While the snow-pile or snow-bank can be described formally, what they collect, or is collected in them, is not a readable document. Rather, their existence documents an event: they are an event. The snow-bank, as Foucault might suggest, “defines at the outset the system of its enunciability” (129). While seemingly random in composition, the chaotic residues of a storm, these particular collections are the root of an event, and mark not the whole event, but rather a specific part.

Their substrate is the public median, which often includes portions of the sidewalk, tree boxes, bus stops, and public benches. In fact it is the pedestrian locations of ingress onto the sidewalk, or resting locales (the bench), which often go overlooked in the creation of a snow-bank. One could offer general limits to their formal qualities based upon spatial dimensions: height, depth, volume, etc., but more importantly, like many collections, they are the products of the technology used to create and collect these forms. The plow, the Bob-Cat, the excavator. Their contents were selected: the snow blocking x street, the snow blanketing y parking lot, or drifted inside z bus stop. And, in most cases their creators, are not unlike the “Archons,” alluded to by Derrida: the civil servants, guardians of the city streets and its public works.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Snow-pile, snow-bank: these deposits—they are deliberate, albeit temporary. To pile. To bank. It would seem that this collection is made as the by-product of necessity—the streets need to be cleared, parking lots need to be plowed, sidewalks shoveled—but, what other assurances do these structured abundances confer on us, and on their creators, collectors? Beyond a return to normalcy, what does the creation of these monumental piles suggest? And, what violence is apparent in these collections?

As Derrida states, “there is no political power without control of the archive…” (4). The snow-bank, while its resonance as a collection is manifold, is a striking symbol of a functioning city government. The monumental piles stand as reminders that tax dollars are providing a service, public works departments are being well managed, and that the city, and by extension the state, are there to ensure safe travel, and a return to normal commerce. In what looks like an amorphous mass, resides, in fact, order and authority.

It might be a slight stretch of the imagination, but one might also view the snow-bank as a type of sepulchre. While not literal by any means (a lethal snow-cave collapse is not the road I’m going down here), it does mark an end, and seems to share in what Mbembe explains as an “architectural event” (21). The end of the snowstorm (“death”) institutes the formation of these piles. However, while this debris has been collected and placed, there is no desire to “reassemble these traces,” to re-disperse this collected snow back onto the streets (22). A narrative of the storm, an approximate account of just how much snow fell, is written, inevitably, by the presence of the snow-banks, but commonly such a story is met by resentment.

Susceptible to natural ruin—the temperature eventually will rise, the snow will melt (here one might argue that the melted snow simply enters a new collection, a second or third stage of the public works, and water treatment), )—the initial snow-bank as collection would seem to mark not-only a point of effacement—the residue of a fresh layer of snow—but also implicate us as reactionaries working against the natural order of winter, and at the same time compelled to destroy the very collections just created. We (at least city officials, business owners, etc.) want the snow to melt. The violence in all of this seems related to Freud’s “death drive” or “destruction drive,” as Derrida explains it in relation to the archive. At no other time has wishing for spring sounded more like “…destroying, by silent vocation” (10).

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While I was documenting these snow-banks, I noticed how often the snow-bank was located near signs, mostly parking signs or something similar, still, material in the public space acting as reminders of authority, and the law. And it was, for me, the presence of the snow-bank that drew my attention and re-contextualized those everyday objects . And so, I wonder how the location of a collection can elucidate elements (values maybe) of an institution?