When is Archiving Too Much?

Larsen’s photo not taken fits in perfectly with Derrida’s theory: the “new dynamic” that both her and her subject’s paths take is in direct correlation with Derrida’s archive “producing as well as recording”. This also gels nicely with Wood’s idea of preserving all time for all time.

I’ve very much enjoyed reading these articles on archiving. My family this summer had several revelations about our genealogy, and almost all of them were because of the use of various archival records, be they books, maps, or the Internet. A “photo not taken” scenario figured in as well: There was a house built by our ancestors that was actually in the area, but no one in any book or map had taken a photo of the front or provided a detailed description or address of where it was located, and we eventually had to find it ourselves.

The mere fact that I am able to trace my lineage directly back to Charlemagne (I’m his 42nd great-grandson) shows me how useful and informative archives and records can be. However, take into account that it could also be dangerous to hold so much information for such a long period of time. Could Wood have been wrong about the lifespan of maps and archives? Every photo not taken, every map not drawn, and every archive not recorded could probably be said to be full of things we don’t know – and maybe that’s for the better sometimes.

On the one hand, it’s fascinating to have windows to the past, like the video that went viral a few years ago of an elderly man on the 50’s game show I’ve Got a Secret, being the last living person at the time to have seen the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. On the other, those windows hold immeasurable power and significance, as the US government found out when the Iraqi archives were destroyed. Where should the line be drawn?

Choosing our Memories

Within the three readings for this week, there was a distinct theme of discussing not only what is in archives but also what is absent from them. We often look at our written documents and our historical artifacts and can make deductions about its purpose and what it says about society at that period of time. But it becomes more challenging to discover what the things that are missing in our archives tell us.

            Marlene Manoff’s “Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines” delves into the idea of the missing in archives. She makes a point to notice how archived documents are not a pure and unbiased account of history but are taken from a certain perspective and by extension are missing the perspective of another. As Derrida said in his work, archivization can produce events in the same way as it records them. By remembering events in a certain way, we in turn are turning them into something else for future generations, In her section on the transparency of the archive, she writes, “whatever the archive contains is already a reconstruction—a recording of history from a particular perspective; it thus cannot provide transparent access to the events themselves” (Manoff 14). Manoff sites women studies and the study of native peoples as two areas where archived information is severely lacking. She suggests that a course for women studies to take would be “to write women back into the historical record—to fill the gaps and correct the omissions in the archive” (Manoff 15).

This leads to an interesting question when considering Erika Larsen’s article “Photograph Not Taken.” While she believes that her photographs that are not taken are ones that were not given and therefore not to be taken, is she possibly falling into the trap of creating an archive that does not capture a close approximation to the real event but rather her own perception of it. By omitting the events and people she photographs she is structuring her own personal archive in a certain way. However can omission of certain moments be necessary? Is it more important that some things stay solely in our own mind and memory and fit different situations when we need them to? Is it better to allow certain pieces of memory to not be archived and to die with us? Or is our choosing what to remember and what not to remember dangerous to future generations?