Pay a visit to an official archive of your choice and spend a few hours exploring its collections, following whatever interests or intrigues you. Using Farge and/or Steedman as a point of entry, consider your experience as an encounter with both the space of the archive and the materials it contains.
The Art of Archives
UMass Boston || English 600 || Spring 2015 || Prof. Erin Anderson
Month: February 2015 (page 4 of 4)
The collection I will consider does call itself an archive, though it is very different from the mystique-bound building with the “motifs and columns” and “labyrinth of corridors” that Mbembe describes (19). It exists only on the internet, so, though it does offer a variety of design schemes (“skins”) with which to view its content, and though it does contain something of a labyrinth of hyperlinks through which its visitors navigate its holdings, it does not possess—according to my subjective interpretation, at least—“the nature of a temple and a cemetery” (19). The collection in question (I am not sure I should call it an “archive,” given that it exists in some ways in opposition to a collection of official state or scholarly documents like those referenced in Manoff’s essay) is the Archive of Our Own (archiveofourown.org), “a fan-created, fan-run, non-profit, non-commercial archive for transformative fanworks” in various media formats.
The AO3, as it is often known, for its initials (and as I will call it, so as to avoid the potential confusion inherent in referring to it as “the Archive”) presents visitors to its home page with a menu bar including four options: “Fandoms,” “Browse,” “Search,” and “About.” In so doing it privileges the organization of its collected works by “fandom,” that is, by the source material on which each transformative (some might say derivative) work is based. Fandoms are categorized by the media format of the source material: “Books & Literature,” “Movies,” “Video Games,” etc. This structure gives pride of place to the source material—so that, if I am seeking to view transformations/derivations of Shakespeare’s plays, I will know to click on “Theater.” When I do so, and am taken from the home page to an alphabetical listing of dramatic literature, I can click on “S” for “SHAKESPEARE William – Works,” or, if I am looking for work based on (for example) Hamlet specifically, I can click on “H” and find “Hamlet – Shakespeare.”
This organizational structure makes sense to a degree—if I were not familiar with Hamlet, I would probably have trouble following a good deal of written stories or audiobooks based on the plot and/or characters of that play. However, this organizational structure also tacitly reinforces the social hierarchy that places fans (the creators of transformative works) as subservient to professional “authors,” that is, the creators of “original” works (presuming one can, with a straight face, call Hamlet, or any one of (m)any of Shakespeare’s plays, “original”)—though it is also arguable that these “authors” are privileged not so much for their works’ (debatable) originality as for those works’ economic viability under current U.S. intellectual property law and the realities of present-day capitalist systems. Works published to the AO3 are free for anyone with an internet connection to view(/read/listen to); they are not intended as money-making ventures, and as such are to some degree denigrated in the larger culture, and even, as I have explicated, in the primary organizational structure of the AO3 itself.
Further exploration of these issues will take much more space than a single blog post allows, but I hope it is clear that, when one widens one’s definition of “archive” to include digital collections in addition to physical repositories of documents, and to construe “documents” as “simply objects that convey[…] information,” as Paul Otlet has proposed (Manoff 10), questions of the nature of the power vested in archivists’ hands become much more complex, colliding with traditional theories of archives in interesting and provocative ways.
I’m particularly interested in the lack of distinction drawn between the library, the museum, and the archive in Manoff’s overview of the field – and the way in which the conflation of the museum and archive in particular heightens and crystallizes the issues of power and control that are the concerns of most of our readings today. As soon as the Elgin Marbles were mentioned, I began thinking about the British Museum and the British Library (which I group together because the latter was constructed from the collections of the former, in what their latest development plan calls a “courageous post-war vision.”)
Mbembe notes the imaginary function of “the rights of collective ownership” (21) that the archive makes us feel we possess; and in fact most archives seem to be collected and kept with the idea in mind that someone will have access to them: “the alchemy of the archive: it is supposed to belong to everyone.” (21) Who these someones may be varies pretty widely, of course, from archive to archive, but I’m particularly interested in the archives which claim some level of public access (the British Library, for example, but I could just as easily jump off of Catherine’s post to talk about NARA’s presidential libraries, or talk about the rare books archives at the Boston Public Library.)
The holdings of these institutions are all available to the public – although here I’m reminded of when Simon Armitage went to the British Library in the course of translating Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and was turned away when he asked for the manuscript (“the lady on the desk seems torn between taking me seriously and sliding her hand towards the panic button.”) Nevertheless, there is at least a theoretical claim to public access at all of these places. The reality, though, is that a good portion of the 1.6 million yearly visitors to the British Library probably don’t pull a single piece from the collection – instead, they interact with it as a museum, a set of exhibitions that have already been curated and presented.
One of the functions this has is to foreground the issue of curation: seeing particular objects plucked from their larger archival context to be presented and arranged reminds us, ideally, of the invisible work (and the invisible biases) behind archival in general: that “archives are not neutral or innocent” (Manoff 14). If constructing the archive is an exercise of power, then presenting and displaying some of its most valuable objects is a trumpeting of that power: the galleries in the British Library are overwhelming, I’d argue intentionally so, with the Magna Carta, the Lindisfarne Gospels, and the sole surviving manuscript of Beowulf, among other objects, on essentially permanent display in a few gallery rooms. The sense of time and geographical space covered in the arrangement of these particular objects is almost dizzying – it has the sweep of empire, a thousand years of English identity and a presence that acquires information and objects from across the world. (This is, assumably, meant to be impressive in a more positive light than many postcolonial scholars might view it, and of course the word acquires in my last sentence has a bit too much delicacy.)
I think a lot of what I’m getting at is an interest in the museum – or I should more properly say the museum exhibition — as something that heightens and almost dramatizes the features, functions, and concerns that can be applied to the larger archive which lurks behind it.
With the newly dropped mounds of snow that have accumulated,I thought it would be appropriate to explore a collection that has seen extensive use during this retreat indoors: Netflix.
I think everyone knows about Netflix. You’re either a subscriber or you know a subscriber, if you don’t I have stock in Blockbuster I’d like to sell you.
Netflix is a movie/tv distribution service that moved movie/tv rentals online. Thousands of movies and television shows are available via streaming and snail mail. For my purposes, I’m going to be more interested in the streaming service as this carries the most subscribers (approximately 61 million according to their 2014 year end report).
The movie/tv shows are organized into genres and subgenres detailed and re-detailed here. According to this Atlantic article, there are a total of 76, 897 genre combinations with a relative formula of: region + adjectives + noun genre + based on… + set in… + from the… + about… + for age x to y. A different discussion may focus on the genre labels in movies generally and how that curtails movie possibilities [as in Foucault’s conception of the archive as a “general system of formation and transformation of statements” (Foucault, 130)].
What most interested me when I first started thinking about Netflix as a collection was how their movies and television shows were collected. Netflix is not a historical archive. Its goal is not to create a collection of movies/TV shows that preserve the past or characterize movie/TV shows as a whole. Its goal is to make money. So how does a collection dictated by the marketplace collect?
Derrida’s notion that “the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content” (Derrida, 17) is applicable here not only in the technical sense, but also in the structure of the marketplace. The consumer structure that allows Netflix to exist also determines the content that is collected. Movie licenses are chosen in a utilitarian manner. Kissmetric cites Netlfix’s former VP of Product Engineering, John Ciancutti, describing this process as efficient: “efficient here meaning content that will achieve the maximum happiness per dollar spent”. In other words they spend the least amount of money to buy the most appropriate content for the greatest majority of their consumers.
How do they know what their consumers like? Netflix collates copious amounts of data from their consumers’ viewing habits. Check out the Atlantic article cited above and here for more detailed information of Netflix users’ favorite genres (“A Sketch of the American Soul”).
When Netflix first began, they were the only game in town. Licenses were cheap and Netflix had a gigantic collection of movies streaming on their website. When companies like Hulu and Amazon got into the game, things changed. Licenses became more expensive. In order to compete, Netflix put their massive collection of data to work.
They started creating their own content. The Atlantic articles and Kissmetric articles that I’ve cited above both discuss this as a creative enterprise that Netflix saw as necessary to compete in the market. What I see is an archive, a collection, within the marketplace that has started to create itself. It’s now held together by the consumer AND the consumer’s data–an algorithmic conception of the consumer.
This process is democratic. The choices, after all, are made according to the majority of subscriber preferences. New content is created by what is deemed the desire of the majority of consumers. But, what if we imagine this action carried to its extreme? What if the majority of films/TV shows on Netflix were created content? At what point does the created content become less of a reflection of consumer desire and more of an imposition of the status quo? At what point does a self-created archive reflect values of the past and neglect values of the present? How does this influence the outlook of the consumer?
Of course, no one needs to be a subscriber. You can cancel anytime. But I think the question when related to collections is still valid. I’m thinking here of Greetham, “all conservational decisions are contingent, temporary, and culturally self-referential, even self-lauatory: we want to preserve the best of ourselves for those who follow” (Greetham cited by Manoff, 20). Netflix, in the marketplace, is conserving the majority by creating and re-creating a conception of the majority and slowly effacing movies/TV shows that represent conceptions outside of this majority.
Does this matter? As the preferable medium for visual entertainment slowly moves from cable and TV to the internet, I think it matters a lot. This is what people will be watching in the future. We should ask how this creation of content will influence movies/TV shows and, more importantly, the people who watch.
The very existence of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library is an obvious function of political power. This collection exists solely because it represents a political figure in American history, a president and his administration. The Kennedy administration was of course cut short due to the president’s assassination, and the archived materials represent an unfinished presidency. In this sense, this archive and the numerous materials held there certainly do act as “a type of sepulcher where these remains are laid to rest” (Mbembe, 22). At the same time the archive is also a “shelter” (Derrida), where the remains of President Kennedy’s life and legacy may be protected and preserved.
Being a presidential library, the collection is assumed to be nationally significant and as such is made easily accessible to the public. Many collections are fully digitized and available on the archive’s website, and the archive has an ongoing digitization initiative. This allows the collections to be readily available to all types of researchers, not just academics. The physical materials themselves remain sheltered under security and inaccessible to the general public. On-site researchers fill out call slips to request materials (if available) and the materials are brought to the research room where they may be viewed.
The entire archival collection is divided into textual and audio/visual archives. The textual archive is very well organized: from collection title, series name, box number, folder title, to item title. The Personal Papers of John F. Kennedy collection contains a “Pre-Presidential” series, a “Presidential Campaign” series, and a “President’s Office Files” series. The President’s Office Files further organizes materials into subseries, such as “National Security Files” and “White House Central Name Files.” There are also subseries for staff members and departments. Materials in each series are chronological. This presents a very structured, very ordered set of materials chosen to represent this administration.
The materials in the archives are not limited to those belonging to President Kennedy himself. The textual archives contain a number of collections, including the papers of John F. Kennedy, his speechwriters, his staff, and his wife, as well as other family members. Because of this, the scope of archival materials in the collection covers a much more extensive time period than just the short President Kennedy was in office. (There are, for example, international travel booklets and logs in his mother’s own sub-collection, from trips in the early 1900’s that have essentially nothing to do with John F. Kennedy or his administration.)
The nature of the collection allows for any number of varied materials related to John F. Kennedy to be included. The sub-collections and subseries categorize all materials housed in the archives, and every item is designated a specified home. This careful organization makes the collections easily searchable. Important and/or classified national documents are housed alongside (comparably) unimportant notes and doodles. All are treated as equally important and are carefully catalogued and recorded in the finding aids. These materials are traces of the “authentic” experiences of this administration and its time.
In addition to the president’s personal papers, the archive includes collections of correspondence sent to the White House by various individuals and groups. This correspondence is carefully ordered by date, then by sender in the “White House Central Name File” or by subject in the “White House Central Subject File.” These boxes not only contain letters, but also pamphlets, flyers, artwork, newspaper clippings, photographs, etc. These types of materials provide more historical value and “authenticity” to the archival collection. These collections of correspondence also preserve the individual voices of those who sent correspondence and accompanying materials to the White House. These items within the collections reveal a lot about the time period and what was culturally significant at the time.
The collection is relatively silent on the assassination of President Kennedy (and subsequent conspiracy theories.) As this is a federal institution, the government likely cannot be viewed to be lending credence to assassination conspiracy theories, and as such the subject is avoided altogether. This means that the physical traces or evidence of these theories are necessarily excluded from the archive. There are, however, sub-collections dedicated to President Kennedy’s funeral and condolence mail sent to family members in the wake of his death. These have been deemed appropriate materials to preserve and make available to the public. While the assassination is not covered by the collection, it could be said that President Kennedy’s untimely death provides additional significance and mystique to this archival collection. This particular archive is undoubtedly “rooted in death” (Mbembe, 22).
Who decides what is included or excluded in a collection such as a presidential archive? Where is the line drawn for “relevant” materials?
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.
Intersection of Prospect St and Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge MA
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?
Kim Noble is a fifty-three-year-old woman with Dissociative Identity Disorder (also known as Multiple Personality Disorder.) Fourteen of her twenty personalities are phenomenal artists, all displaying vastly different and extremely unique artistic tendencies, preferences and techniques. The collection can be viewed here, where pieces are organized in alphabetical order under the personality name to which they belong. Once categorized under their respective personality names, there seems to be no visible method of arrangement, as the pieces are not presented in any chronological or chromatic order, which leads me to assume that it is preference that guides the arrangement. In the case of displaying the collections at live shows, samples from each artist’s work are shown, but the pieces remain with others from the same personality. This works to maintain the great distinction between Noble’s artistic personalities so that viewers don’t mistake the same style as coming from more than one personality.
Understanding that each personality’s style is distinct from the other is all one needs to do in order to easily group the paintings. Abi, for example, paints delicately, illustrating a monochromatic background with a single subject that consumes only an eighth of the painting and entitles the works with short phrases describing the every-day things that the subject is doing or being. Anon, however, paints with heavy, oil-based paints, illustrating ghostly figures and applying mysterious and dark titles involving “the edge.” Much different still is Key, who paints cryptic tribal graphics and geometric designs on boxes covered in black cloth.
Key’s art in particular illustrates that the collections of Noble’s artistic personalities are not limited to canvas, but do seem to be exclusionary of art forms outside of painting/illustration. With Key’s diversion from the rest of the collections, however, it does not eliminate the possibility of Noble developing a 15th artistic personality that prefers sculpting or wood-carving, etc.
The very clear divisions between each personality’s collections, however, does seem to limit each artist to a particular medium and specific style. It is here that the possibility of something silenced arises. When Achille Mbembe’s discussion of the archival building, wherein he writes, “The archive has neither status nor power without an architectural dimension,” (19) is applied to the world of digitized archives, the framework of the collections and unifying/separating characteristics can be seen as the walls and the structure without which the archive loses its power. In the case of artists without Dissociative Identity Disorder, it is not uncommon to see creative nature expressed in many forms and through many mediums. Why, then, can we suppose that Noble’s personalities are extremely distinct in their artistic expression? Or, is it likely that outlier pieces from each personality have been suppressed in order for the “walls” and power of the collection to stand? If this is the opinion taken, (which I am inclined toward) is it Derrida’s “archival fever” (12) or the potential power in manipulating the archives that Mbembe describes that truly works in contradiction to the anarchival “death drive” (which here has not prevailed)? Or, is the “archive fever” inclusionary of the construing power that comes with archives?
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