Death Drive – The Art of Archives

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?

The Art of Archives

UMass Boston || English 600 || Spring 2015 || Prof. Erin Anderson

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