Politics of the archive (2)

The historian's anxiety at the archive gate

NASA Earth observatory: Detroit, Michigan

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In the early 1990s, I returned to university to pursue a doctorate in what can best be described as a cultural history of postwar suburban Detroit. By then, postmodern theory/post-structuralism/deconstruction had impacted all the major disciplines: philosophy, sociology, literature, and more. And of course, History. Having trained in Social History, this was an unsettling experience at times. My fellow Ph.D. candidates were not social historians. A few were art historians; others had trained in literature, philosophy, or Cultural Studies. In our seminar exchanges, I witnessed the ease with which some of them dismissed standard conceptions of historical evidence.

At the same time, I knew these were good challenges for any historian, no matter how he or she decided to manage them in the long run. And in retrospect, none of it was all that surprising. Perhaps postmodernism merely confirmed what historians have always known, but sometimes forget. The past is gone. History – the discipline - is not the past. It is a representation of the past. And representation is always unstable. In other words, postmodernism didn’t really tell historians something new; it reminded us of something old:

“… it is, in fact, the historian who makes the stuff of the past (Everything) into a structure or event, a happening or a thing, through the activities of thought and writing… We should be entirely unsurprised that deconstruction made no difference to this kind of writing. The search for the historian’s nostalgia for origins and original referents cannot be performed, because there is actually nothing there: she is not looking for anything: only silence, the space shaped by what once was; and now is no more.” (Carolyn Steedman, Dust)

Here (after drawing on Hayden White, Louis Mink, David Carr, and Paul Ricoeur), Steedman takes on deconstruction directly, persuasively arguing that by its very nature the writing of History is deconstructionist: final meaning is always deferred. This, for all the reasons we have already seen - not only that the writing of History is a representation but that the archive is simultaneously finite and infinite, continuously altered by new evidence, by the positioning of archivists/historians/readers, by theories/practices of narrative, and by social and political change. In other words, by history itself. Evidence gives rise to and demands more evidence, even as it reveals gaps and silences. Writing leads to more writing; History leads to more History.

Ricoeur told us that “every historical explanation is looking for an explanation to incorporate into itself because it has failed to explain itself.” (Time and Narrative, 1983). As early as 1985, Dominick LaCapra warned us about what he called “the archive as fetish” acting as a “literal substitute for the ‘reality’ of the past which is ‘always already’ lost for the historian.” (History and Criticism, 1985)

So, do we still long for the supposed neutrality of the archive, for the archive’s innocence? Do we believe in its plenitude, its promise to yield the evidence we need? Yes, I suppose we do. We believe, but we hear the tiny patter of doubts in the back of our minds. Take, for example, evidence in the form of numbers and statistics. How often have we heard the line, ‘numbers don’t lie’? Yet who did the counting? Who determined what/who was worth counting and what/who did not matter? In whose interest were numbers gathered? As for the archive’s neutrality or ‘innocence’, look no further than the way archives were used by the Nazis to identify Jews. Or consider imperial archives, nearly always a valorization of the colonizer with little to no knowledge of the colonized. Plenitude or completeness? Forget about it. The omissions of so many histories (think race, class, gender, sexuality, age, colonization) can never be fully repaired. (For these and other examples, see Marlene Manoff’s Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines).

It goes without saying that the best archives (and archivists) are those that work to acknowledge and address such issues as transparently and thoroughly as possible. For in truth, we cannot do without archives. They are important. They do hold material remains of the past. They do deliver. Our work will be judged for its archival integrity – for our critical use of archival evidence and silences. So, despite the flaws and challenges, we return again and again, ever hopeful and sometimes rewarded. Harriet Bradley notes that

“even in an age of postmodern skepticism the archive continues to hold its alluring seductions and intoxications. There is the promise (or illusion?) that all time lost can become time regained. In the archive, there lingers an assurance of concreteness, objectivity, recovery and wholeness.” (“The Seductions of the Archive: Voices Lost and Found,” History of the Human Sciences, May 1999; see also Manoff, Theories of the Archive)

All of this reminds me of an old Wim Wenders film, an adaptation of the Peter Handke novel evocatively titled The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick. You only need to have watched one penalty shoot-out to grasp the idea. But in truth, it is both goalkeeper and penalty taker who must live that moment of shuddering angst. A visit to the archives is rather like taking a penalty kick, and I surely know the historian’s anxiety at the archive gates. But it’s good anxiety. It need not be paralyzing. It need not keep us away.

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Next up: Politics of the archive (3): I still believe in the quote.