consider how value is assessed – by whom, by what standards, for what presumed future user groups, etc? This idea of archival neutrality — of the archivist not presuming what future researchers will find valuable in a collection — is kind of like the journalistic value of objectivity. It’s not entirely possible 🙂 There are always editorial decisions, value judgments, etc., made in the act of processing.

    Thanks for the excellent post. High five.

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