dust, madness, decay

Continued from this post, chapbook styles:

" The different reactions of archivists and historians to Archive Fever were broadly reflected in the Michigan seminar. At our earliest sessions, Carolyn Steedman, the English cultural historian, interpreted Derrida's central trope of "uncovering" as, in part, a metaphor for the complex ways in which individuals and societies process experience itself, something for which there can never really be original documents. Indeed, as she suggests in her essay in this section of the volume, in important ways experience cannot be documented at all, only transcribed from its visceral impressions into some reproducible linguistic form. For her, the virtue of Derrida's intervention is in its turn to the historical subjective, the realm of emotions, feelings, and experiences that clearly affect the ways both individual and social pasts and presents are understood but whose access lies elsewhere than in the archive. She suggests that while there is a common desire to use the archive as metaphor or analogy when memory is discussed, the problem is that an archive is not really very much like human memory and certainly not like the unconscious mind. On the contrary, Steedman maintains that unlike with memory, there is not, in fact, very much there in actual archives, though the bundles may be mountainous. And unlike human memory, which actively processes, suppresses, distorts, selectively remembers, and applies in sometimes quite different ways the memory traces of past experience, material either carefully selected for or randomly placed in an archive just sits there until it is read and uses and narrativised... the archive is thus quite benign. " (from Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory; Essays from the Sawyer Seminar, eds. Francis X. Blouin Jr. and William G. Rosenberg, p.1)

I just need to get this out of my system. What follows are some bits and pieces from Something She Called a Fever, by Carolyn Steedman, published in the collection of essays cited above.

These parts in no way reflect the scope of her intended or entire argument - a very complicated and scholarly discussion I cannot really comprehend anyway. Here we go:

" The fever, the sickness of the archive, is to do with its very establishment, which is the establishment of state power and authority. And then there is the feverish desire - a kind of sickness unto death - that Derrida indicates, for the archive: the fever not so much to enter it and use it as to have it...

" Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression is further exploration of the relationship between memory and writing (or recording), a discussion of Freud's own attempts to find adequate metaphors for representing memory, particularly the very first memory that takes place, or is had, just before the thing itself, the origin, comes to be represented...

" Derrida sees in Freud the desire to recover moments of inception, the fractured infinitesimal second between thing and trace, which might be the moment of truth. In Archive Fever, desire for the archive is presented as part of that desire to find, or locate, or to possess that moment, which is the beginning of things...

" For the fever - the feverlet, the precursor fever - usually starts at the end of the penultimate day in the record office. Either you must leave tomorrow (train times, journeys planned, a life elsewhere) or the record office will shut for the weekend. Anf it's expensive being in the archive, as your credit card clocks up the price of the room, the restaurant meals. Leaving is the only way to stop spending. You know you will not finish, that there will be something left unread, unnoted, untranscribed. You are not anxious about the Great Unfinished... You know perfectly well that despite the infinite heaps of things they recorded, the notes and traces that these people left behind, it is in fact, nothing at all...

" 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 the term was no mere figure of speech. It described two forms of meningitis that had been pathologized by the 1830s: inflammation of the membranes of the brain (meningitis proper) and of the substance of the brain (cerebritis)...

" Because bacteriological understanding of the dust that had so much preoccupied these early investigators was unavailable to them, they did not consider the book, the very stuff of the scholar's life, as a potential cause of his fever. And yet the book and its components (leather binding; various glues and adhesives; paper and its edging; and, decreasingly, parchments and vellums of various types) in fact concentrated in one object many of the industrial hazards and diseases that were mapped out in the course of the century."

(all excerpts from Something She Called a Fever, by Carolyn Steedman, published in Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory; Essays from the Sawyer Seminar, eds. Francis X. Blouin Jr. and William G. Rosenberg)

When I first thought of going here I had intended to now segue into smells of decay, death and decomposition. Perhaps also describing funeral rites I find interesting. (I am especially into those that involve fire.) But that will have to wait for another day, if ever.