#archivefever

Taking point from Derrida, Carolyn Steedman opens her text using Archive Fever as a springboard to interrogate the feverish quality of the archives by which subsequent scholarship has been so persuaded. The historian working in the archives holds a deep “desire to recover the moments of inception” (5)— moments that interrupt the larger narrative leaving the researcher with the choice—an opportunity—to inherit that event into our cultural memory. Feverish, anxious, and ephemeral, these moments haunt us with the recognition of authority we hold to tell a story, often pitched as the story. Tacitly flooding throughout my read of Steedman’s text are the voices of thinkers we’ve read so far in this class who remain acutely aware of the anxiety produced by this kind of work (Foucault, Vivian, Baliff, and Farge come first to mind). These opportunities of inception remind me of an innocent childhood moment when a child witnesses something they weren’t intended to see. For a brief moment, the child remains in a state of haze, both excited and distraught by that same choice the researcher holds over whether or not to share such knowledge with someone in authority—a fleeting state of undesired power.

Steedman proposes quite provocative questions about the process of history, the construction of narrative, and the role of a researcher. While theoretical in nature, these questions propose two fundamental concerns with which rhetoricians continuously grapple: what authority do we have to tell a story and what modes are available to communicate that story? To tackle the first question, I want to address the aspect of the gaze.

With what Steedman calls an erotic gaze, we hunt and sift through documents in the archives for two reasons: first, to evaluate, modify, and enhance the larger historical narratives circulating throughout society often understood as “facts”; and second, selfishly and feverishly to fulfill our own cravings to eavesdrop into the lives of others, to know the answers to our own burning questions. Yet, Steedman reminds us that “the Historian who goes to the Archive must always be an unintended reader, will always read that which was never intended for his or her eyes” (75). Enter fever symptom #1.

I’ve decided to work from the research question that asks when rape became a national problem, and in order to do that, I’ve been tracing a linear trajectory of voices from roughly the early 1960s to the mid 1980s—a time frame constructed by me based on my own perceptions, readings, and intuitions concerning the second-wave feminist agenda. So far, I’ve built a network of what I would call official voices (special interest groups, NGOs, federal statistics, publicity, etc.). The fever begins when I stumble upon these unofficial voices, where I know I am not the intended audience. The letters between friends and colleagues, the personal notes from a chapter meeting, or the journal of an unknown member of a Milwaukee subgroup of the National Organization for Women—these are the voices that haunt me. I eavesdrop on their conversations, frantically sift through their thoughts, wondering if I’ve just stumbled upon the goldmine that will drive my analysis, or, I wonder, if their words are merely an outlier in the conversation—how will I trust what they’re saying in privacy? I’m an unintended reader; with what confidence can I claim their purpose and intention?

To address the second question, we have to consider the role of narrative and how it appeases our Westernized proclivities to start from the beginning. Narratives are “modes of perception and ways of thinking,” yet narratives hold the power “to attach to the real world an order and form it does not intrinsically possess” (149). Enter fever symptom #2.

My research question essentially asks a temporal question: when does rape become a public, national problem? To ask that, I’ve charted out a chronological trajectory that assumes an “unspoken starting point” (150). My evidence is time sensitive; I’m searching for voices that speak of the problem of rape directed to a public audience. Not only am I concerned about my gaze, as well as the anxiety over whether or not I’m looking at the right archive, I now wonder if I’m building a narrative that falls trap to the narrative impulse rooted in “once upon a time.” Feverish.

History writing is a technology of memory; with writing history comes much power, power that I’m uneasy about holding. Towards the end of Steedman’s text, she recovers the problem of writing that plagued some of our earliest rhetoricians, which Derrida then recovered. While at the core of writing lies “temporariness and impermanence,” it’s public perception is often understood as permanent and authoritative (148). Narratives re-describe the world and simultaneously structure human behavior. The archives hold an ephemeral quality in all their stuff-ness made present through writing. Writing is all we have, so while we can’t abandon it, we must constantly recognize its power and the power we as writers hold to sway perception.