Classified is a tease

This week readings were refreshing to me in how they showed archives being reactivated again from different perspectives.

One topic that struck me was of ‘classified’ information that Stolers talks about in her essay on Colonial Archives.  I found it to be an interesting insight into how cultural cohesion (or not) within the organization of an archive is important.  Stoler discovered in her research of Dutch colonial archives that ‘classified’ information wasn’t so much a secret but information that was unclassifiable, ’not necessarily secreted truths about the state, but promises of confidences shared’.  Or information that couldn’t be agreed on in terms of how or why a particular thing occurred, which seems to suggest that schisms in terms of interests for how an event should be archived and remembered is what creates these sensitivities.

Wikipedia defines classified as ‘material that a government body claims is sensitive information that requires protection of confidentiality, integrity, or availability. Access is restricted by law or regulation to particular groups of people’

Is ‘classified’ then a term that reports are labelled with when the information doesn’t line up with the archives overarching cultural narrative or risks undermining and restructuring parts of it?  And what would allow for something to be omitted altogether instead of being considered ‘classified’ within a political archival framework?

That these secrets may ‘index the changing terms of what was considered “common sense,” as well as changes in political rationality’ reminds me of how often conspiracy theories spring from the knowledge that certain information has been classified.  Ultimately that classification, if noted by the public, has the effect of announcing itself as something to speculate on instead of making the topic go away, which seems like a strange side-effect of classified information.