I am easily overwhelmed by huge libraries, but I love to peruse them. Like Machiavelli and Alberto Manguel, I like to sit amongst books. I even tried sleeping with them when I was younger, thinking it would help me absorb the information more quickly. In these readings I was interested in how the digital world intersects with the physical world both logistically and experientially.

In Warburg’s library, the organization of the books was the most important element. This “catalogue of problems” gave a unique insight into the actual information that people were seeking. The intimate journey to the information was just as important as the information itself. The Prelingers carried on this tradition of a journey when they discussed browsing and all the various associations that happen when one is in the physical space of books. Putting their collection online doesn’t quite offer the same experience, although I liked some of the ideas they had to make the online browsing experience more like the in-person experience.

Moving from there to getting a better sense of how some of America’s biggest libraries store and lend out their materials made me feel as though we went from someone’s living room to a warehouse. Gone is that intimacy, but the information is more readily available. I wonder how much the role of efficiency of preservation and the ease of online collections moves us from an intimate experience of sitting amongst our books. I wonder what “free photography” does to the collection of photography. Do things become more accessible and less sacred? Or are they more readily available so we can appreciate them more?

Aby Warburg’s “law of the good neighbor” really stresses on the relations between books, so much so that arranging books in their appropriate spaces no longer becomes a mere simple case of categorizing their content/subject-matter, but the lines of potential connections and associations between a constellation of books. I feel like it is this potential of charting (perhaps hitherto unnoticed) connections between books/things that similarly drives the Prelinger Library. Particularly, both Rick and Megan Prelinger spoke of the need to sustain a browsing experience in the library that should not be reduced to a simple query-based search and information retrieval.

The latter seems instead to be increasingly the mode of the library experience: query-based search and information retrieval. Watching the Cold Storage video, I can’t help but feel that while the need for consolidated offsite storage facilities does have its logistical conveniences (and may afford librarians more time to do their cultural programming), if libraries continue adding more and more materials to their collection, they are really going to end up having to depend on these offsite storage facilities. When that happens, I worry if this may also end up sealing the fate of the library experience as purely a process of information retrieval. If that should happen, would the library then be reduced essentially to a platform and search engine?

Off topic, but there’s also a great podcast from Radiolab on the logistics of Amazon and other Internet retail systems. I highly recommend it!

I hope I’m not being too cynical, but I really did feel rather depressed and a little suffocated by the opulence of The Morgan’s Library.

While I am deeply appreciative of the Morgan family opening up its collection to the public, I can’t shake off the knowledge that the library and Pierpont Morgan’s collection seems to have been primarily initiated and motivated by a need to demonstrate one’s cultural pedigree and taste. It stares back at me in the never-ending wallpaper of paintings, tapestry, and books. If nature abhors a vacuum, Morgan’s walls seem to abhor any gap. And the wallpaper of paintings, tapestry, and books end up looking like they are just as foundational to the building as the bricks themselves.

If we think further about its history as a private collection, I can’t help but think about it along the terms of access in two layers: First, Morgan sought to purchase what was deemed as the very best examples of high culture in Europe and to consolidate it in his private home, in order to domesticate/internalize it in a way that both displays Morgan’s cultural pedigree but also exhibits what his spending power allows him to access/consume; the second being that one would have to be of some social standing in order to be even invited into Morgan’s private collection. Such that by the time the Morgan was opened to the public in 1928, it seems to have participated in what Tony Bennett terms as “exhibitionary complex,” with the general public performing essentially as witnesses to a display of power and cultural capital.

Though opened to the public, the original architecture and interiors of the library nonetheless reveals a certain closeting of power. And I left wondering if the new 2006 glass extension was indeed an architectural attempt to render the institution and its collection a little more “transparent” and “open.” But of course, I don’t wish to discount the work done by The Morgan through its cultural programming; and I am very glad to know that its collection remains open to the public’s viewing and curiosity, even if its library functions effectively as a closed stack. All in all, we’re better for its being made into a public space. And The Morgan, if anything else, is a great reminder that not all libraries (and archives?) necessarily function or are built on the foundational belief of democratizing knowledge.

Post for September 19: Library Lineages

I used to think that as libraries’ role have shrunk to the similar level of print media’s role, the book rooms had better focus on the minorities, those who deliberately keep distance from the mundane, like the Komura Memorial Library serving as a haven for the runaway protagonist in Haruki Murakami’s novel Kafka on the Shore. After being reminded of Marx’s argument, in the modern societies, people will have to give money in exchange for all the stuff they cherish, my conviction was even enhanced. For the disfranchised, libraries indeed provided a lot of free services in various places all over the world; But for rest of citizens, libraries also could be offering spaces for quality reading/writing groups or workshops. I personally would like to have those features in my hometown’s libraries, since book communities organized by local publishers here in New York are scarce there.
People aren’t consuming less books. Rather, we read and listen to content via increasingly varying media. The ubiquitous podcasts is one of the examples. If we can work with our sophisticated librarians to establish the required and desired facilities at the brick and mortar halls, communities would actually appear. Sometimes it feels a lot better to interact with likeminded folks and practice my enthusiasm at once than gazing at the screens and staying with the devices alone.

(A shorter one this week.)

Melvil Dewey was a renaissance man – OF COURSE.

The library is much more, and can be much more, than whatever associations we have thrown together from life experience. The history of the Morgan library has made me consider the future publification of other private collections – will future generations one day be able to wander through Kanye west’s library of Jetsons memorabilia (he is a superfan)? Will it be the focus of a middle school field trip, boring the students to death but exciting their parents? Will the inclusion of something pop culture related in a wealthy celebrity’s “permanent collection” be momentum enough to elevate its status from “pop art” to “fine art” or “artifact”? Does a library possess such transformative power?

It seems to me that the most inclusive way to define library spaces is just to refer to them as manufacturing, refinement, and distribution facilities for the additive commodity that is knowledge. When it comes to new technologies “changing” the role of the library, I consider that what happens inside the library as not necessarily a part of its core “mission statement” (if you will – and through exploring the history of the library we are able to deduce, in a sieve-like way, what the library stands for among its many parallel purposes and values).

Our historical readings trace how knowledge and the medium of its recording have always provided a multifunctional value to the person or people in charge. Saladin selling a library to pay for the crusades might have been a mistake in the eyes of everyone curious about the content of those documents, but that line of thinking is dangerously arrogant; the library’s evolution has taught humanity about the value of knowledge through reflections on the regret of its misappropriation, incorrect appraisal, destruction. The library has come to represent shared knowledge, the earthly scrapbook of our species, and efforts to keep libraries (and the manner in which these efforts are rolled out) are a way we measure our self-worth… and scrap books can be dark!

As role of the library changes, the professor is certainly correct, I believe, in warning that making new things does not constitute an enlargement of the global knowledge pool.

Manoff’s piece provides a great context for an olympic dive into the informative yet recondite piece by Derrida. For Darth Derrida, archiving is way more sinister than you’d think; linked to the two conflicting forces of the death drive, and the conservation drive (linked to the pleasure principle), the structure and role of the archive in society is perhaps a very telling externalization of individual inner struggle. Ironically, while Freud’s work can at times feel reductively alienating, it seems that Derrida’s inclusion of Freud into the discussion of the archive is an attempt to make it personal, universal, primal, consequential. This is not the first time I’ve come across theory in a collegiate/grad school setting that makes me wish I had a doctoral level handle on psychoanalysis. We should have someone with a psychoanalysis degree in every class, hidden in plain sight, ready to spring into action like an academic air marshall.

This week’s readings sent me into a cognitive tailspin (as most readings do). To understand that extant archives are not necessarily of value to people that will eventually comb through them, proportionately to the degree that parts of life which would be invaluable as data never become mummified as such, injects a degree of randomness to the overall use value of the archive. The Hairpin article helps illuminate the extent to which archives are dedicated to context, which values the valueless because of its comparative contribution to something which does or will have value. Much can be understood about archival science (and black magic) by following the reasoning of an archivist as they attempt to answer questions many of us would likely ask them ourselves.

I became quite interested in the idea of the act of archiving as the elimination of personal biases, almost as though the archive itself is a globally scaled hindsight one can retrofit into the catch phrase “hindsight is 20/20”. Perhaps archiving is not preservation, but filtration, the same way short term memories are cherry picked for long term memories in the human brain. Perhaps archivists impose the same filtration style, on a large scale, upon cultural memories by datafying and preserving content and context (according to some specific criteria) to enable future unbiased minds to retroactively assign meaning or use meaning in a way that serves whatever survived early generations of bias-infancy regarding that information.

Perhaps neurons direct each other, to and fro, like a librarian would a genealogist seeking a specific public record.

It dawned on me that, at some point, essential archives may become absorbed, as a whole or in part, by another entity that supplants them. I wonder if all the material transferred in this scenario will be permanently watermarked as having passed through the curation of the previous archive which amassed it, which had its own principles governing the collection process. This might be particularly interesting should a regime, state or region become rearranged or fall to the point of requiring total restoration by another (perhaps invading) state.

If all the physical and digital materials accessible at the NYPL in the year, let’s say, 2017, were one day featured at a recreated site, it might, from a LaCaprian perspective, be a great (if not the most objective) pathway to understanding the geopolitical reality of the aforementioned year; what constituted knowledge, archives explain, constitute reality and cultural memory. I suspect such a future archive might also resemble a bit of an amusement park. Perhaps a future way to understand capitalism would be to visit a preserved archive first assembled during its heyday, and see for yourself the degree to which the profit motive shapes the preserved knowledge, comparing it then to similar source material at an archive intact across the world. What books are tattered beyond repair? What books are immaculate, with multiple copies? Combing through records of cardholders, what did the average political science student check out? My imaginative ramble of a scenario is really inspired by uncertainty as to whether context defines data or corrupts it.

Hopefully, one could then compare data at this future archive to the “truth” by jumping in a delorean. I’ve always thought this to be an unappreciated perk of the prospect of time travel; the illumination of the impact of human and societal biases on historical event, i.e. we travel through time not to see the past, but to sample it for comparisons that allow us to retroactively understand how much of any given present we subjectively take with us into the future (an issue that I now understand governs much of the minutiae of an archivist’s work).

There’s a scene in Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones where Obi Wan is consulting Jocasta Nu, resident archivist of the Jedi Temple:

Jocasta Nu: Let me do a gravitational scan … There are some inconsistencies here. Maybe the planet you are looking for was destroyed.

Obi-Wan: Wouldn’t that be on record?

Jocasta Nu: It ought to be. Unless it was very recent. I hate to say it, but it looks like the system you’re searching for doesn’t exist.

Obi-Wan: That’s impossible. Perhaps the archives are incomplete.

Jocasta Nu: The archives are comprehensive and totally secure, my young Jedi. One thing you may be absolutely sure of – if an item does not appear in our records, it doesn’t exist.

***

Marlene Manoff’s article is a helpful point of entry into Jacque Derrida’s Archive Fever, especially if, like me, you haven’t read a single page of Derrida in more than five years! Manoff summarizes Derrida’s core arguments neatly into two main points: (1) the archive does not exist simply after the events of the history as this neutral repository of the past, but is rather itself a medium that determines and makes possible what is archivable in the first place as our retrievable past; the past then does not exist for Derrida a priori and independent of the archive writ large; (2) the Freudian binary opposition Derrida hinges on for his argument – that of the pleasures of the archival impulse to collect and preserve the past for the potentialities of the future, and that of the death drive which seeks to destroy archives in order to return to the quiet and stasis of forgetfulness or amnesia. (Manoff 11-12)

But what is crucial in Derrida’s text, and missing in Manoff’s summary, is Derrida’s overturning of the binary between the archival impulse to collect and the death drive of forgetting.If conventional wisdom tends to believe that archives are the “bastions in the war on entropy” (Tim Maly, “Dark Archives”), this privileging of the archive bears further scrutiny for Derrida: “There would indeed be no archive desire without the radical finitude, without the possibility of a forgetfulness which does not limit itself to repression.” (19) In other words, Derrida seems to be suggesting a parasitic co-dependence and co-implication between the archival impulse and that of forgetfulness. Derrida’s text, if anything else, serves as a reminder not to fall into a feverish over-investment of the archive at the expense of glossing over others (e.g. the possibility of forgetfulness) that are the crucial support structures (both physical or otherwise) of our archives.

In many ways, Derrida’s re-reading and reconfiguration of Freud’s terms here onto a (media?) theory of the archive is an interesting context to consider. Namely, Derrida seems to want to broaden and complicate the “archive”/canon of Freud’s literature, to wrestle Freud’s legacy away from the exclusive control of those who seek to franchise it (i.e. so-called Freudians) and to bring the startling insights of Freud into unchartered territories. Hence also Derrida’s use of presumably unorthodox and un-archived documents from Freud’s legacy (e.g. Jakob Freud’s correspondence with his son about the latter’s book and of the latter’s circumcision). To borrow Tim Maly and Donald Rumsfeld’s terms, we might say that Derrida was unearthing from the dark the “unknown knowns” of the Freud Archive.

While I agree with some of the charges against Derrida’s theory of the archive, such as the need to also consider the literature and experience of professional archivists on the ground, I do not think of Derrida’s theory and professional literature as mutually exclusive. Yes, it is true that perhaps had Derrida actually have some hands-on experience and practice as a professional archivist, he might have had very different thoughts on the archive. But that seems to also miss Derrida’s subtle point about the archive as well – which is already evident in the first page of his opening note. By beginning with the etymology of the word “archive,” Derrida is cheekily making the point that etymology is itself also archival in nature, by tracking the semantic histories and provenance of a particular word. By beginning his text which is supposedly about archives with etymology, Derrida is deliberately questioning the notion of what constitutes an archive, broadening the archive of the archive, and thereby asking us to consider the pitfalls of professionalization. Just as it may be that the professional Freudians would have a particular archive of Freud’s work and legacy in their agenda, professional literature on the archives may also be blinded by its own archive of the archive.

I hope all this makes sense, despite the repetitions. I want to end by saying I am not necessarily a fan of Derrida, nor a defender of his text too. And I do sense that Derrida’s text has much to learn from the insights of the literature written by professional archivists. (I myself look forward to the field trip and to further insights from the professional archivists!) But perhaps Derrida’s text is nonetheless a helpful reminder that the archive is not something that should be the sole property of anyone in particular, not even the professionals. If that happens, then all discourse of the archive will simply be “known unknowns” hidden behind the policed barrier of professionalization. The archive of the archive needs, as Derrida might suggest, to be publicly accessible, used and possibly even reconfigured by others. The locking down of archival discourse would thereby only destroy the archival possibilities of the archive. Personally, I would file Derrida’s text as a modest contribution to enrich the archive of the archive.