The After Archive
In September, 2019, I was invited to speak at a symposium about archives. The premise of the gathering was to imagine new ways of translating archives and immaterial forms of art into exhibitions. My interlocutors were all very theoretical, and I felt out of place with my slides describing finding aids and linear feet. Then came time for questions. Someone from the audience commented that we should be careful about how we were using the term "archive." She said we should remember what Derrida told us: that "the meaning of 'archive' . . . comes to us from the Greek arkheion: initially a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded." Archives, she reminded us, were about the law and we weren't talking about that. Derrida almost always comes up at these talks. But I had the sense that she didn't know how archives really work. I said that there still were custodians of archives and the decisions they make about what is kept, how it is described, and who has access to it has everything to do with the law, knowledge, and power. But her point carried an irony, for us speaking, because we were being archived. Each of us had signed a waiver giving away our voice and our face and our words to be deposited in the archive of the symposium's host institution.
*
Then in October, the day before a different talk, my host wrote me to say, "we'll be streaming [the talk] by Facebook live. I may need you to sign a release for that." I said fine without thinking about it.
The next morning, I was reading the newspaper and there was an article about Facebook's refusal to take down advertisements spreading disinformation, and the company's claim that it upholds a "fundamental belief in free expression" and "respect for the democratic process." I was appalled, if not surprised, and then I recognized my complicity. It dawned on me that what the library was doing was absurd. It was trying to democratize itself — to become more widely accessible, more relevant — by utilizing a platform that is actively deteriorating democracy. I asked my host if it was too late to decline. He said the videographer was already ordered and, more importantly, he had notified "the community" via the listserv that my talk would be streamed. Whose community, I wondered, but I didn't ask.
My host also asked: "any chance you'd like us to pull some archival materials.... We've been trying to incorporate them into colloquia lately, even if just as an after-the-talk show and tell." So there I was at the podium, streaming live, being digitally archived for the community, toggling between the printed pages of my talk, the keyboard arrows for my PowerPoint slides, and the archival documents I had pulled from the collection and laid on the table at the front of the room. I'd read a little, project a photo of a document from the archive on the screen behind me, and then walk over to the table and hold that very document up for everyone to see. Afterward, back at the hotel, I lay awake asking myself what it was that I had been performing? I felt ashamed of my buoyant enthusiasm, my passion for the collections, something the archons often compliment me on.
*
At the library where I now work, we talk about the toll that such performances take on the material. Typically our library holds over six hundred classes and "object sessions" a year. We've taken it as a matter of principle to be as open and accessible as possible. But living hands tear paper, smudge pencil marks, break bindings. Sometimes an archive can be loved to death. So we ask: how are the materials being used in the classroom? What specifically do the materials contribute to the learning experience? We ask these questions to decide whether we can rotate out some of the most frequently used items and lessen the wear and tear on them. Do the students really need to see the first edition of the Divine Comedy? Wouldn't a sixteenth-century edition convey the materiality of textual transmission just as well? To which, one curator responded: "Well, you know, it's very hard to substitute the fetish."
*
During one of these fall speaking engagements, I had some time to wander around New York City. I found myself in Chinatown on a Saturday morning, wandering in and out of houseplant stores and art galleries when I heard what sounded like a marching band. Following the sound around the corner, I arrived at a funeral. There were horn players on one side of the street, drummers on the other. Men in suits carrying flower arrangements to a car. After a mountain of flowers had accumulated, a portrait of a woman was mounted on the car's roof. Passersby walked behind the drummers, in front of the drummers, through the drummers. Skateboarders dragged their shoes on the street to slow down. One held up his phone and recorded the scene like a filmmaker as he floated past. Other arms lifted phones. Walked closer. Zoomed in with their fingers. People flowed like ocean water. A man came out of the funeral home and threw small strips of blank paper in the air: a life dispersed. Then came the casket, then the people pouring out of the building, crying, holding each other. The drums and horns continued. Then came the cars that drove the mourners and the casket and the family all away. The band quieted. The people stopped taking pictures. The traffic began again, and the little strips of paper became litter. I picked one up and tucked it in my bag. That paper felt more like "the archive" than what I had been rehearsing lately before audiences and cameras.
*
It is a year later. There is an impossible chasm between then and now. This plague. Citizens taking up their phones, amassing archives of violence. Each witness an accumulation of historical evidence. We can't mourn. All we can do is mourn. I originally wrote this essay as a form of mourning for my friend and teacher, the activist, curator, and critic Douglas Crimp. To return to it now, disoriented and anxious; my words read like an archive of distant thought. The entrance has moved.
*
In Douglas Crimp's 2002 book, Melancholia and Moralism — which brought together his critical essays on a previous, yet still ongoing epidemic — he wrote: "If the defense of gay sexual culture and the critique of moralism are central to my essays, so too is a theoretical understanding of cultural representation as an essential site of political struggle, indeed of the struggle for life itself."
The archive is a place of life hinged to death. It is an essential site of political struggle. It is a form of cultural representation and an actual space. It is the presence of the individuals who care for the material past intertwined with the absence of those collected and uncollected. It is the administration of discursive power: closed stacks, internal records, backlogs, finding aids, acquisition committees, authority files, digitization initiatives. The right to be forgotten. The desire to remember. The justice of repatriation. The archive is not merely a vehicle through which we try to understand the past, but also, to borrow from anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler, it is a reworking of the inequities of the past in contemporary terms. This year has made clear: to archive can be to struggle for life itself.
*
As Douglas Crimp was dying, he began thinking about his archive. Who might want his papers? Where should he place them? He had a small collection of material in his home. File drawers set into a narrow wall near his desk. I sat on the floor of his apartment looking through his files. There wasn't much there. Some photocopies, his research files. Not many letters, no drafts, no photos. I asked him about those things. Douglas said he didn't keep early drafts. He said he had always felt embarrassed by them. I mentioned that the library where I work holds Larry Kramer's papers and so his archive might make sense there in that context. Douglas said Larry Kramer probably kept everything he ever wrote since he was a child. I felt bad. I knew looking at those two file drawers there wasn't much of an archive. I hadn't spent a lot of time going through each folder, so maybe I was mistaken. But it felt like I was going through someone's drawers, well that's exactly what it was — literally in front of a person I love, appraising what's worth keeping of his life, afraid he would disappear.
After my visit, I returned to the library and consulted with the curators. They conferred and said that they'd be interested in seeing an inventory of Douglas's papers, but it didn't sound like there was a lot of archival material. I sent a follow-up email to Douglas,
I've spoken with a few of my colleagues and have some thoughts and several questions to share. Since you have worked across so many different fields, your papers don't easily fit into traditional collection categories — at least not the ones here at Beinecke — so I sought advice from a variety of colleagues . . .
My colleagues here affirmed my sense that most institutions aren't interested in research files, but that they are typically interested in daybooks, diaries, letters, notes, drafts, and snapshots. For example, your letters from Marilynne Robinson and your draft of the Moroccan cookbook would probably be of interest to an archive. Along those lines, I was thinking about your memoir and wondering about what materials you drew on to write it? Do you have diaries that you've kept? In your book, there is the snapshot of you and Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo, and also that great photo of you at Fire Island, which made me wonder if you have other photos of your social life and the roller disco scene or your trip to see Agnes Martin or other trips and parties and friends? I think those might also be of interest to an institution . . . When we met you mentioned the storage locker that you have. I wonder what kind of stuff you have in there and how much of it there is? One question that came up with my colleagues was if you have a rough outline of what's in your collection? If you already have that, or if you are up to drafting one, that would be really helpful for thinking about what institutions might be a good fit for your papers.
Douglas decided to place his papers at NYU's Fales Library, which holds extensive collections documenting the downtown New York scene. But he never did answer my questions. I keep wondering whether he decided to include his personal material in his archive. Or did he really not keep any letters, notebooks, or photos? We had spoken about his email, about all the people whose lives he touched. Douglas was a witty and thoughtful correspondent; did he save his email? I thought that he should. But I got the sense that he wanted his papers to be about his intellectual life, his scholarship, not his personal life. I've struggled to understand why he would feel that way because Douglas brought the autobiographical into his critical work so beautifully and importantly. He had written that "one of the central tenets of cultural studies has been the contestation of the vanguard role of the intellectual in relation to the culture and cultural constituencies he or she studies." He had urged us to "be self-reflexive, to recognize the double play of transference, to interrogate the subject as it interrogates the object."
It took me some time to realize I'd been thinking about this all wrong. "It historicizes me," reads the last line of Douglas's memoir. Why did I not see the resistance in his words? Even the title of his memoir, Before Pictures, puts him at the beginning rather than at the end. I didn't realize what I was asking Douglas. Of course he didn't answer me.
*
The intimacy of an archive can catch you off guard. I have this photograph of me with my younger sister Melissa sitting on a piece of cardboard in the front yard of the house where we grew up. We are surrounded by berries and twigs and rocks, mounds of red and green and earth that we've gathered around us. Melissa looks so happy. So small. Melissa whose life has been confiscated by violence and drugs and poverty. The last time I saw her, I was dropping her off at a women's shelter. She gave me a box for safekeeping, in it the photos of her babies, the letters and trinkets she had held on to, the chintzy painted buddha she kept on her dresser in high school. Ten years have passed. Closed in a box shaped like a turtle, in my basement — my sister's archive. I've only opened it once.
*
Years ago I showed the photograph of Melissa and me sitting on the piece cardboard with our collection of yard debris in a talk at the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries's annual conference. I was trying to articulate my position inside-outside the field. I felt compelled to draw attention to the fact that I am not a librarian. I have no degree in information or library science, no certification as an archivist. But collecting and organizing, hiding and saving have always been a part of me. I wanted to argue for an alternative genealogy for the field of librarianship. I advanced the slide, and my sister disappeared. I read to my audience:
Rather than, or in addition to, Melvil Dewey and Lee Pierce Butler, let us see ourselves as actively in dialogue with the scholarly discourse of Derrida and Foucault, Aby Warburg, Walter Benjamin, and Jorge Luis Borges. Why not contend that collection development policies are scholarly arguments made by individuals rather than institutions, which might be discussed and peer reviewed like other scholarly works? Why not author finding aids, and be transparent about restrictions and de-accessioning policies? Why not create exhibitions that are developed around issues or that make arguments that aren't always in celebration of the collections that we hold or the collectors who gave them to us?
I did not name my sister as a contributor to this discourse. I saw myself as a custodian of collections, not her. She had not yet given me her archive to hold on to.
*
A little further along, in that same talk, I pointed to a passage in Douglas's 1993 book On the Museum's Ruins. I often go to this passage when I am asked to talk about working in archives and libraries. Over the years I have started to feel like I'm forgetting Douglas's point — wearing it out by continually returning to it — maybe I feel like I'm diluting its relevance or diffusing the polemic by overplaying it, decontextualizing it, like that first edition of the Divine Comedy we trudge out a dozen times a year. But I don't want to fetishize Douglas. I want to remember him.
Decontextualization was precisely Douglas's point in this passage. He's talking about modernism and photography. About the librarian Julia Van Haaften who walked the stacks at the New York Public Library and created an exhibition of their photographically illustrated books. Douglas explains that the work of Van Haaften's exhibit wasn't really the exhibit itself, but what happened afterwards. The books Van Haaften pulled weren't returned to their places in the stacks according to the subject areas in which they were catalogued. Instead those books were reclassified as art and the producers of their images became artists. Douglas's story about Van Haaften has been a touchstone for me these past several years — a mandate to be self-critical in the work that I do in the library. To question the institutional apparatus of which I am now part.
*
Last year, when I began writing this essay to be read in honor of Douglas at the University of Rochester, I went back to that book. But it wasn't the story about Van Haaften that grabbed me. It was how Douglas ends the chapter with an anecdote about his own experience in the library stacks:
I was once hired to do picture research for an industrial film about the history of transportation, a film that was to be made largely by shooting footage of still photographs; it was my job to find appropriate photographs. Browsing through the stacks of the New York Public Library where books on the general subject of transportation were shelved, I came across the book by Ed Ruscha entitled Twentysix Gasoline Stations, first published in 1963 and consisting of photographs of just that: twenty-six gasoline stations. I remember how funny it was that the book had been mis-catalogued and placed alongside books about automobiles, highways, and so forth. I knew, as the librarians evidently did not, that Ruscha's book was a work of art and therefore belonged in the art division. But now, because of the reconfigurations brought about by postmodernism, I've changed my mind; I now know that Ed Ruscha's books make no sense in relation to the categories of art according to which art books are catalogued in the library, and that that is part of their achievement. The fact that there is nowhere for Twentysix Gasoline Stations within the present system of classification is an index of the book's radicalism with respect to established modes of thought.
I'd grown increasingly preoccupied with libraries: what they meant, how they were changing. I asked my audience at Rochester, "What are the established modes of thought?" "What are libraries anymore?" I pointed to a story in the New York Times with the headline: "Check this Out: Libraries as Tourist Attractions." In the article, travel writer Alyson Kreuger explained, "About a decade ago, libraries across the world faced a predicament. Their vital functions — to supply books and access to information for the public — were being replaced by Amazon, e-books, and public Wi-Fi." Libraries began reinventing themselves. They built "rooftop gardens, public parks, verandas, play spaces, teen centers, movie theaters, gaming rooms, and art galleries." They bought "expensive new technology like 3-D printers, laser cutters and broadcasting studios for podcasts and movies." "They are transforming skylines, going viral on social media and attracting tourists from all over the world."
The article featured a photograph of the futuristic Tianjin Binhai Library in China. When it opened in 2017 some hailed it as the "world's best library" and "a book lover's dream," which is bizarre because its undulating terraced shelves filled with books from floor to ceiling are an illusion. They are not filled with books at all, but with printed digital images of books. "It's a popular place for selfies and Instagram posts," writes Krueger, although there have been reports of people falling off stairs while taking pictures of themselves amid the fake books.
The library's biomorphic architecture garnered it the nickname "The Eye." Winy Maas, cofounder of the Dutch architecture firm MVRD, which built the library, explained the concept in a press release: "We opened the building by creating a beautiful public space inside; a new urban living room is its center. The bookshelves are great spaces to sit.... The angles and curves are meant to stimulate different uses of the space, such as reading, walking, meeting and discussing. Together they form the 'eye' of the building: to see and be seen." To see and be seen in China today as protesters cover their noses, mouths, and ears to protect their identities from the surveillance state. A new urban living room, indeed. After all that has passed since writing this, the two preceding sentences resist revision. Yet their meaning is changed.
*
In the years that I transitioned from being Douglas's student to becoming his friend, I got my first job working in a library. On my last day at that library, I asked a colleague to walk the closed stacks with me. Ours was an exercise in getting lost and feeling lost together. We had spoken often of the invisible the labor of the librarians, the strangeness of how material is classified and arranged, the dreaded fundraisers, the performative instructional sessions, and the description of our work as an "alternate track" and therefore a form of failure. As two women not doing what either of us were trained to do, but feeling the significance of being able to work in this field at this moment and having unfettered access to the collections, the documentation behind them, and the spaces in which they are stored, getting lost in the stacks together was an important and fleeting act.
*
Now I work at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Well, actually, now I work at home. But there are others who still work in the library and keep it running, giving access to its collections, circulating boxes and books, scanning and securing the archive for the future.
In a normal year, one hundred and seventy-five thousand people would typically visit the Beinecke Library. In the summer, it is not uncommon to have up to two thousand people visit in a single day. Most of our visitors do not come to the reading room to study the collections, they come to look at the architecture. It is a beautiful building. Made of translucent Vermont marble panels, an inch and a quarter thick, which allow diffused light into the building. Its solid, white surface reminds me of a skull. Inside, filling the center of the building is an illuminated six-story bookcase enclosed in glass meant to evoke the mind, or knowledge. In the afternoons, the light comes in through the marble panels and turns the interior of the building golden. The books glow. They are real books. But the glass is meaningful. We call it the tower. It is a metaphor. It is theater. It is also a popular place for selfies and Instagram posts.
*
"Sightseeing is the art of disappointment," Borges quotes the author of Treasure Island. This quote appears at the end of a short essay written by Borges in 1945: ten years before he would lose his sight; ten years before he would become a librarian. His essay is a complaint about the "perverse artifice" of film dubbing. He evokes ancient precedents: the chimera, the Trinity, the hypercube. I imagine Borges in the movie theater, alone, thinking he was going to see and hear Greta Garbo. Witnessing the separation of her voice from her image — as if he was witnessing a crime, or the creation of a monster. "Since they are usurping voices, why not also faces?" Films were becoming "a kind of negative paradise." Some people, he wrote, find dubbing "delightful, or tolerable." But for Borges, the technical ingenuity of dubbing, "these audio-visual deformations," pointed toward foreclosure, inevitability, authoritarianism. He worried about being able to discern a substitution from the original, the real from a fake.
Lucy Mulroney is a writer and curator. She is currently working on "My Experiment in Living," about design, government policy, and archives. Her social media handle is 39 Knollwood Road, North Haven, CT 06473.
