The Library v The Archive

 

Reading the interview with Kate Eichhorns where she discusses the scope of feminists movements use of the archive and written materials and how the shifting approach towards ephemerality in these materials as the movements conditions changed was fascinating to me.

That at the beginning of the first wave of feminism most of the materials were so ephemeral both to the movement and the public that an archive wasn’t started until well after is indicative to me of what the various movements understanding of the permanence of their actions and their control over their own narrative was at the time. And later in the second wave where Eichhorn talks of the intention of small presses and zines intently having smaller distribution since “reaching an audience with shared political goals was often more important for these women than reaching a mass audience”. That  the ability to accumulate materials and control these materials in itself was representative of a working goal of the movement makes the archive appear much more inherently political.

Archives holding the ability to provide future context to the ‘blind spots’ that marginalized groups encounter in their times from lack of access or funding to publishing or other channels of getting information out shifted the lens of how I had been thinking about the act of creating and maintaining archives.

Eichhorn also stated that ‘the library and archive are active in the production of a somewhat different regime of truth’, libraries representative of information that navigated through social channels and was able to get published, and archives holding the unpublished materials.

This makes me think of the archive as more of a treasure map or collection of unanswered clues to future queries, where contrasted with the published or ‘library’ version of accounts, one can see what ultimately the material representation in an archive is indicative of; what the people making it were working against, since the published account would be the version of truth that the public (or at least the publishers segment) had accepted as one, whereas the archive material didn’t have that cultural traction yet.

This is substantiated by Elvia Arroyo-Ramirez’s discussion of the accents on the language in his work on the Argentine Dirty War; the computer programs hadn’t been programmed to accommodate an accurate conveyance of the names or information of the victims, because this wasn’t important to them. The advice he ran into from the coders or ‘mainstream’ to just alter/erase/scrub these details out in order to move forward towards a published account that was more accommodating of the already existent understanding of the information shows how mundane the act of conformity to power dynamics is.

In many ways these readings brought a lot of the concepts of this course full circle for me, in that they were illustrative of how an archive can be measured against the larger power systems and how instrumental controlling peoples archives is for future political reasons.

One Reply

  • Thanks for this, Maris! A few of these readings point out how seemingly small negotiations have big political implications for particular (often marginalized) archival populations. I’m especially glad to read your last sentence; I’m really happy to hear how these readings provided a fitting ending to the semester for you!

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