Seeing archives: Postmodernism and the changing intellectual place of archives

American Archivist

Volumn 65, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 24-41

  Nesmith, Tom ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 78649840661     PISSN: 03609081     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.17723/aarc.65.1.rr48450509r0712u     Document Type: Article

References (71)

1. See Lawrence E. Cahoone, ed., From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996) and
2. Pauline Marie Rosenau, Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences: Insights, Inroads, and Intrusions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
3. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
4. Here is a list of some of the archival writings discussing postmodernism: Brien Brothman "Orders of Value: Probing the Theoretical Terms of Archival Practice," Archivaria 32 (Summer 1991): 78-100
5. and "Declining Derrida: Integrity, Tensegrity, and the Preservation of Archives From Deconstruction," Archivaria 48 (Fall 1999): 64-88;
6. Rick Brown, "The Value of Narrativity in the Apppraisal of Historical Documents: Foundation for a Theory of Archival Hermeneutics," Archivaria 32 (Summer 1991): 152-57;
7. Terry Cook, "Electronic Records, Paper Minds: The Revolution in Information Management and Archives in the Post-Custodial and Post-Modernist Era," Archives and Manuscripts 22 (November 1994): 300-28;
8. "Archival Science and Postmodernism: New Formulations for Old Concepts," Archival Science 1, no. 1 (2000): 3-24;
9. and "Fashionable Nonsense or Professional Rebirth: Postmodernism and the Practice of Archives," Archivaria 51 (Spring 2001): 14-35;
10. Joan M. Schwartz, "'We make our tools and our tools make us': Lessons from Photographs for the Practice, Politics, and Poetics of Diplomatics," Archivaria 40 (Fall 1995): 40-74
11. and "'Records of Simple Truth and Precision': Photography, Archives, and the Illusion of Control," Archivaria 50 (Fall 2000): 1-40;
12. Bernadine Dodge, "Places Apart: Archives in Dissolving Space and Time" Archivaria 44 (Fall 1997): 118-32;
13. Verne Harris, "Claiming Less, Delivering More: A Critique of Positivist Formulations on Archives in South Africa," Archivaria 44 (Fall 1997): 132-41;
14. and Exploring Archives: An Introduction to Archival Ideas and Practice in South Africa, 2nd. ed. (Pretoria: National Archives of South Africa, 2000);
15. Tom Nesmith, "Still Fuzzy, But More Accurate: Some Thoughts on the 'Ghosts' of Archival Theory," Archivaria 47 (Spring 1999):136- 50;
16. Lilly Koltun, "The Promise and Threat of Digital Options in an Archival Age," Archivaria 47 (Spring 1999): 114-35;
17. Eric Ketelaar, "Archivalisation and Archiving," Archives and Manuscripts 27 (May 1999): 54-61;
18. Steven Lubar, "Information Culture and the Archival Record," American Archivist 62 (Spring 1999): 101-12;
19. Francis X. Blouin Jr., "Archivists, Mediation, and Constructs of Social Memory," Archival Issues 24, no. 2 (1999): 101-12;
20. Richard Harvey Brown and Beth Davis-Brown, "The Making of Memory: The Politics of Archives, Libraries and Museums in the Construction of National Consciousness," History of the Human Sciences 11 (November 1998), 17-32.
21. Cahoone, ed., From Modernism to Postmodernism, 14.
22. For these images of guardian and mirror, see Timothy Walch, ed., Guardian of Heritage: Essays on the National Archives (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1985)
23. and the Public Archives of Canada, Archives: Mirror of Canada Past (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972).
24. This is not to say that archivists today do not think of their work as intellectually demanding or that they actually seek social self-effacement. Archival work is intellectually demanding and many archivists work hard to improve public understanding of archives. Still, the ultimate aim for most is to step aside and present archiving as a transparent conduit to the past, rather than an activity that shapes our understanding of the past. See, for example, Terry Eastwood, "Nailing a Little Jelly to the Wall of Archival Studies," Archivaria 35 (Spring 1993): 232-52
25. and "What is Archival Theory and Why is it Important?," Archivaria 37 (Spring 1994): 111-13;
26. and Luciana Duranti, "Reliability and Authenticity: The Concepts and Their Implications," Archivaria 39 (Spring 1995): 5-11.
27. Hilary Jenkinson, "The English Archivist: A New Profession" in Selected Writings of Sir Hilary Jenkinson, ed. Roger H. Ellis and Peter Walne (Gloucester: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1980), 238, 258.
28. Report on Canadian Archives, 1889 (Ottawa, 1890), x, xii.
29. Paul Heyer, Communications and History: Theories of Media, Knowledge, and Civilization (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 8, 40;
30. Martin Jay, "Should Intellectual History Take a Linguistic Turn? Reflections on the Habermas-Gadamer Debate" in, Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives, ed. Dominick LaCapra and Steven Kaplan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 86, 105.
31. Hans Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern: A History (London: Routledge, 1995), 3-11, 242;
32. Heyer, Communications and History, 8, 40;
33. Jay, "Should Intellectual History Take a Linguistic Turn?" 86, 102, 105;
34. and Hans Kellner, "Triangular Anxieties: The Present State of European Intellectual History", in Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives, ed. LaCapra and Kaplan, 86, 105.
35. For general treatment of these ideas, see Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982)
36. and Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997);
37. Roger Webster, Studying Literary Theory: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (London: Arnold, 1996);
38. and Glenn Ward, Postmodernism (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1997).
39. Derrida, Archive Fever, passim.
40. Unpublished transcript of "Archive Fever: A Seminar by Jacques Derrida, University of Witwatersrand, August 1998," 22. I thank Verne Harris for this document. Archive Fever, 16-17.
41. For more on Brymner's work at the Public Archives see Peter Bower, "The Colonial Office Group of the Public Record Office, London, with Particular Reference to Atlantic Canada," Canadian Archivist 2, no. 5 (1974);
42. Ian E. Wilson, "A 'Noble Dream': The Origins of the Public Archives of Canada;" and Jay Atherton, "The Origins of the Public Archives Records Centre, 1897-1956," in Canadian Archival Studies and the Rediscovery of Provenance, ed. Tom Nesmith (Metuchen, N.J., and London: Society of American Archivists and Association of Canadian Archivists in association with the Scarecrow Prss, Inc., 1993), 61-108.
43. For more on Doughty's nationalistic and decidedly cultural, rather than legal or administrative vision of archives, see Ian E. Wilson, "Shortt and Doughty: The Cultural Role of the Public Archives of Canada, 1904-1935," Canadian Archivist 2, no. 4 (1973): 4-25
44. and Wilson "'A Noble Dream'". For Carlin's comments see Ready Access to Essential Evidence: The Strategic Plan of the National Archives and Records Administration, 1997-2007 (National Archives and Records Administration, 1996), 1-2.
45. In light of the themes of this article, it is of interest that "essential" evidence is the government record only, and only the US federal government record. For Senator Trent Lott, see his "Powerful Documents Inspire a Nation," The Record, January 1998, 6.
46. For the architectural symbolism of the downtown Washington D.C. National Archives building, see Walch, ed., Guardian of Heritage. For further reflections on archival architecture, see Theresa Rowat, "The Record and the Repository as a Cultural Form of Expression," Archivaria 36 (Autumn 1993): 198-204.
47. The concept of the "pedestal" is borrowed from art historian Marianne Stanishevsky who uses it to discuss how objects we might not normally consider "art" are often considered so when placed on the "pedestal" of the art gallery or museum. See Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, "Ideas", "In the Eye of the Beholder", broadcast 16 June 1997, transcript, 10.
48. Stanishevsky maintains that art galleries and museums shape how works of art acquire value and meaning: "To define a work of art: a work of art gains meaning and value if it circulates within the institutions of art. A work of art has to be made visible in some way. . . . It has to enter the institutions of art. If you make a work of art, you think it's a work of art, no one sees it, you don't tell anyone about it and it just sort of crumbles to dust, in a sense it's not art. It doesn't register in terms of meaning and value, in terms of the culture. So a work of art needs to sort of enter culture to gain its meaning and value, and you see that as a work of art increases in value through the years. . . . And it's the institutions that shape meaning." (pp. 11-12) Archival records can be viewed in a similar way. Shakespeare scholar Gary Taylor also throws light on this point. He notes that knowledge and culture are not simply the totality of what has been thought, written, and spoken, but "only the fraction that is remembered." The process of remembering involves a variety of "editors," as he calls them, who intervene to select what shall be recalled and undertake the many tasks required to communicate recollections across time and space. The various activities involved in this recalling change what is being remembered. Although Taylor does not explicitly mention archives, archivists are obviously among society's "editors" who, though, also virtually "invisible," help determine what shall be remembered and how it shall be transmitted. See Gary Taylor, Cultural Selection (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 6, 122-25.
49. For an example of the metaphor of archival treasures, see National Archives of Canada, Treasures of the National Archives of Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992).
50. For more on the computerization of archival research tools, see Ronald Weissman, "Archives and the New Information Architecture of the Late 1990s," American Archivist 57 (Winter 1994): 20-34.
51. Taylor, Cultural Selection, 122-23.
52. Charles Lemert, Postmodernism Is Not What You Think (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), 46 (emphasis original);
53. Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 34-40.
54. Interestingly, Wills notes that Lincoln was trying to reinterpret the American Constitution to argue that it was the basis of a nation in which equality of men was recognized. Wills comments that Lincoln "altered the document from within, by appeal from its letter to the spirit. . . ." (p. 38). For the idea that meaning making is a process, see also Steven Connor, Postmodern Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, second edition, 1997), 142-43
55. and Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 11-12.
56. Bill Russell, "The White Man's Paper Burden: Aspects of Records Keeping in the Department of Indian Affairs, 1860-1914," Archivaria 19 (Winter 1984-85): 50-72.
57. Gary B. Madison, ed., Working Through Derrida (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 1 (emphasis in original).
58. Kenneth L. Woodward, Making Saints: How the Catholic Church Determines Who Becomes a Saint and Who Doesn't (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 197.
59. I thank Peter Wosh of the New York University graduate program in archival studies for this reference. For a seemingly mundane aspect of archival influence on the inscription of records, see David Walden, "The Tax Credit System: Blessing or Burden?" Archivaria 18 (Summer 1984): 84-90. Walden notes how the inducement of tax credits to donors to Canadian archives of private manuscripts prompts them to create such records. Oral history, when undertaken by archivists for archival purposes, is, of course, a striking example of their involvement in the literal inscription of records.
60. Anne Ruggles Gere, Intimate Practices: Literacy and Cultural Work in U.S. Women's Clubs, 1880-1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 50.
61. John McDonald, "Managing Records in the Modern Office: Taming the Wild Frontier," Archivaria 39 (Spring 1995): 70-71.
62. For David Bearman's and the University of Pittsburgh's work in this area see, his Electronic Evidence: Strategies for Managing Records in Contemporary Organizations (Pittsburgh: Archives and Museum Informatics, 1994), 294
63. and Wendy Duff, "Ensuring the Preservation of Reliable Evidence: A Research Project Funded by the NHPRC," Archivaria 42 (Fall 1996): 28-45.
64. For a similar project at the University of British Columbia (UBC), see Luciana Duranti and Heather MacNeil, "The Protection of the Integrity of Electronic Records: An Overview of the UBC-MAS Research Project," Archivaria 42 (Fall 1996): 46-67;
65. For an Australian example, see Sue McKemmish, Glenda Acland, Nigel Ward, and Barbara Reed, "Describing Records in Context in the Continuum: The Australian Recordkeeping Metadata Scheme," Archivaria 48 (Fall 1999): 3-44.
66. Ready Access to Essential Evidence, 7 (emphasis in original), 2, 8. The Australian Society of Archivists makes the goal of ensuring that archival records "are made" a key part of its professional mission statement.
67. See Archives and Manuscripts 27 (May 1999): 1.
68. Duranti, "Reliability and Authenticity," 9;
69. Duranti and MacNeil, "The Protection of the Integrity of Electronic Records," 47, 56, 63;
70. Heather MacNeil, "Providing Grounds for Trust: Developing Conceptual Requirements for the Long-Term Preservation of Authentic Electronic Records," Archivaria 50 (Fall 2000): 70, 73.
71. Margaret Hedstrom, "How Do Archivists Make Electronic Archives Usable and Accessible?" Archives and Manuscripts 26 (May 1998): 15.