archivenerd

[archivenerd]

Memory in the archive

Johnson articulates the distinction between history and memory, saying, “A history is told because the audience needs to know. Memory provides a reference point for something the audience already believes” (139). Considering memory in the archive is particularly relevant for the project I’m undertaking because I’m looking for writing mentalities, which are ideas and attitudes and realities that people take for granted in the world around them, that are simply understood and accepted. Memories seem like a variation of this very thing, evoking mentalities of the past that inform mentalities of the present. So where can I find memory in the archive? 

This week, I was able to identify three specific ways that memory shows up in (and in relation to) the archival research I’ve done this semester:

1) In moments when my research subjects evoke collective memories for rhetorical purposes 2) In moments when my archival subjects bump up against a collective memory that they had underestimated 3) The ways that contemporary texts reveal collective memories about the historical era that I am researching

Evoking collective memory

A number of the texts I’ve encountered in the archive existed for the purpose of persuading readers to disavow the Hollywood blacklists, support blacklisted writers’ lawsuits, and confront anti-Communist and anti-free speech rhetoric. In order to persuade readers, my archival subjects evoke a number of historical incidents that are representative of poor judgement on the part of the same people enforcing the blacklist. Reading about memory and history, however, has illuminated the ways that these writers not only invoke historical events but evoke the collective memory of those events--the attitudes that the audience already has about the events. 

In a speech titled “The Blacklist and Your Freedom,” delivered by Herbert Biberman (a blacklisted writer)  to university students in 1962, Biberman says, “For, you see, there is a direct connection between the Un-American Activities Committee and the swamps in Cochinos Bay in Cuba where our ignorance and braggadocio went down to such ignominious erasure.” Biberman moves swiftly past the reference to Cochinos Bay--he doesn’t provide any of the details of what happened there or any analysis of the event’s significance. Instead, he trusts in his audience’s shared knowledge of and attitudes toward the event--he trusts in their memory. Johnson explains,  “The stronger a memory is, the less it needs to be articulated explicitly and--this is a very important point--the more potent its rhetorical force” (137). The invasion of the Bay of Pigs was a fresh and relevant memory for an audience of American college students just one year after the incident, and Biberman evoked the memory of this recent failure to shift (or reinforce) the audience’s attitudes towards the blacklists.

Bumping up against memory

In contrast to moments when my research subjects intentionally harnessed the power of collective memory to persuade, there are also moments where they are confronted and defeated by the power of collective memories that they had underestimated. For example, after failing to garner support from the writer’s guilds for a lawsuit against the studios enforcing the blacklists, a group of blacklisted writers wrote a lament to their lawyer.

The overshadowing reason, of course, from which all things, including the Blacklist, flow, is the Cold War which must recruit Law as well as Press and Army to its banners. In the past year that Cold War has grown into a vast, omnipresent crisis. Many things that seemed possible two Septembers ago are now buried beneath U-2s, Cuba, Laos, McCarran Act Convictions and the John Birch Society. That Thing is bigger than all of us.

It is evident now that we underestimated the impact of the Cold War not only on the nation but on the Hollywood community. We entered upon this case with many illusions.

The memory of even these recent events and the accompanying attitudes of fear and hysteria were more powerful than any of these writers’ arguments for free speech and workers’ rights. Cuba and Laos are examples of these reference points that Johnson describes, signaling the already tightly held anti-Communist beliefs of the audience, memories with power to outweigh other arguments.

Mining contemporary memorials

Outside of the archive, I’ve had the sort of weird experience this semester of constantly running into the time period I’m researching. This has mostly happened through films that I have (unintentionally) encountered dealing with the Cold War. One in particular hits my research right on the nose--the film Trumbo.

Starring Bryan Cranston and Helen Mirren, Trumbo is the story of Dalton Trumbo, a blacklisted writer who won Academy Awards using a pseudonym (and whose archive I’ve spent time in this semester). Even a quick perusal of the trailer can raise interesting questions about how our collective memory of the Cold War has shifted, how the era has been clearly defined in contemporary memory, and what that contemporary memory reveals about how our societal attitudes and values (and, dare I say, mentalities) have shifted. Johnson writes, “To share a memory with another does not just mean that we share knowledge about what happened in the past...It also means that we share an understanding of what that past means for the present” (134). There’s something important about the  reflexivity of memory; it seems worthwhile to consider the memories evoked in a historical moment as well as the memories evoked in relation to that historical moment from a contemporary vantage point.

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Fumbling in the digital archives

This week I decided to take up Jenell’s invitation to spend research time in digital archives and consider some of the differences between that work and the work we’ve been doing all semester in brick-and-mortar archives. I expected these research hours to be especially productive; I expected that I would feel freed from the limitations of searching one box at a time, one archive at a time. This was not the case.

All semester long I’ve been skeptical of what seemed like a romanticization of the brick-and-mortar archives. (Others brought this up in class, too, particularly on the day we discussed Farge.) 

Solberg identifies this tendency towards the romantic, saying that we often “identify historical research with labor that occurs in certain archetypal settings (in dim basements, at long, wooden library tables, seated near rolling carts stacked with archival boxes)” (71). 

There’s something about the basement-bound researcher that seems so serious and rigorous and grounded. There’s a certain gravitas to the image of the researcher in the archive, poring over brittle documents and constructing realities from their contents. 

Solberg (quoting Stallybrass) continues, saying, “The cachet of scholarly/archival work has been maintained, in part, ‘through its privileged relation to the protection and retrieval of scarce resources’” (71). 

While digital archives are still tied up with issues of privilege and scarcity--not everyone has the tools or literacies or credentials to access digitized materials--the brick-and-mortar archives have seemed to particularly celebrate scarcity. Nothing makes historical artifacts feel more scarce than locking them away in a grand, old building and never allowing them to leave the premises.

But this view of the brick-and-mortar archive--a view that emphasizes its limitations and seems to set up the digital archives as a sort of solution--ignores two important things: (1) the advantages of this site and method of research and (2) the disadvantages/limitations of digital archive work.

I spent probably the bulk of my research time in the digital archives simply searching. I searched in archivegrid and the UW digital collections and Google’s digital newspaper archives. And everywhere I looked, it was a bit of a bust. It took awhile on each site to figure out how best to find things, and when I did find things my immediate impulse was to look for something better, more interesting, more specific. The bottomlessness of the digital archive was basically my worst enemy. Whereas in the brick-and-mortar archive, I would select a box or two and then commit to them (at least somewhat), finding whatever there was to be found therein, the digital archives didn’t work for me that way. Partly because I’m further into my research and have a more specific idea of what I’m looking for, and partly because of the nature of the digital archives, I just couldn’t get settled. Where the brick-and-mortar archive invites immersion into materials, the digital archive invites endless skimming and searching.

Another limit of the digital archive (that matters in the brick-and-mortar archive, too) is that we are at the mercy of the archivists and programmers who tag collections and artifacts with particular metadata. Our search terms only work if we can tap into the logic of this metadata and figure out the right things to search for. Again, I realize this is an issue for pretty much all the research that we do nowadays. But the digital archives in particular, as I said, encourage a kind of infinite searching frenzy, making this reliance on the metadata feel particularly frustrating. It made me think (again!) of Brandt’s use of mentalities to better understand the history of writing. Again, mentalities provide a framework for thinking about historical trends based on the claim that history shifts depending on shifts in what people take for granted about the world around them. I’ve been trying to draw out writing mentalities from the artifacts I’ve encountered, but this week I was thinking about the writing mentalities that become apparent through the metadata of the digital archives. For example, there are exactly zero items in the Wisconsin Historical Society archives tagged with the term “ghostwriter” or “ghostwriting” or variations on these terms. I feel like I’ve encountered a number of texts that warrant these tags, but the words and concepts don’t seem to be showing up in the archivists’ vocabulary. What significance can I draw from this, and what does it reveal about attitudes toward writing and writers that archivists and digital technologists and librarians aren’t seeing ghostwriting as a thing to tag?

Finally, a quick word on the value of scarcity. While my experience in the digital archives was frustrating and felt a lot like spinning my wheels, in a way it was reassuring not to find much. I don’t mean this because I have some weird, elitist attitudes about my own positionality or because I buy into the romanticized vision of the historical researcher covered in dust and absorbing truth. I simply mean that, for practical reasons, it is reassuring to note that the person I’ve spent weeks reading about in the archive doesn’t have much of a digital presence. It’s a lot easier to say something interesting about a specific, individualized case when 500 other people aren’t trying to say something interesting about it. I realize this is obvious and not at all earth-shattering, but it’s the biggest reassurance I can take away from this week’s experience in the digital archives.

[archivenerd]

Archive-as-subject

“[T]he need exists, she [Stoler] writes, for scholars to move ‘from archive-as-source to archive-as-subject,’ to pay attention to the process of archiving, not just to the archive as a repository of facts and objects” (Arondekar 15).

This week’s readings as well as the upcoming methodology paper ask us to consider, as Stoler (by way of Arondekar) puts it, “archive-as-subject” rather than “archive-as-source.” With the archive itself as the focus of my post, I’m interested in considering the relationship between the archive and our research as well as the relationship between the archive and us as researchers.

The archive and our research

There is pretty clearly a rich conversation going on in a variety of disciplines related to the meaning and structure and significance of the archive and the relationship between the archive and the kind of research that is done therein. Morris and Rawson refer to Wendy Sharer’s argument, for example, that “rhetorical historiography should always (re)consider what an archive is and does, how it means and matters, and for whom” (75). Arondekar emphasizes Thomas Osborne’s statement that “There is always a politics of the archive...because rarely is it a simple matter of revealing secrets that are waiting to be found” (27). And Mbembe problematizes a simplistic view of the archive as a storehouse of objectively gathered and neutrally presented artifacts, saying, “The archive is, therefore, not a piece of data, but a status” (20 emphasis added).

The archive matters for certain kinds of people doing and reading certain kinds of work, it is political by nature, funded and constructed by institutions with individual and state interests, and its contents are deemed to be “of value” based on systems of value that likely have little to do with our research questions and goals. We can’t ignore the baggage of the archive, the ways that it can be (and has been) misrepresented as an oracle and a source of truth, and the problematic potentialities of that misrepresentation for our research. I think about the archivist’s note that I encountered during our first week of archival research for this class, telling me that the papers I’d chosen to look at weren’t a good representation of that institution at that time. From almost the very first moment I arrived in the archive, I was met with a hierarchy of value enacted by archivists whose methods were opaque and disconnected from my interests.

This is not to say that archivists are sinister instruments of state power or anything so conspiratorial. It is simply an acknowledgement that we can’t divorce our research that relies on archival methods from a thoughtful consideration of the methodology, a justification of its appropriateness for our work, and an explicit discussion of the ways that the archive is limited and limiting in the context of our project. Does it matter, for example, that almost all of the archival research I’ve done this semester comes from an archive that is explicitly labeled as inadequate? Especially as I use those archival materials to make claims about literacy and writing and the underlying ideologies of the time period? What needs to be said about this as I move forward from looking at and thinking about the archive to producing a project based on its contents?

The archive and the researcher

As I read Mbembe’s article, particularly as he characterized the work that historians do, I found myself typing in my notes in all caps: ARE WE COOL WITH THIS? For example, Mbembe says, “[W]riting history merely involves manipulating archives...[T]he historian...restores [death] back to life precisely in order better to silence it by transforming it from autonomous words into a prop on which s/he can lean” (Mbembe 25). ARE WE COOL WITH THIS? Obviously, we’re not meant to be cool with this. 

Mbembe’s critique of (some) historians and the work that they (sometimes) do reveals another reason that the archive is limited and that we need to acknowledge our awareness of its limitations: because the archive is entirely dependent on us as readers to externalize its contents, to give it shape. The archive is limited because we are limited. As researchers, we can’t ignore our own positionality, our own self-interests, and our own entanglement with institutions and the state. A couple of times this semester, the question has been raised: “Do we go to the archive to see ourselves?” And if the answer is yes, then who else don’t we see?

Moving forward

This is all to say that the archive-as-subject conversation will need to continue as I move forward with my research and begin to construct a final project/proposal. Based on the archival research I’ve done so far, as well as the analytic of mentalities (introduced to me by Deborah Brandt and described in my previous post), I’ve decided to consider the following research questions:

How did blacklisted writers and those who supported them (lawyers, journalists, etc.) both make use of and problematize commonly held writing mentalities in their efforts to overturn Hollywood blacklists? How do competing mentalities bump up against each other and cause shifts?

Tracing mentalities will force me to continue considering the archives, asking questions like: whose mentalities am I privy to in the archive, who am I to interpret a person’s unspoken and even unconscious assumptions about the world, and what am I not allowed access to through this particular research method? These questions of method will continue to run parallel with the content-related questions of this project.

[archivenerd]

Writing mentalities

In Deborah Brandt’s The Rise of Writing, she uses the concept of mentalities to guide her research into the cultural history of writing and the consequences of the spread of mass writing in contemporary American society. French historians developed this concept of mentalities, which “attribute[s] historical change to shifts in what people take for granted about the world around them” (Brandt 15). This week in the archives, I had my eye out for evidence of writing mentalities in the era of the Hollywood blacklists. My hope is that uncovering these mentalities might help me to better understand the cultural and ideological factors that made such a prolonged and problematic era of discrimination possible, and that I might be able to begin thinking about how some of these mentalities have changed or stayed the same (and why that might be significant).

It was a lucky coincidence that Brandt happened to be visiting campus during our week-long break from the archive. Her work has informed some of the early research I’ve done in grad school, and her lecture helped me to refocus on some of the initial questions that sparked my interest in looking at the material and physical and spiritual consequences experienced by people who write for pay. Brandt’s work traces the fraught cultural heritage of writing, specifically as it relates to the storied, moralistic heritage of reading. Reading rights of citizens, she notes, are protected by the constitution, and reading is viewed as a vehicle for moral and intellectual development, citizenship, and democracy. Writing, on the other hand, is almost solely relegated to the realm of work, and is either related to profit-making or trouble-making. The rights of writers are determined at the level of contracts and individual legal battles rather than the more widespread protections over reading.

“The commercial value of writing, the way it can be transacted and enhance other transactions, the way it can fit into systems of work, wage, and market, all make writing unique among the so-called language arts, giving it a different cultural history from reading. [Writing] took longer to democratize, and its subversive and deceptive powers marked it for heightened control (Monaghan 2005). Practically speaking, writing has flourished not in the civic sphere but in the realm of patronage, where writers enter into some sort of give-and-take relationship with more powerful others in exchange for access to tools, audiences, or remunerations of various kinds. ‘To be a writer,’ David D. Hall (2007) observed of literacy conditions in the seventeenth century ‘was to enter into a relationship of dependence’ (p. 76). This statement remains most true today—the only difference being that many more people are writing now” (Brandt 5).

So how does this all play out in the archive? What writing mentalities can I untangle in the texts I’m looking at?

In a newspaper clipping from 1961 titled “Blacklist Caught Junkman,” a journalist asks Nedrick Young, a blacklisted screenwriter, whether or not he is really a Communist. At this point, Young had been blacklisted for over a decade, had been caught up in a scandal when a screenplay he wrote using a pseudonym won an Oscar and was linked back to him, and had worked as a bartender and junk collector in order to make ends meet when writing work was difficult to come by. Young’s response to the journalist? 

“’Do you really want to know?’ he asked. I said I did. ‘On the day when my answer makes no difference to whether or not I can get work, I will buy you a drink and tell you,’ he said. ‘I have been asked many times why I don’t make things easy for myself and ‘recant.’ I simply won’t do it just to secure an economic advantage for myself. Others can. I’m not made that way. A man has to live with himself.’”

What does this exchange reveal about what Young takes for granted about the world around him, especially in relation to writing and being a writer? Young seems well aware of writing’s entanglement with profit-making and institutional power. But it seems that he views the economic power of writing as secondary to issues of identity and agency. “I’m not made that way,” he says in comparison to people who can disassociate the writing they’re doing (or need to do to make a living) from their own beliefs and attitudes and identities. In what Brandt calls a knowledge economy (where ideas/texts function as commodities), the profit-making power of texts is given precedence over the concerns and considerations of individual writers. Young seems to be acknowledging that this writing mentality is prevalent—that others are capable of accepting this hierarchy—but that he is not.

In another text I looked at this week, a blacklisted actor complained that writers had an advantage during the days of the blacklist. They could assume false names and keep working (whereas an actor stepped in front of the camera and, even with a false name, was identified). So there’s this implication that writers had it easy. They were doing the safe, behind-the-scenes work that didn’t matter as much/wasn’t as public and so (supposedly) wasn’t as persecuted. The source even implied that writers were living pretty large in the era of the black markets. It seems that there is a mentality about the skills of writers and the value of writers being lower on a hierarchy of value than, say, the person who serves as the public face of an idea or the head of an institution that is using the texts writer’s produce. Again, writing is highly valued in a way that writers are not. I’ve encountered this mentality in conversations with friends and family as I explain some of the kinds of questions I’m interested in pursuing in my research. When I told a friend recently that I was fascinated by unseen writers, she said, “Well, aren’t all writers unseen?” It seems that this pervasive writing mentality, that writers are typically “unseen” as though by choice or by their nature, makes us maybe slightly less uncomfortable when their ownership is stripped away.

There are many other threads of writing mentalities to pick up and look at as I move forward. And there are many other factors to consider—such as the ethical and methodological anxiety of extrapolating unspoken (and maybe even unconscious) mentalities from brief snapshots of the lives of people who cannot respond to what I’m claiming they meant by what they said. So back to the archives next week to untangle and re-tangle all of this a little bit more.

[archivenerd]

my first political cartoon in the archives!

[archivenerd]

Reading the individual back onto the general

As we encounter artifacts and stories and snapshots of historical moments in the archive, what do we do with them? How do we move from semi-interesting observations about singular events and individuals to broader claims and implications? As Jenell asked in class last week, how do we read individual experiences back onto the general?  

These questions seem to be at the heart of the Biesecker/Campbell debate. Biesecker takes issue with Campbell’s reading of women into the canon, saying that it reinforces patriarchal hegemony. Biesecker calls for scholarship that considers subjects in relation to their various contexts (154) and where scholars consider themselves in relation to these same contexts. She says, “We must begin to read ourselves as part and parcel of the history we so desperately seek to disown” (158). So how do we do this? How do we approach the texts we encounter in the archive in a way that takes into account the wide variety of relevant contexts that are tied up with the artifact itself and our own relationship to the artifact and its context? And how does reading texts this way impact what we can do with them/say about them? Here’s what Farge says:

“If we aim to ‘defend stories’ and bring them into history, we must commit ourselves to demonstrating in a compelling manner the ways in which each individual constructed her own agency out of what history and society put at her disposal” (Farge 93).

This week I picked up Jeff Smith’s Film Criticism, The Cold War, and The Blacklist based on recommendations during class discussions, and he exemplifies the kind of compelling demonstration Farge calls for while telling the story of Dalton Trumbo. Trumbo was a blacklisted screenwriter, known for writing Spartacus as well as winning the Oscar for The Brave One under the pseudonym Robert Rich. Robert Rich was an actual person--the nephew of the film’s director and a messenger boy--and this led to a lot of confusion when Rich was announced as the winner for Best Screenplay on Oscar night. Trumbo milked this confusion, repeatedly and cheekily refusing to confirm or deny that he was Rich. He planned an elaborate prank that involved writing another film as Rich and having some kind of graphic in the credits of an Oscar statue wearing a sheepish expression. (The prank ultimately fell through because of a variety of censorship issues).

The question of Rich’s true identity was broadly debated in the media, and the implications of this question were considered by Trumbo’s contemporaries. A reporter at the Louisville Gazette-Courier, for example, explained the significance of Rich’s unknown identity when he said, “Now, perhaps, the official recognition that some of the film colony’s best writers cannot even acknowledge their work may kill the blacklisting system by ridicule” (192). Trumbo eventually published an article entitled “Who Is Robert Rich?” which he wrote using his real name and still not acknowledging that he was Rich. In the article. Trumbo sets up Rich as a symbol of true Americanness. He wrote, “Robert Rich, therefore, is the generic name of all persons who must somehow escape their individual identities if they are to continue working at their chosen professions. As such, he has as many faces as the blacklist itself” (193). By putting these various texts and contexts into conversation, Smith helps to demonstrate how Trumbo “constructed [his] own agency” at a time when he had been cut out of his profession and forced to disown his own name, and how he used that agency to chip away at power structures that attempted to silence him. The blacklisted Trumbo was forced to use a pseudonym, and so he used that very pseudonym to create an everyman, a symbol of the power of the oppressed to circumvent their oppressors. And there’s something about that that seems broadly significant if not representative, right? That seems like a story worth telling?

So then part of our job in the archives is not just to find the right collections and identify interesting things in them, but then to consider them in light of other contexts and stories and subjects until we can construct/decipher a more complete and complex and layered picture of what matters and what it means (all the while maintaining an acute meta-awareness of our positionality). Simple enough, right?

[archivenerd]

The ethos of the archive

Why does archival research have such a particular ethos? And what does this say about the kinds of scholarship we value?

This weekend I was talking on the phone with my Dad in Seattle, and he recommended a documentary that he’d seen on TV the night before. He described the documentary’s premise—following two brothers for ten years of their lives, from their early teens to their early twenties—and raved that it was the best documentary he’d ever seen. I asked why, and he said that he felt like it was an accurate depiction of the boys and their lives. And when I asked why he thought that, he said, “Because it was just the facts—no editorializing.”

This summer, my parents and I went on a long road trip from Madison to Seattle (my parents are both making big cameos in this post, apparently). My family has been Mormon for several generations, and my mom in particular really wanted to visit several early Mormon history sites on our trip. We spent a day in Nauvoo, Illinois, a town that was founded by Mormons in the mid-1800s and where ancestors of both of my parents had lived before moving west to Utah. Nauvoo is kind of a Mormon theme park. You can take a carriage ride or learn to make candles like pioneers did or watch a blacksmith demonstration. Many of the original Mormon homes have been rebuilt and filled with historical artifacts, and there are tour guides in each home who tell stories about the people who lived there. My mom was frustrated when we visited her great-great-grandfather’s bakery and the tour guide talked generally about how bakeries functioned in the 1840s and about her own experience as a tour guide in Nauvoo. As we left that day, my mom said that she thought the tours would be a lot more interesting if they were grounded in history. She said, “When you’re visiting a historical site, you just want the facts!”

Now my parents are both intelligent and well-read and thoughtful people, but they don’t necessarily read Foucault and Derrida or have conversations with their peers about the non-linearity of history and the falseness of origins. And I think their comments represent pretty widely held ideas about history and historical work—that historical work is the work of uncovering truth.

And isn’t that the ethos of the archives? That it’s just the facts—no editorializing? That it is an instrument of truth-finding?

Now we (meaning the we in Jenell’s class) probably wouldn’t characterize the archives or historiography this way, and neither would most contemporary scholars. But wasn’t Derrida responding to these very ideas not too long ago when he characterized a reverence for the archive as a fever? And aren’t scholars like Farge and Steedman writing (among other reasons) to complicate and fill out this view of the archive as something more than origin-seeking and truth-transcription? Sure, scholarship about historiography has shifted away from talking about it as objective and extrinsic (though, again, those words were used by Gronbeck relatively recently). But I think the general population (my parents included) still largely views historical scholarship as objective work, as something more reliable and rigorous and real than the more interpretive work of, say, a literary theorist or rhetorical critic.

So, then, is the ethos of the archive (even for us in Jenell’s class) still tied up with the idea that archival work and historical research is somehow more rigorous and real and legitimizing than other kinds of scholarship?

Are we looking for legitimacy in the archive?

And if so, how does that change the way we look or how we feel about what we find? And if so, should we knock it off? Or is there something about archival work that is legitimizing, even when we divorce it from outdated ideas about what history is and why it matters?

I’m asking a lot of questions this week because I don’t have a lot of answers. I spent more time looking at Nedrick Young’s papers (which, oddly enough, have not included anything actually written by Nedrick Young so far). I’ve encountered lots of really interesting documents related to writers and the McCarthy era blacklists in Hollywood and the fight to have these blacklists eliminated. For instance, I read a series of letters about Richard Weil, whose name was attached to a screenplay after he’d been blacklisted because of supposed Communist affiliations, and the subsequent fallout of his name being associated with a successful Hollywood film. Included was a letter from Weil himself accusing his accuser (Berkeley) of fabricating the whole story about Weil’s Communism. In fact, Weil says that his accuser was the real Communist (as well as a racist and a dirty businessman) who had a chip on his shoulder after Weill shut down his Communist advances. What a mess!

As I read these kinds of accounts, I catch myself thinking things like, “Wow, the Cold War really was a crazy time in America,” as if I hadn’t really believed it before seeing a handwritten document from that time period with my own eyes. Something about touching the letters and seeing the signatures and feeling the crumbly paper makes it seem much more real. Historians and novelists and Hollywood directors haven’t just blown this whole Cold War thing out of proportion in the ways they’ve represented and dramatized it—it really was frantic and absurd and terrifying!

But that’s the seductive power of the archives, right? (Steedman) Even with all the Derrida floating around in our brains, we get pulled into these notions that seeing is believing and the archive is a repository of facts. Certainly there’s a middle ground between giving the archive that kind of power/giving into that kind of view of history and disregarding the very real value of the archive and of archival methods. But the ethos of the archive is real and powerful and, I think, worth defining and reconsidering and even troubling.

[archivenerd]

An awareness of our research subjects

During the first week of class, an interesting question arose about whether we have a responsibility to our research subjects, and if so, what that responsibility looks like. The consensus seemed to be that, yes, we have a responsibility to our research subjects. But how does our  responsibility to and awareness of our research subjects—their contexts, concerns, privacy, individuality, and humanity—influence our work in the archives? In particular, how does this play out in the context of rhetorical history research?

I didn’t think too much about individual research subjects during my first week in the archives because I was looking at labor agreements negotiated by an organization—the Writers’ Guild of America. Of course I was thinking about these documents in relation to the people that wrote them and the people that were protected (or not protected) by them, but it was easy to do so at a high level. Nobody’s names were attached to these documents. No one specific person was being called out or praised or maligned. Without realizing it at the time, I had this sense of myself being involved in a somewhat objective task. I was considering how these documents were constructed, how terms were defined, what they were defined in relation to,  and how the rhetoric of those definitions and connections might be interesting.

This week I thought it might be more interesting to look at a wider variety of documents related to my general interest in the vulnerabilities of unseen writers and taking advantage of the Wisconsin Historical Society’s collections related to film and TV. I stumbled across the papers of Nedrick Young, a Hollywood screenwriter (and unconfirmed Academy Award winner) who was blacklisted in the 1950s and 1960s because of an alleged affiliation with the Communist party. Some quick searching revealed that a couple of the Young boxes deal specifically with his involvement in a 1961 lawsuit where a group of blacklisted writers, producers, actors, etc. took on the major studios who were upholding the blacklist.

I made it about three sentences into the first letter—written by Young and his associates to David Shapiro, the lawyer representing them in their lawsuit—before I became acutely aware that this was a very different kind of archival research than what I’d previously been doing. This document was so human. The people involved—the writers and the recipient—seemed like friends. They clearly had strong emotions tied up in the lawsuit, and rightfully so! Their livelihoods and careers and reputations had been compromised because of accusations about their political beliefs. They had families and bills to pay, they felt targeted and needed money to support their legal efforts, and they were worried about Shapiro getting the argument just right so that they could win the case. The legalese of the labor agreements seemed incredibly cold and detached when held up against the pleadings and strategies and worries of these people whose names were signed in ink at the bottom of the letter and whose pictures I could look up online.

And from there, I was swept up into the very human drama of this lawsuit. There was a form letter, written in November 1960 by the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, requesting financial support for their effort to take on the major motion picture studios of the time and inviting other wronged individuals to join the case as plaintiffs. The letter describes the dire situation of the plaintiffs—some of whom had been blacklisted for 13 years at that point—as they tried to make a living on the black market and encountered hardships both “materially and spiritually.”

Another letter—addressed to Ken England, the President of the Writers’ Guild West, after a Guild meeting in March of 1961 where members debated whether or not to become involved in the lawsuit—describes the political hysteria of the time and questions the members of the Guild who resisted supporting the lawsuit. Apparently there were concerns about whether some of the plaintiffs actually were Communists (rather than simply being people who were unfairly accused of being Communists). The writer of the letter (whose name I can’t quite decipher from the signature) says that this question misses the whole point—that the problem with the blacklist isn’t that “innocent” people are ending up on it but that it violates everyone’s right to fair employment and free thinking and free speech.  He writes, “Directly or indirectly, the blacklist has affected hundreds of writers. The displacements and hardships which occurred to them and their families would fill volumes and, no doubt, will when history has had a chance to sort them out” (emphasis added). And here I was, quite literally sorting out the displacements and hardships. How could I not get excited when the document I’m looking at basically predicts my looking at it one day? Again, in that moment I felt I was encountering a human subject, a moment in history with very high and very human stakes, rather than simply a document about which a person had made rhetorical choices.

So then how does my experience this week—especially when contrasted with my experience last week—help me to understand how an awareness of the humanness of my research subjects impacts the way I research? Farge says that “the historian must be both close to and distant from the figures, words, and events emerging from the archives” (xiii). I understand the need for distance, especially if we are to treat the archives as “adversaries” with whom we do battle and constantly question (73). We do a disservice to our subjects when we set them up as heroes of an oversimplified narrative��a risk I would run if I were to try and write something about the group of blacklisted writers I read about this week. I would need to do more research and more critical re-reading before I could do their story justice. Again, I understand the need for distance.

But what I learned this week in the archives is the importance of the closeness that Farge mentions. Our awareness of the humanness and individuality of our research subjects just makes the research process so much more interesting. There are real people tangled up in the issues that interest us, and there were (and are) real stakes involved. Maybe this is simple and obvious, but it seems worth remembering as we engage in the rigorous work of rhetorical historiography. Zarefsky characterizes the work of rhetorical historian in a way that seems to put the emphasis on the distance that Farge suggests, saying that what distinguishes it “is not subject matter but perspective…In this sense of rhetorical history, the historian views history as a series of rhetorical problems, situations that call for public persuasion to advance a cause or overcome an impasse. The focus of the study would be on how, and how well, people invented and deployed messages in response to the situation” (30). Obviously I think it is worthwhile and interesting to consider the rhetorical problems of various times and peoples and spaces and the rhetorical moves that were made to influence and overcome these problems. And obviously I realize that Zarefsky wasn’t writing about specific research subjects in this moment, but about an approach to rhetorical history in general. But I’m struck by the distance in this explanation of rhetorical history work, by the de-emphasis of the subject. And it seems important to remember that, while we need distance, we also need closeness.

[archivenerd]

The limits of the archive

The title for this post has been running through my head since the first week of class. The archives are absolutely limited and limiting, but what are the pros and cons of these limits and how does this limitedness affect our work as researchers in the archives?

Before our tour of the Wisconsin Historical Society on Wednesday, I thought that I wanted to research issues of ownership and vulnerability for unseen writers, a topic I’ve been considering in an ongoing qualitative research project that looks at the financial and emotional vulnerability of corporate ghostwriters. But how should I approach this super broad idea? What kinds of writers should I think about? In what contexts? And then, if I eventually could decide which writers and which contexts, would UW even have archival materials related to those subjects and those contexts? I did some preliminary digging through the library catalogue, entering search terms like “ghostwriting” without any success at all, and I wondered if this general topic was really suited for a class on rhetorical historiography. Maybe I should put it away and think about something else?

Luckily I stopped myself short of panicking and decided to wait and see what Wednesday’s tour would reveal. I was interested to learn about the Historical Society’s large collections of film and television artifacts, including scripts and other documentation related to the writers producing texts in these industries, writers who are largely unseen and who I know have had a somewhat tumultuous history of defining their rights and roles. (I was aware of the 2007 Writers’ Guild of America strike and have since learned that this was the most recent of many such strikes.) This was enough information to provide me with new search terms and to lead me to collections related to writers’ guilds, collective bargaining, blacklisting, and more.

Yes, the archives are limited and limiting. We can only look at what’s there. But limits can be both challenging and freeing. Because we can only look at what we can look at, we are freed from the burden of a thousand unfeasible ideas. Because we can only look at what we can look at, we are forced to critically and creatively consider what can be done with what we have. Farge acknowledges the incompleteness of the archives and then explains this incompleteness in relation to the researcher in a way that didn’t stand out until I’d realized it myself: “to use the archives is to translate this incompleteness into a question” (55). The limits of the archive helped me to find a direction for my research that I hadn’t previously considered.

Once I was in the archives, I encountered all kinds of practical and temporal limits. You can only request a certain number of boxes at a time, for instance. You can only type and read so fast. And the folks working at the archive—who are busy with a hundred other things—can only retrieve boxes so quickly. What I thought would be four solid hours of reading and note-taking and having great epiphanies turned out to be a significant amount of waiting. I also had the idea that the archive would be some kind of hushed and sacred space. But a woman needed help deciphering a large map and carried on a conversation with the archive staff in full-voice. And then a guy popped in from down in the library to talk about weekend plans with his friends. And my concentration in the archives was limited because of all these bodies and noises and interactions (and by my own inability to tune things out and mind my own business). And then when I did get boxes and have material to look at, I was limited by myself: my allergies (so much dust! so much sneezing!), my inattentiveness (my mind sure does wander while looking at mid-century legal documents), and my anxiety to FIND SOMETHING.

And this gets at another huge limit of the archive: there is simultaneously not enough and way too much. Once you’re looking at something, what do you look for? The decision about what to look at isn’t made when you find the call number of a box, it’s made a hundred times over and over as you consider what’s in the box and if and why and how it matters. Both Johnson and Farge use the word “untangle” to describe the role of the researcher in this process, and in my very limited description, I found this word to be a useful descriptor of what I was doing. Untangling myself first of all so that—hopefully, eventually—I can untangle some kind of meaning from the archives.

I spent the entire morning in the archives looking at just a few folders in the first of two boxes of labor agreements that the Writers’ Guild of America, West used in the 40s, 50s, and 60s. I noted a few interesting moments where writers were defined in terms of their relationship to their employer rather than their work, or where a writer’s eligibility for membership in the Guild and protection under the Guild’s agreements was directly tied to financial success rather than to quality or quantity of work. For example, writing the screenplay for a “big budget” film qualified you for membership in the Guild at one point, while writing the screenplay for a “low budget” film did not, on its own, qualify you. Terms like “big budget” and “low budget” were undefined. I also noted odd distinctions related to genre. In the 1940s, for example, writing a Western screenplay entitled you to about half as much pay as writing a non-Western screenplay. None of these moments of interest really mean anything yet. And maybe in a week or two I’ll decide I’m noticing the wrong kinds of things and will never return to untangle some kind of idea or argument from these pieces of information. But this is what I have after Week 1.  

One more limit of the archive, in my experience so far, is that the decision of how to look at what you’re looking at can be highly influenced by the way the archive has been constructed. An archivist with her own set of interests and her own training put a bunch of things together in a certain order. And this order more than likely has nothing to with your project or your goals. So it doesn’t necessarily make sense to just follow it, right? I got a box with a bunch of folders organized chronologically, and I started with Folder 1 and began reading its contents, and then I moved on to Folder 2. And I felt like I needed to read all of Folder 2 before I could move on to Folder 3, even though I was getting bored and not finding much and could always go back later. As soon as I realized that I was feeling this way, I made a note of where I was abandoning Folder 2, put it away, grabbed Folder 7, and started reading there. I had this intense reaction to the idea (my own idea, I realize) that I had to read things in the order in which they were archived. Baillif’s idea that “linearity…is a problematic fiction” (202) and Foucault’s claim that origins are constructs can free us up not only in the way we think about historiography but in the way that we approach our day-to-day, in-the-trenches archival research.  We don’t have to start at the beginning (which beginning?) and move chronologically (isn’t rhetoric more concerned with kairos anyway?). The way the archive is set-up doesn’t have to limit or control how we look.