Archives and Social Justice: On the Importance of Postmodern Theory

In the last decade, the preeminent South African archivist Verne Harris has advocated postmodern archival theory, arguing for its role in supporting the archivist’s response to the call for social justice. Harris has a unique perspective on social justice archives, as he worked in the apartheid-era State Archives Service in South Africa.¹ Along with other, predominately Canadian, postmodern archival scholars, Harris encourages a will of hospitality toward otherness, seeking to include those who have been marginalized and denied a legitimate place in history. These scholars offer an ill treatment of traditional archival methods, which have privileged the application of a singular reading onto archives through positivist beliefs in authority and objective knowledge. However, in light of postmodern ideas related to power and social memory, some archivists worry that the profession is inherently marginalizing and xenophobic. To address this worry, Harris and others are quick to cite Jacques Derrida and his theory of deconstruction, warning of archival complicity in oppressive bureaucracies. As the main infuser of postmodern thought into archives, Derrida is an important figure for study. But there remains a logical discrepancy between postmodern theory and social justice. By defining these terms and understanding their complexity, it becomes apparent that postmodern theory alone cannot guarantee that social justice will emerge from a deconstructed archive. Certainly, philosophy can inspire activism, but to argue that postmodern theory is a necessary grounding principle for a social justice archives is to misrepresent the archival profession and its calling.

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the subjects of postmodernism and social justice have commanded the attention of archival scholars. While postmodernism is a relatively recent development, social justice has a long and complex history. Arguably, for as long as human societies have existed, there has been some notion of social justice. Duff et al. mention that social justice has had many manifestations across time and space. They identified theological, philosophical, economic, legal and political contexts where this notion has been applied.² But with the advent of postmodernism, ideas of what constituted the appearance of social justice came from various counter-cultural milieus. Radical and civic movements alike sought political representation in efforts to secure equality. Social memory was also at stake in these political battlegrounds, as marginalized groups fought to legitimize their identities, which would allow them the opportunity to construct their own history free of oppression. Duff et al. argue that social memory is always “contingent, contestable and reconfigurable” through politics and political power. They also warn that archives exist in explicit relation to this power.³ In this sense, one can readily argue that it behooves archivists to be guarantors of the social memory of oft-marginalized groups. But as we shall see, abandoning objectivity and neutrality in the archives in favor of political activism can have an unintended, negative affect on the very groups which social justice archivists wish to empower.

Harris claims, perhaps rather too arrogantly, that he introduced transformation discourse into the field of archives. By “transformation,” he is referring to the idea that archivists are active shapers of social memory instead of impartial custodians of the recorded past.⁴ Postmodern theory, however, was introduced into the archival field by Terry Cook (who had a huge influence on Harris) at the close of the last century. In What is Past Is Prologue, Cook analyzed the major treatises of archival theory and arrived at social theories for appraisal. Following Hans Booms and Helen Samuels, Cook argues that archival value should be defined by social constructs and societal functions.⁵ This would ensure that state archives broadly represent society by acquiring both private and public sector archives.⁶ As part of the Canadian school at the National Archives of Canada, Cook helped to inaugurate the total archives approach; a vision of archives “sanctioned in and reflective of society at large rather than one shaped primarily by powerful interest groups of either users or creators, or the state.”⁷ This approach recognizes the dichotomy of power between the state and its citizens. The Canadian school sought to elicit broader contextuality through their archives, focusing on how archives are related to public policy and public use. Speaking directly on issues related to social justice, Cook explains:

While the maintenance of government accountability and administrative continuity and the protection of personal rights are still rightly recognized as important purposes for archives, the principal justification for archives to most users and to the public at large rests on archives being able to offer citizens a sense of identity, locality, history, culture, and personal and collective memory. Simply stated, it is no longer acceptable to limit the definition of society’s memory solely to the documentary residue left over by powerful record creators.⁸

This concept of total archives put Canada ahead of other national programs in terms of offering a more democratic and open agenda. This emphasis on broad contextualization represented at the state level may also be the reason Canadian archival scholars first picked up the works of postmodern authors. But as Rodney G. S. Carter states: “Even in a “total archives” environment… it is impossible for archivists to reflect all aspects and elements of society. Admittedly, this impossibility hinges on practical limitations of financial resources and physical space. However, reasons of practical economy do not excuse archivists from understanding the discourses of power, and that archiving is essentially a political exercise with far-reaching implications. In fact, Harris states “that politics is archival; that the archive is the very possibility of politics.”⁹ This pronouncement is supported by the fact that archives are socially constructed, and that the decision of what to keep necessarily implies that some are being remembered for posterity while others are not.

Seeking to make archives more explicitly postmodernist, Cook expanded on his ideas in Archival Science and Postmodernism. He explicates some of the principal insights and methods of postmodern theory, such as the contention that there is no universal truth or objective knowledge, and the relentless application of logical criticism used to deconstruct the taken-for-granted meanings of texts.¹⁰ Instead of reading against the grain, Cook appropriated these ideas and applied them in parallel with archives. Also, following Jacques Le Goff and Gerda Lerner, Cook recognized patterns of machination among those who have historically held power, whether that power was political, religious, or economic. Convinced, Cook succinctly concludes that “there is nothing neutral, objective, or “natural” about this process of remembering and forgetting.”¹¹ In other words, the processes of remembering and forgetting are often found to be controlled by a centralized authority. Moreover, Cook also realized that archival records are merely signs or signifiers of events. Context and contemporary voices are often lost in the creation of records, and to countenance archival use by historians, who transmute these signifiers into facts, is a smoke and mirrors game in which archivists participate.¹² This kind of power circumscribes the traces of social memory. Harris, also writing on the concept of the archival “trace,” claims that the event is “irrecoverable,” and that archives comprise only “a sliver of a sliver of a sliver” of all records that are available.¹³ These ideas, when taken together, have a clarion resonance. What remains is the undeniable existence of gaps, or silences, in the archives.

The idea of “gaps” may have come from Robert Smithson in his discussion on museums.¹⁴ But the term has more recently revolved around the concept of archival power. Derrida spoke of archival gaps in the historical record of memory when he wrote about the “absence of archive.”¹⁵ We can take this idea of absence to mean that records which are not made are often more important than records which are, because archival gaps represent a wider conception of thoughts and feelings in historical time, and thus a more accurate picture of social memory. This question of are and not at once speaks of a negation and an affirmation; an exclusion and an inclusion in the archives. Here, the presence of power is undeniable. Joan M. Schwartz and Cook addressed this by delineating the ways in which archives and archivists wield power, and how various governing bodies can determine what becomes archives through state control. For example, Schwartz and Cook mention that archival institutions “wield power over the administrative, legal, and fiscal accountability of governments, corporations, and individuals,” while archival records “wield power over the shape and direction of historical scholarship, collective memory, and national identity…”¹⁶ This latter power implies the plurality of the Other in society, and they can either be included or marginalized in the archives.

The discussion of archival power was informed mostly by postmodern theory. The power of the archive mentioned above is derived from the topo-nomological “archontic” power of Derrida.¹⁷ Some postmodern archival scholars, including Harris, have chosen to read Derrida both liberally and literally (a mistake, perhaps, considering Derrida’s obscurantism). They understand archontic power as the practice of consigning history to a place of privilege. In other words, archives are seen as being institutionalized and controlled through the use of certain “rule-guided systems.”¹⁸ This is the marginalizing power; the power to circumscribe the trace and to naturalize universalism. If the marginalized are included, however, archivists cannot regard archives as these positivist containers of objective truth, because the multitude of other voices and contexts open out indefinitely unto the horizon of history. As Harris says, “archival contextualization reveals the multiple layers of construction in text, and in doing so adds yet another layer. Properly conceived, archival contextualization—archival endeavor as a whole—should be about the releasing of meanings, the tending of mystery, the disclosing of the archive’s openness.¹⁹ We can understand all of this to mean that detached objectivity on the part of the archivist is paramount to allowing gaps to persist, voices to fade, and histories to perish.

With this philosophy in mind, Cook and Schwartz – in their second issue on the theme of archives, records, and power – ponder how the archivist should “perform” in a postmodern world, or how they should apply postmodern theory to archival practice.²⁰ Performance implies action, and in light of the discussion on power in archives, the action implied is decidedly political. The authors, however, grappled with the practical issue of calling an entire profession to action, especially based on the polarizing nature of postmodern theory. As Cook and Schwartz write: “the script acted out daily by “line” archivists is rarely derived from a detailed understanding of archival theory, let alone abstract philosophizing, for it is strongly suspected that few practising archivists read such work.”²¹ Instead, archivists still largely adhere to the normalized shibboleths of the practice, like provenance and original order. These principles have become rather “fundamentalist,” according to Hugh Taylor, and they have confined archivists to the role of passive and neutral spectator of history.²² In other words, it is not the archivist’s place to question the value of a record, the moral character of a record creator, or the potential abuse perpetrated against others through that record’s creation.

How, then, are postmodern archivists supposed to rally the profession? Can postmodernism even be considered an animating philosophy for social justice? The connection is a precarious one, as these two subjects suffer from an incompatibility of definition. Duff et al. demonstrate this incompatibility by writing: “abstract universalistic philosophical approaches to social justice have been criticized as being “unable to respond to people throughout the world who are experiencing the presence of injustice in the form of poverty, landlessness, dispossession, political and religious oppression, and genocide.””²³ Solving these global issues, admittedly, is beyond the capacity of a profession that can only deploy its discretionary funding internally. But postmodern archival scholars have provided examples where archives helped to secure justice for citizens. Randall C. Jimerson, for example, convincingly showed that archives have the power to hold political and social leaders accountable, support open government, redress social injustice, and document underrepresented social groups.²⁴ Both Jimerson and Harris maintain that corrupt bureaucracies have their own systems of recordkeeping in which they engage in an archivization of their own. But instead of keeping records as evidence of wrongdoings, these bureaucracies deliberately hide their documents from public view, sometimes even destroying documents relating to illegal activities. Because secret government agendas are often made to avoid public scrutiny and accountability, Jimerson contends that archivists should “actively engage” in politics to fight for open access to government information in efforts to ensure that citizens will be able to judge the health of their respective democracies. This is the social justice imperative, shared by Harris and other postmodern archival scholars.

As popular as this discourse has been, there are some archivists who reject the social justice imperative. Mark A. Greene, for example, argues that social justice archives “overly politicize” and “ultimately damage” the archival profession.²⁵ However, in rejecting the social justice thesis, Greene seeks to arrive at the same conclusion that postmodern authors strive toward. Namely, that the archival profession works for the collective good of all. Whereas the postmodern archival scholars argue that archivists must fight against corrupt governments and avoid participation in their recordkeeping systems for fear of being complicit, Greene suggests that the issue of power and corruption is not always so black and white. For instance, corruption is not always immediately apparent in government. Regrettably, some scandals – like the Watergate crisis and the Iran-Contra affair mentioned by Jimerson – take years to come to public consciousness. Fortunately, there were remaining records in these cases to prove the culpability and guilt of those involved.²⁶ But even in government systems that are visibly corrupt, Greene asks: “How is it that [without archives]… agents could be prosecuted for their crimes? The legal proceedings [rest] solidly on the evidence in the very records that archivists should have resisted creating or even destroyed.”²⁷ Here, Greene effectively flips the “complicity” argument on its head. Instead, he argues that archivists who perform recordkeeping tasks on behalf of corrupt governments are not “morally bankrupt,” so long as those archivists are working from an objective and neutral angle.²⁸ Greene agrees that sometimes archivists must take a public stand when their professional values are being threatened,²⁹ but going beyond their professional calling to participate in wider political action is unnecessary when the very act of archiving is a democratically-infused power.

Two goals, then, become apparent for the archival profession, and they depart radically from the postmodern ethos. These are the goals of objectivity and neutrality. Jimerson accepted the former while rejecting the latter, believing that archivists “can be objective without forsaking engagement in discussions of values, politics, or social policy.”³⁰ Greene, on the other hand, argues that archivists should be neutral. Greene says, “without the goal of neutrality… archivists and their institutions will become completely politicized, the stalking horses or pawns of every stripe of partisan effort.”³¹ I am inclined to agree with Greene’s opinion. Archivists will understandably possess different political viewpoints, but the goal of the archivist remains to be objective and neutral while engaged in their professional work. Political commitment often comes from a place of passion and emotion, which can distract archivists from being dedicated to intellectual and professional principles. Political partisanship could easily cleave the profession and lead to infighting and division. The goal of neutrality, then, can also be considered as an imperative, because its scope allows for records of all kinds to be created and to speak for themselves. Indeed, archives should exist as evidence to be used for arbitrating justice by exposing wrongdoers and holding them accountable. The black and white perspective of Harris and Jimerson suggests that the archivist is always involved in bureaucratic back rooms, where evil minds hatch their plans. But this is absurd. While the archivist may have power in the policies of selection, preservation and access, they are rarely in the same room as governors, politicians, and bureaucrats. In fact, one can argue that this enhances the power of archivists, because they operate at a safe distance from such corrupting influence. This is a far cry from being a complicit “pawn.” ³² However, it is important to note that this issue is much more complex than either author concedes. Indeed, there are gradients of state power. Harris, for his part, found himself quite unable to be impartial or objective while in the State Archives Service. State control over records there was too entrenched to permit either minority representation or damning evidence. As Harris writes, “Apartheid realities and the service’s status as an organ of the state combined to ensure that many of its services, whatever the intentions of the service or of individual archivists might have been, were fashioned into tools of the apartheid system.”³³ This is where the postmodernists could mount a counterargument to Greene. As we already know, postmodern theory is ruthless in its critique of power relations in society. In South African society, power that Harris could have otherwise exercised in the interest of the collective good was usurped by the regime. Still, documenting records of oppression with a sense of objectivity and neutrality (a stoic task indeed!) can serve to reflect the truth to other governments or international watchdogs. As Greene says, “we must realize that the recordkeeping of immoral regimes… is often transmogrified over time to recordkeeping of social justice…³⁴ This is Greene’s power play. Objective records are essential for any justice to be enacted.

Harris, despite his firsthand experience, was unable to offer a “blueprint” for identifying the call to social justice. He even admits that, “Following Derrida, I don’t believe that justice, ultimately, can be knowable.³⁵ It seems, then, that postmodern theory comes up short in prescribing a way forward for a social justice archives. Following Greene, however, such a prescription is unnecessary. The archival profession, when done right, already does all it can reasonably do to ensure justice. Postmodern theory is important for deconstructing power relations and promoting diversity in archives, but as a philosophy, it is incapable of grounding the archivist’s response to the call for justice.

I would like to turn now to a recent provocative thesis put forward by Richard J. Matthews. Matthews argues that social justice is incompatible with postmodern archival theory. He writes: “No ethical or political stance can be derived from the logic of deconstruction: “the former requires a performative commitment that cannot be justified by or grounded in the latter.””³⁶ Attempting to clarify the “undecidability” of justice, Matthews proposes a theory of “new wave” deconstruction, based on the radical atheism of Swedish philosopher Martin Hägglund. Radical atheism is concerned with the concepts of time and mortality. As such, it does not concern itself with the reflexivities of language or discourses on power. It is a radical politics of the now, demanding an answer to the social justice question, and refusing to accept that justice is unknowable. Matthews contends that the postmodernists have misread Derrida’s Archive Fever, appropriating his idea of “archontic power” to serve as a literal definition of state or government control. Instead, Derrida’s archontic power has more to do with the psychoanalytic desire of life over death. Because the threat of annihilation propels archival desire, Matthews says, “we care about archiving because of the possibility of the radical destruction of our memories and ourselves.”³⁷ The conclusion of new wave deconstruction posits that the radical finitude of survival is the basis for definite moral values. As a philosophy, this insistence on the relatively short duration of human mortality should compel archivists to immediately demand justice. This is a strident attempt to support the archivist’s response to the call for social justice, but Matthews does not address any of the practicalities. How, for instance, will archivists come to accept his label of “radical atheist”? This designation, I believe, would be more polarizing than having the profession identify as postmodernist. Therefore, this prescription could be as disruptive and damaging to the archival profession as the politically-fueled social justice activism of postmodern archival theory.

I have attempted to define the connection between postmodern archival theory and social justice. While this connection has been defended quite rigorously over the last decade, the framework for a social justice archives remains tenuous at best. What remains, however, is a professional calling to safeguard the social memory of people from all nations. This does not just mean archival inclusion for representative democracies, but for all areas of human activity; even oppressive regimes. Objective archives offer the best evidence for democratic intervention and sanctions. These archives can later be activated by the repressed for therapeutic reasons in acts of remembrance and mourning.³⁸ Thus liberated, the process of reconciliation can give rise to new histories and archives, satisfying the postmodern call for diversity and justice through the ironic intervention of objectivity.

Bibliography

Carter, Rodney G. “Of Things Said and Unsaid: Power, Archival Silences, and Power in Silence.” Archivaria 61 (2006): 215-33.

Cook, Terry. “Archival Science and Postmodernism: New Formulations for Old Concepts.” Archives and Museum Informatics1, no. 1 (March 2001): 3-24.

Cook, Terry, and Joan M. Schwartz. “Archives, Records, and Power: From (Postmodern) Theory to (Archival) Performance.” Archival Science 2, no. 3 (2002): 171-85.

Cook, Terry. “What is Past is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas Since 1898, and the Future Paradigm Shift.” Archivaria 43 (1997): 17-63.

Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Duff, Wendy M., Andrew Flinn, Karen E. Suurtamm, and David A. Wallace. “Social Justice Impact of Archives: A Preliminary Investigation.” Archival Science 13 (January 18, 2013): 317-48.

Greene, Mark A. “A Critique of Social Justice as an Archival Imperative: What Is It We’re Doing That’s All That Important?” The American Archivist 76, no. 2 (2013): 302-34.

Harris, Verne. Archives and Justice: A South African Perspective. Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2007.

Ketelaar, Eric. “Archives as Spaces of Memory.” Journal of the Society of Archivists 29, no. 1 (April 2008): 9-27.

Jimerson, Randall c. “Archives for All: Professional Responsibility and Social Justice.” The American Archivist 70, no. 2 (2007): 252-81.

Matthews, Richard J. “Is the Archivist a “Radical Atheist” now? Deconstruction, its New Wave, and Archival Activism.” Archival Science 16, no. 3 (June 13, 2015): 213-60.

Millar, Laura. “Discharging our Debt: The Evolution of the Total Archives Concept in English Canada.” Archivaria 46 (1998): 103-46.

Schwartz, Joan M., and Terry Cook. “Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory.” Archival Science 2, no. 1-2 (2002): 1-19.

1 Verne Harris, Archives and Justice: A South African Perspective (Chicago, IL: The Society of American Archivists, 2007), 2.

2 Wendy M. Duff et al., “Social Justice Impact of Archives: A Preliminary Investigation,” Archival Science, Vol. 13 (January 18, 2013): 321.

3 Duff et al., “Social Justice Impact of Archives,” 329-30.

4 Harris, Archives and Justice, 11.

5 Terry Cook, “What is Past is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas Since 1898, and the Future Paradigm Shift,” Archivaria, Vol. 43 (1997): 31.

6 Laura Millar, “Discharging our Debt: The Evolution of the Total Archives Concept in English Canada,” Archivaria, Vol. 46 (1998): 104.

7 Cook, “What Is Past Is Prologue,” 34.

8 Cook, “What Is Past Is Prologue,” 44.

9 Harris, Archives and Justice, 245.

10 Terry Cook, “Archival Science and Postmodernism: New Formulations for Old Concepts,” Archives and Museum Informatics, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Mar. 2001): 7.

11 Cook, “Archival Science and Postmodernism,” 8-9.

12 Cook, “Archival Science and Postmodernism,” 9.

13 Harris, Archives and Justice, 16.

14 Rodney G. S. Carter, “Of Things Said and Unsaid: Power, Archival Silences, and Power in Silence,” Archivaria, Vol. 61 (Spring 2006): 215.

15 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 64.

16 Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook, “Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory,” Archival Science, Vol. 2, No. 1-2 (2002): 2.

17 Derrida, Archive Fever, 1-5.

18 Terry Cook and Joan M. Schwartz, “Archives, Records, and Power: From (Postmodern) Theory to (Archival) Performance,” Archival Science, Vol. 2, No. 3 (2002): 177.

19 Harris, Archives and Justice, 45.

20 Cook and Schwartz, “From (Postmodern) Theory to (Archival) Performance,” 172.

21 Cook and Schwartz, “From (Postmodern) Theory to (Archival) Performance,” 173.

22 Cook and Schwartz, “From (Postmodern) Theory to (Archival) Performance, 179.

23 Duff et al., “Social Justice Impact of Archives,” 323.

24 Randall C. Jimerson, “Archives for All: Professional Responsibility and Social Justice,” The American Archivist, Vol. 70, No. 2 (Fall/Winter 2007): 256.

25 Mark A Greene, “A Critique of Social Justice as an Archival Imperative: What Is It We’re Doing That’s All That Important?,” The American Archivist, Vol. 76, No. 2 (Fall/Winter 2013): 303.

26 Jimerson, “Archives for All,” 256.

27 Greene, “A Critique of Social Justice…”, 305.

28 Greene, “A Critique of Social Justice…”, 305-306.

29 Greene, “A Critique of Social Justice…”, 310.

30 Jimerson, “Archives for All,” 271.

31 Greene, “A Critique of Social Justice…”, 312.

32 Harris, Archives and Justice, 248.

33 Harris, Archives and Justice, 176.

34 Greene, “A Critique of Social Justice…”, 321.

35 Harris, Archives and Justice, 249.

36 Richard J. Matthews, “Is the Archivist a “Radical Atheist” Now? Deconstruction, its New Wave, and Archival Activism,” Archival Science, Vol. 16, No. 3 (June 13, 2015): 220.

37 Matthews, “Is the Archivist a “Radical Atheist”…, 239.

38 Eric Ketelaar, “Archives as Spaces of Memory,” Journal of the Society of Archivists, Vol. 29, No. 1 (April 2008): 17.

On the Importance of Personal Archives

A common thread in literature on personal archives is the use of these archives as memory aids. Two cases highlight this fact. One by Paul Ashmore et al. in Working With: Talking and Sorting in Personal Archives, and another by Jennifer Douglas in The Archiving “I”: A Closer Look in the Archives of Writers. In both the cases of Derek Ingram, a journalist and political commentator, and Lucy Maud Montgomery, renowned author of Anne of Green Gables, their personal archives were active sources of referral that led to the creation of new stories. In other words, their archives were frequently being recontextualized and reconstituted. Personal archives, when used, can be remade and reshaped in this way in many forms. Examples of these forms are ongoing diary entries, autobiographies, or even personal discussions through the social transactions of “working-with” domestic collections and donors. As such, personal archives are dynamic collections which take on many meanings and significations. The active fostering of a personal archive enhances memory rather than detracts from it, like when shapers of archives describe collections autonomously, without the support of donors and the subsequent sociality of the archive.

The tragedy of traditional archives is that, in many cases, archivists are not involved in building collections. Sure, they may be responsible for appraising some collections – and archivists are certainly responsible when it comes to making archives accessible to the public – but the initial decision to bring collections into an archive often lies with people with political clout; regents presidents, executive board members, etc. etc. With personal archives and archivists working-with donors, there is no longer this great cold distance between archivists and the material, where you have superiors telling you what is important and what is not important for an archival collection. The Working-With model for appraisal as outlined by Ashmore et al. thrusts archivists into active and affective/emotional roles. In other words, archivists are intimately involved in every step of the way when they are working with personal archives. Archives are imbued with stories from their creators, and when archivists have the opportunity to share in the relating of these stories, there is an emotional impact on the archives which can reverberate down through the ages.

Personal archives also subvert the traditional power relationships inherent in archival practice. The personal nature of diaries and letters, as shown by Douglas, allow the creators to wield representational power. For instance, diary writing can be constructed from the perspective of the historical “I” or the narrated “I.” When constructed from the narrated “I,” personal archiving for individuals with some claim to fame is a way and a means of controlling public perceptions of themselves when their archives are solicited for research. In this sense, personal archives can be disingenuous and contrived, because partial evidence is not always accurate evidence. But even if the donor is genuine, honest, and not given to any delusions of their own selfhood, their personal archives are still within their power to retain or destroy.

While the above concern regarding partiality has historically kept personal papers out of archives in favor of government or organizational records, the postmodern turn has given consideration to personal archives. Riva A. Pollard most convincingly demonstrates the value of personal archives and how they can be arranged and described in The Appraisal of Personal Papers: A Critical Literature Review. It seems that there is a greater effort to include personal archives in collections based on the information that is constituted in these personal archives, and how they accord with the collection policies of individual repositories and greater societal values. During the appraisal process, archivists help to bring in collections that have certain influences on what the collection can mean. Pollard cites Timothy Ericson, who mentions that the information constituted by the materials in a personal archive is more important than the record itself. I took this to mean that the decision to appraise personal archives should hinge on the intellectual content within given materials of a personal archive, and not on the reputation or influence of the record creator.

This is a difficult task though because, historically, when archivists have appraised personal archives, they have been arranged in terms of the oeuvre of the individual (think personal papers and manuscript collections). In terms of literary figures, we have whole collections suitably arranged based solely on the person (i.e. the Virginia Woolf Collection; the Montgomery Collection, etc. etc.). I guess this still kind of makes sense when one is dealing with national, famous figures. But I think the Ashmore et. al. paper signified that personal archives belonging to more “common” people, like a Derek Ingram, can still be relevant culturally and historically based on their content. The information constituted in a personal archive can be linked intellectually to other archives and shown to have wider cultural associations. How? Through the help of archivists working-with donors of personal collections. This is why I think personal archives can enhance social memory as well.

Fonds versus Function: The Evolving Nature of Provenance and Original Order

For almost two centuries, the concepts of provenance and original order have been the hallmarks of archival thought and philosophy. These concepts date back to 1841, when the French historian, librarian and archivist Natalis de Wailly called on archivists to “respect des fonds.”[1] When translated from the French, respect des fonds means “respect for the collection.” As expressed by de Wailly and many others since the nineteenth century, respect for an archival collection emphasized respect for the individual, family or organization responsible for the creation of an archival source. The origin of this source became its provenance; a term which has been subsequently used by other disciplines such as archaeology, art history, and museology. A concomitant respect was reserved for how an archival source was originally conceived and organized by its creator. This was a collection’s original order; the order by which a creator decided to catalog their own materials. This ordering was deemed to be logical and conclusive by the archivist.

These two principles were subsumed into the idea of the fonds. More broadly construed, the fonds can be understood as a dual-ordered principle containing a certain kind of religiosity. For instance, traditional archivists would forever hallow the revelation of the archive, or how an archival unit or collection was revealed to them from the moment it came into their care. This professional calling, almost religious in its construction, meant that preservation was the archivist’s sole responsibility. In other words, collections were meant to stay fixed in their original form without being altered, rearranged or reinterpreted. In short, archives were never meant to be remade, according to the classicists of the profession.

Over time, however, the principles of provenance and original order have changed. In some cases they have been done away with entirely. But we can see how these concepts grounded the archive and led to the idea of recorded fixity, so crucial to the modernist-positivist stance on archival custody. This stance, if we recall, asserted that archives were these “building blocks” of historical narrative that lead to an elusive yet absolute value. Namely, the “evidentiary” value as articulated by T. R. Schellenberg. For instance, when considered in their aggregate or final archival form, records were believed to embody objective truth. Thereafter, nonintervention and preservation became the clarion calls of the profession. But if records are to be preserved in their original form, in accordance with the ideas of provenance and original order, then there can be no room for reappraisal.

With the especial intervention of postmodernism into the archival profession, archives have been subjected to criticism and the possibility of reappraisal. For instance, textual criticism released records from their ideological moorings and the considerably laissez-faire attitude which predominated during the modernist period. As Heather MacNeil writes: “[t]his scholarship argues in various ways that cultural texts – whether literary, artistic, or architectural – are not fixed or stabilized at one moment in time; rather, they are in a continuous state of becoming, as they are resituated and recontextualized in different environments and by different authorities.”[2] As MacNeil aptly demonstrates, archives are invariably cultural texts. Historically, however, archives escaped this appellation because they were presumed to have reached an apotheosis of meaning. Collections that were aggregated and well- defined, whether having originated from an individual, family or organization, were deemed absolute and unimpeachable. Indeed, in the modern tradition of Jenkinson and Schellenberg, provenance and original order were used as justifications to protect the concept of evidentiary value.

The fonds has been the standard guiding principle for the arrangement of archival collections for many years. Arrangement, for just as long, has been a singularly significant act; an act with considerable socio-historical import. For example, as archivists took collections into their custody, each collection’s relative value went unquestioned. This was part and parcel of modern archival theory and praxis. Collections were considered to have an objective meaning that was unique in their particular historicity, and this objective meaning was meant to be preserved in perpetuity. But MacNeil shows how objective archival arrangement is a flawed starting point. For instance, the irony of arrangement is that the historical use of purportedly “evidential” archives relies on a certain degree of subjectivity. Indeed, no custodian or researcher is purely objective when using an archive. Even as archives are consulted for objective purposes, like writing a sanctioned state history, for example, their original order is slowly altered through the transference of custodial environments. MacNeil says: “[t]he orders given to the records by their various custodians – or at least what survives of these various orders – are as relevant to the present meaning and authenticity of the archive as the order given to the records by its creator.”[3]  This fact completely undermines the concept of original order.

MacNeil’s article is helpful in illustrating the point that archives do not have fixed meanings. Instead, archives accrue meaning depending on who is using them, whether that person is a researcher or a custodian. This phenomenon also underscores the postmodern idea of différance as articulated by Jacques Derrida; the important postmodern figure cited by many post-custodians, namely Terry Cook. Différance, for example, asserts that cultural texts only have meaning when individual readers come into contact with them. This idea applies to archives as well. Indeed, in order to truly guarantee preservation, archives must continually be used or activated. When archives are thusly activated, they invariably adopt new meanings through the process of being “resituated” and “recontextualized.” This is an important analysis, and it should be a clear objective for archival studies in the twenty-first century. Still, provenance and original order have historically codified archival schemas of arrangement which have privileged singular narrative representations. Out of the fonds, archivists have circumscribed historical narratives in a single act; the act of appraisal. Although archival collections may gradually lose their original meanings through the subjective nature of human activity, cultural hegemony can be sustained through certain normative and institutional fonds.

A safer approach to archival appraisal, arrangement and description can be found in the functional approach to archives. This approach is central to a post-custodial vision of archival care. For example, functional analysis treats records as distinct entities, stripping them of their ontological wholeness as presumed by modern archival theory. MacNeil concluded her article with a nod to functional analysis by stating: “…while an understanding of the functions records fulfilled in their original environment informs our understanding of how to treat them over the long term, such understanding should also remind us that the records no longer fulfill those functions.”[4] Here, MacNeil is saying that archives serve an originary function which is unique to the individual or entity responsible for the creation of that archive. For example, a personal letter may possess an emotional salience that only the author can understand. Likewise, a business contract may signal an obligation which is only applicable between two persons. When items like these are archived, however, they acquire cultural meanings which supersede the strictly personal meanings that were attached to the archive’s originary function. In other words, when time disassociates the archive from its creator, usually through the process of the creator’s own mortality, the archive undergoes a change. This change is not insubstantial. Indeed, either an archive can retain its original meanings by being sealed away after the creator’s death, or an archive can assume new meanings through the activations of a wider public.

The functional approach to archival management is promising because it holds the entities that create records at a critical distance. For example, archivists who subscribe to institutional functional analysis will research the institutions that fall under their scope. As Marcus C. Robyns’ explains: “…the archivist first determines what the institution does and how it does it. He or she then identifies and decides the relative value of the institution’s key functions and from this analysis resolves the location and relative value of the records that document these functions.”[5] Before, as archivists worked from the dual-ordered principle of the fonds, relative value was largely ignored in favor of evidentiary value. But functional analysis isolates the relative importance of an institution’s functional activities. From this starting point, records can be carefully selected for archival appraisal.

In institutional functional analysis, respect for provenance is still adhered to as records are linked to their creators. But instead of being described as part of a larger contingent of records, functional archives are considered worthy of description all the way down to the item level. In other words, singular archival records can acquire a life of their own in terms of context and representation. This is an important development because it allows for an archive to showcase other historical actors; not just a series’ owner like a government office or a “distinguished” donor.

One may wonder how the functional approach can commence when it’s point of departure for arrangement and description is item-level analysis. After all, it is well-known in the profession that describing archives at the item level is grossly impractical in terms of staff time and resources. This reality was overwhelmingly demonstrated by Mark A. Greene and Dennis Meissner in their seminal article More Product, Less Process.[6] But functional analysis is misunderstood if one believes that the functional approach necessarily means dissecting every sheath of paper that enters into an archive. Instead, functional analysis is a forward-thinking strategy. For instance, after writing and revising institutional or administrative histories, archivists can determine which of the functions of an institution will be more likely to produce valuable archives. This was the process undertaken by Robyns and Jason Woolman at the Central Upper Peninsula and Norther Michigan University (NMU) Archives. After identifying various administrative functions that fit into the overarching mission of the larger academic institution, retention schedules were created to help guide the selection of records with relative importance. However, the authors of the NMU study warn that effective functional analysis requires cooperation and good working relations between archivists and the creating entities within their scope. This dynamic is not always guaranteed. Still, the functional approach to archives is a method that helps ensure meaningful collections. Through functional analysis, new meanings can take shape as well as new revelations that were previously hidden in the initial reveal of the fonds.

While functional archives certainly present a promising alternative to the dogmatism inherent in the modern view of the fonds, there are legal issues that arise in terms of access. For example, Steven Bingo illustrates that archival donors seldom wish for their collections to become destabilized in meaning. By way of Helen Nissenbuam, Bingo writes: “[c]ontextual integrity… is violated when information divulged within one context is recast in another context, particularly of how the information is allowed to flow in radically different ways.”[7] This idea of contextual integrity can problematize the creation of a postmodern, functional and interactive archive. Indeed, the concept of provenance often revolves around aspects of donor privacy, such as confidentiality and agreements to donor rights. In short, there are moral and legal parameters to allowing the context of an archive to change. Bingo offers some helpful suggestions for mitigating donor risk while at the same time enhancing collection value. Fruitful conversations can come from donor/archivist collaborations, where the donor can be apprised of provenance and functional analysis, and the archivist can determine how to best provide prudent access. But privacy and access are issues which will continue to be of paramount importance for archivists, especially as the profession moves away from modern theories of appraisal, arrangement and description.

Bibliography

Bingo, Steven. “Of Provenance and Privacy: Using Contextual Integrity to Define Third Party Privacy.” The American Archivist Vol. 74 (Fall/Winter 2011): 507.

Greene, Mark A. and Dennis Meissner. “More Product, Less Process: Revamping Traditional Archival Processing.” The American Archivist 68, (Fall/Winter 2005): 208-263.

MacNeil, Heather. “Archivalterity: Rethinking Original Order.” Archivaria, The Journal of the Association of Canadian Archivists 66, Fall (2008): 1-24.

Millar, Laura A. Archives Principles and Practices. Chicago, IL.: ALA Neal-Schuman, 2017.

Robyns, Marcus C., and Jason Woolman. “Institutional Functional Analysis at Northern Michigan University: A New Process of Appraisal and Arrangement of Archival Records.” The American Archivist 74, (Spring/Summer 2011): 241-256.

Internal Citations

[1] Laura A. Millar, Archives Principles and Practices (Chicago, IL: ALA Neal-Schuman. 2017), 45.

[2] Heather MacNeil, “Archivalterity: Rethinking Original Order,” Archivaria, The Journal of the Association of Canadian Archivists, Vol. 66 (Fall 2008): 2.

[3] MacNeil, “Archivalterity,” 17.

[4] MacNeil, “Archivalterity,” 21.

[5] Marcus C. Robyns and Jason Woolman, “Institutional Functional Analysis at Northern Michigan University: A New Process of Appraisal and Arrangement of Archival Records,” The American Archivist, Vol. 74 (Spring/Summer 2011): 244.

[6] Mark A. Greene and Dennis Meissner, “More Product, Less Process: Revamping Traditional Archival Processing,” The American Archivist, Vol. 68 (Fall/Winter 2005): 208-263.

[7] Steven Bingo, “Of Provenance and Privacy: Using Contextual Integrity to Define Third-Party Privacy,” The American Archivist, Vol. 74 (Fall/Winter 2011): 507.

Eastwood on Appraisal

In Currents of Archival Thinking, Terry Eastwood delineates the history of archival appraisal in a similar fashion to how Blouin (1999) and Hohmann (2016) described the historical arc of the profession. Eastwood gives an overview of the very stark paradigm shift that occurred as traditional positivism and essentialism yielded to postmodernism. As Eastwood explains, over time the profession’s most respected figures gradually moved away from viewing history and truth as uniform and objective to understanding these concepts as being much more relative and destabilized in meaning.

Eastwood goes back further in time than Blouin or Hohmann by exploring the nineteenth-century of archives. He demonstrates how records were couched in terms relating to natural law. Like Blouin, who mentioned that archivists have traditionally been neutral agents of nation-states complicit in perpetuating established powers, Eastwood demonstrates that records were assumed to have more authority the higher up they were on the hierarchical ladder. For example, organizational records were seen to be more “authentic” than private papers. Public archives were deemed more important than private ones. So, there was a natural order to records that very much mimicked the hierarchical orders of society.

Eastwood also discusses the rampant growth of records and how this changed the practice of archival science. If the postwar era of Jenkinson’s time was the first moment of fragmentation in documentary history, the next moment of major disruption, according to Eastwood, occurred during the advent of the welfare state. The first fragmentation occurred as a result of increased efforts to secure national security by figuring out how to optimally mobilize industrial resources and manpower, which created reams of records usually in the form of memos and correspondences. The second fragmentation occurred due to government intervention into just about all areas of human activity, creating paper trails for all citizens. Finally, this emphasis on human activity forced archivists into realizing that all records are products of human activity, and that the use of records will change because human activity is a mutable thing. This observation made it imperative for archivists to get a hold of records basically from the moment of their creation in order to understand and describe their original purposes, because provenance itself changed meaning. Instead of having a fixed meaning as being the result of some original and special dispensation, provenance itself  became “mutable and multifaceted”

Eastwood demonstrates his allegiance to postmodernism by stating that archives are not sources of truth, that they only have meaning relative to the user or reader of the archives. In this way, archives represent “traces of thought, expression, and activity.” Eastwood would immediately have archivists give up any conception of records serving as evidence of reality (being of “evidentiary value”), and instead have archivists focus on contextualizing memories that are triggered when readers select and use the archives.

The Heart of Archivy and Social Memory

As an interested student, it is perhaps difficult to arrive at a study of archives when the current literature, written by some of the profession’s most respected faculty, explicitly denies the authority of archival records. But many authors working from the postmodern perspective argue that such denial is necessary for becoming a good archivist. These authors also assert that, far from being nuggets of objective truth, archives are often sources of misinformation and intellectual deceit. As Francis X. Blouin, Jr. notes in Archivists, Mediation, and Constructs of Social Memory, archivists have been agents of the modern nation-state, complicit with dominant cultural and political aims for many generations. In more recent times, however, – owing to the growth of the Annales as a method of historical inquiry, as well as the emergence of counter-cultural thinking in the latter half of the twentieth century – academics have moved to study archives not as a place where study originates, but as an “object” of study.

In the modern era, archival thought was dominated by Sir Hilary Jenkinson, or Jenkinsonian ideology. Jenkinson was against the idea of archivists determining the value of documentary records. In other words, he was against the appraisal process, so important to the profession today. But Jenkinson was against appraisal for admittedly pragmatic reasons. For instance, he surmised that the bulk of records coming into archives from the many bureaucratic entities of the WWI postwar era could not be adequately processed by archivists. It was, Jenkinson reasoned, far too much work for such a modest field and its practitioners. Therefore, instead of intentionally stripping archivists from a very important duty, Jenkinson attempted to alleviate a burden; the burden of record inundation and the administrative suffocation that would result. Still, Jenkinson had mistaken thoughts about the nature of records. He believed that records were these “building blocks” of historical, objective truth. That is, historical truth was not to be found distilled into any singular document, but would instead eventually be revealed through the aggregation of records. This was believed to be a natural sequence, requiring patience and good stewardship from archivists. Therefore, Jenkinson’s attitude toward appraisal was considerably laissez-faire. The principle he exercised was absolute nonintervention into the war-tested process of records management. This positioning of the profession ultimately stripped archivists away from appraisal, which was a task deemed more suitable for records managers.

Another thought, offered by Paige Hohmann in On Impartiality and Interrelatedness: Reactions to Jenkinsonian Appraisal in the Twentieth Century, is that Jenkinson was simply a product of his time. In the postwar era, for example, there was great nationalism rooted in society with concurrent strong belief in government and presidential morality. This background made it easy to subscribe to a prevailing empirical positivism. The culture was also characterized by a nascent Weberian economy whereby, in the words of archival scholar Fiorella Foscarini in Understanding the context of records creation and use: ‘Hard’ versus ‘soft’ approaches to records management: “labor was rationally divided and fixed sets of responsibilities were assigned to every individual office in accordance with written rules and regulations.” In other words, this development in the society allowed for an increasing divergence of “specializations” or “departments,” where people adopted rigid work roles and were meant to act as distinct working units in a rather industrial machine.

The history of archives is very much the history of established powers. The elite groups of history are always comprised of select men or women. This leaves out a plethora of other histories, namely folk histories, which have escaped thousands of years of human documentation. But this did not go unnoticed in the latter half of the twentieth century. Leading postmodern figures such as Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard, as well as poststructuralists like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, moved away from viewing history as an empirical study, focusing instead on cultural institutions and social interactions with various power structures. The idea of social memory began to take precedence over authoritarian history, and more abstract notions of individual pasts were considered over and above any unchallenged acceptance of a uniform past. This allowed for the possibility of recontextualizing or imagining when thinking about history (an important concept when talking about the activation of archival records). Derrida, in particular, spoke of archival gaps in the historical record when he wrote about the absence of archive. To summarize this concept of absence, records which are not made are often more important than the records that are made, because gaps represent a wider conception of thoughts and feelings in historical time and thus a more accurate glimpse of social memory. It is also imperative to think about gaps in terms of “silences,” demanding to know who has been silenced.

Power often obscures truth, and because archives have traditionally been the products of political power, archives cannot be assumed to be coterminous with social memory. If an archives is filled with records that obscure truth, it behooves the archivist to redirect the means of archival study. Instead of being neutral agents of obscurantism, archivists need to provide space for the effective mediation of records. Unfortunately, this is difficult in a capitalist economy where archivists exist within larger business structures and are forced into “dealing with corporate goals, standard requirements, and technological constraints on the one side, and records creators… on the other” (Foscarini). This problematizes the ability to provide uninhibited mediation. But archivists should be mediators. They should connect individuals with opportunities to activate records for recreation, social justice, rituals of healing and commemoration, etc. etc. If this objective comes up against corporate restraints, mediation becomes impossible, and archivists are made to exist in a vacuum.

Terry Cook has written in ‘We Are What We Keep; We Keep What We Are’: Archival Appraisal Past, Present and Future: “appraisal is the very heart of archivy, what gives it life, allows it to survive, from which all other functions follow, and that appraisal has been absent for too long from the archival corpus of ideas.” Cook, as a stalwart defender of social memory and justice, maintains that archivists must not lose out in claiming the right to act as appraisers of record history. For if anyone can determine the value of cultural products, there would inevitably be a culture war where groups would seek to elevate themselves and destroy others. Because creators of the historical record have traditionally had power, archivists must stand as a last line of defense in tempering the kind of power that marginalizes and silences others, considering in that wake politics of class and ethics, as well as principles of nondiscrimination and inclusive democracy. Indeed, archival records are not static or fixed. They are relational and suspect. Physical archives require activation. Archival absences require imagination. Where the latter is concerned, the process of imagining history needs to rely on an established critique of archival processes, which goes straight back to the appraisal question; a question thoroughly mired in democratic philosophy.