archive fetish
When the fever finally broke, I dreamed I was a stack of early 18th century manuscripts and my partner’s hands were studying my pages. Earlier that day I sat in the train on my way to see him, feeling sicker by the minute, and read Carolyn Steedman’s Dust. In one of the essays, ‘Something she called fever’: Michelet, Derrida and dust she tracks down archive fever, not just as a metaphor, but as a real occupational disease of the scholars, brought on by anxiety and dust.
‘The diseases of literary men’ sat uneasily under Forbes 1833 heading ‘Diseases of Artisans’, but nevertheless, that is where he placed them. Very briefly, for perhaps thirty years or so, between about 1820 and 1850, a range of occupational hazards was understood to be attendant on the activity of scholarship. They originated, said Forbes, ‘from want of exercise, very frequently from breathing the same atmosphere too long, from the curved position of the body and from too ardent exercise of the brain’. ‘Brain fever’ might be the result of this mental activity, and was no mere figure of speech. (p.21)
Later, she argues that the brain fever could have been meningitis, caused by anthrax spores in the dust coming off the deteriorating leather-bound books. I did not have meningitis, but in the train and later delirious in my lover’s bed it felt like my sickness had been brought on by the manuscripts.
I have been out of the national archives, where I worked, for a few months now. During my two commissions I was accustomed to the dust, dirt, and grime of the archive. There was a period of time in January when I was the only person retrieving books from the kilometers worth of shelving underground, lifting the manuscripts or books that weighed up to thirty kilograms on my shoulder. The red rot clung onto the fibers of my clothing. On one or two occasions my mouth was ajar and something disgusting fell into it as I reached overhead. I learned to shut my mouth. I learned which documents were moldy by the sweet smell of them. The old prison record books were treated with beeswax, and now lighting a candle reminds me of the deprivation of liberty.
As of now I am no more than a customer in the archive, though I must visit it enough for my boyfriend to grow jealous of it. This jealousy is something historians never tire writing about, I’ve found, as it is referenced by both Steedman and Arlette Farge. The documents I rifle through for my thesis were produced in an environment so thick with cigarette smoke that they still smell faintly like an old man’s breath. They leave my fingertips black at the end of the day, even if I try to avoid running my fingers over the pages. I’ve come to see information as something that is filthy, physically, and metaphysically. If dirt is matter out of place every awful history I read feels like the metaphorical equivalent of sticky mints on the bottom of my purse. I don’t forget anything interesting I’ve ever read so every sorry story of a drunken murder I’ve read is etched in my memory.
I have always felt that there is something grotesque about the relationship historians have with archives. Steedman writes that students are warned about the “cult of the archive” and “those sad historians who fetishise them.” Generally, “archive fetishists” are thought to be historians who worship the archives but there’s something erotic about the way the archives allow us to interact with information with our bodies. K.J. Rawson, a scholar who has written extensively about rhetorical work of queer and transgender archival collections, goes as far as comparing archival work to S&M fetish gear.
Some days I would walk into the archives so hungry for information that I wanted to put it in my mouth. “—[T]hey [the students] are warned about the seductions of the archive, the 'entrancing stories' that they contain, which do the work of the seducer.”, Steedman continues in her paragraph about archive fetishists. This description of the archives paints a picture of a peep show that leaves us engorged with information. The days I walked to the archives hungry I’d leave buzzing, as if over touched, over stimulated.
Historically The National Archives of Finland has been involved in the national project of state sovereignty, an effort to build a historical foundation for a nation state and is currently committed to maintaining a particular narrative of Good Finland, even if the archive is blind to the power it uses. I find that this form of use of power, or cruelty, is visible in the way decisions about which records and manuscripts are to be preserved permanently and which destroyed.
We historians who study lower classes and marginalized communities often hit a frustrating wall where we know the information we are looking for existed despite all odds, but was destroyed to save space. In the case of police records, for example, all but one year per decade are destroyed. This form of institutional violence informs us that Finns hold the police in remarkably high regard and believe the people who commit crimes aren’t worth remembering.
The issue of accessibility isn’t limited to destroyed documents. Memory organizations such as archives are underfunded and efforts to save costs have led to cuts in both staff and opening hours. The cruelty of the archive dictates that information should be difficult to access, if not entirely unobtainable. The issue of access is multiplied for historians who are multiply marginalized. Rawson has described how environmentally inaccessible the archives can be by writing about needing to argue for his right to use the policed and gender segregated bathrooms. The physical limitations of space come to me every time I need to let hot water on my freezing hands in the restroom of my local National Archives.
It is argued that accessibility will be improved through digitizing archival documents, though as of now it does not seem that digitizing does anything but save money in the long run. Maybe there is something enjoyable to the cruelty. The efforts to digitize the archive are bad news for those of us who are intimately familiar with the erotic cruelty of the archive. Not that digital archives lack eroticism; I was giving a lot of thought to archive fetishism while accessing the more explicit Tom of Finland drawings on the Internet Archive.
Reading
Farge, Arlette, and Thomas Scott-Railton. The Allure of the Archives. Yale University Press, 2013. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vm50t.
Rawson, K.J. Accessing Transgender // Desiring Queer(er?) Archival Logics ARCHIVARIA 68 (Fall 2009): 123–140
Steedman, Carolyn. Steedman, Carolyn, and Rutgers University Press. Dust : The Archive and Cultural History. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. 2002.