Paper, Materiality and the Archived Page

Maryanne Dever

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781137498854
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137498861
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The emergence of digital technologies in the realm of archives has enlivened our understandings of archival materialities and lent a new intensity to our engagements with the archived page by prompting us to consider the potential of paper and the page in ways that we have hitherto largely ignored. Paper, Materiality and the Archived Page responds to this provocation by setting out an approach or an orientation to 'thinking through paper'. Critically, it questions what work the archived page does if it is more than an invisible or transparent support to text. Three exemplary case studies are offered on the letters of Greta Garbo, the messy archival remains of Australian writer Eve Langley and the letters and manuscripts of English poet Valentine Ackland. Together they demonstrate how approaches grounded in concerns with materiality and matter can shift how we understand archival research and what we accept as archival 'evidence'. They also reveal the emergent capacities of the paper page.

                            

© The Author(s) 2019

M. DeverPaper, Materiality and the Archived PageNew Directions in Book Historyhttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49886-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. The Matter of Archival Paperwork: An Introduction

Maryanne Dever¹

(1)

University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, Australia

Maryanne Dever

Email: [email protected]

Abstract

This chapter examines current debates concerning archives, paperwork and materiality, and begins to outline the case for why paper matters in archive-based literary research. The scope of the current study is laid out and its particular focus on twentieth-century literary and personal archives clarified. The chapter explores how the dominant view of paper as a mere neutral platform or carrier for written text has meant that its presence and significance in archival research has often been underappreciated. In this way, the chapter opens out the question of what constitutes ‘evidence’ in archive-based literary research, and it poses a set of questions and provocations that set the terms for the empirical studies of individual archival collections that follow.

Keywords

PaperMaterialityArchivesEvidenceManuscriptsDigitization

End Abstract

This is a book about archives and paper. It seeks a new and productive mode of engagement with the archived page. Its focus is on the particular case of modern literary and personal papers that survive their creators and caretakers to form the basis of archival collections (Fig. 1.1). The question that drives the book—namely how archived paper matters—is loosely inspired by novel debates emerging from what is becoming known as the field of ‘critical archival studies’. This is a field of inquiry that brings the traditional areas of archival science and records management together with insights from critical theory. In its explicit attention to the politics of archives and archiving it differs from conventional archive studies which focus on ‘the preservation, classification and interpretation of […] literary drafts and manuscripts as well as personal records’ primarily in the service of ‘the writing of biography and history’ (Van Mierlo 2018, p. 78). While critical archival studies also draws energy from new work in literary studies, queer theory, cultural studies and history, particularly colonial history, at the same time the field seeks to ‘make a much-needed intervention into the humanities, which has so often ignored the existence and legitimacy of archival studies as an area of rigorous academic inquiry’ (Caswell et al. 2017, p. 4). The field positions itself as transformative of how we understand what archives are, what they can do, and their role in the production of knowledge.

Fig. 1.1

Typescript and manuscript sheets in a folder entitled ‘Diary of Episodes, June to October 1928’. Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland Collection, Dorset County Museum. (Photo by the author)

Critical archival studies treats archives not as unproblematic repositories of source material but as subjects of inquiry in their own right. In this field, archives are understood as ‘figured’, that is, enmeshed in histories and politics that must be interrogated or accounted for before any investigation of individual collections can proceed (Stoler 2009; Ketelaar 2012). Indeed, such histories and politics are ultimately understood as constitutive of those collections and of individual documents. As will be evident, the field is indebted to the work of Michel Foucault on relations of knowledge and power (1972) and that of Jacques Derrida on the role of archival technologies (‘archivization’) in the shaping or making of history and memory (2002, p. 17). Although in critical archival studies the archive as a concept is generally treated in a less abstract and more particularized manner than in either Foucault’s or Derrida’s accounts, insights from their work are nevertheless integral to the field’s understanding of the contingent nature of the archive and of the need to problematize the idea of archival records as simply inert sources offering transparent and unmediated access to our past. While Derrida’s Archive Fever (2002) is regularly cited in contemporary discussions of archives and archiving, of greater relevance for this study are the occasional pieces brought together in the collection Paper Machine (2005), where Derrida speculates in a far more concrete manner on documents themselves and on the challenge new technologies might pose to archives and their paper documents. Importantly, he challenges the ‘commonsense’ view of paper as a neutral support or ‘inert surface laid out beneath some markings, a substratum for sustaining them’ (p. 42). The implied question of what paper is—and what it might do—if it is more than a mere support to writing is actively taken up in this book and explored via a series of archival case studies.

In this chapter, I locate my inquiry in terms of current debates concerning archives, paperwork and materiality and begin to outline the case for how and why paper matters in archive-based literary research. The focus on archived documents as paper might appear odd at first but it can be readily contextualized. Since the late 1990s we have witnessed a ‘turn’ (or return) to ‘things’ across the humanities and a new focus on relations between humans and things and the agency or potential of things (see, for example, Brown 2004; Domanska 2006). This is part of a broader ‘material turn’ that attempts to refigure nature, bodies and things for the humanities. In this context, it is not surprising to find rising interest in the thing that is paper. Indeed, scholarly attention to the general area of paper and paperwork has been developing steadily. One particularly generative work on the topic is Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper’s The Myth of the Paperless Office (2001). Their foundational study revealed how our continuing attachments to paper are entangled with its specific affordances as a technology. Their approach marked a turning away from a focus on what paper is, its history and its properties, towards an interrogation of what it can do or what it can make happen. The influence of these insights is evident in recent scholarly investigations of the productivity of paper in specifically bureaucratic settings, including Matthew Hull’s Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan (2012) and Ben Kafka’s The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (2012). Kafka, in particular, is interested in how the materiality of the bureaucracy is entangled with ‘the psychic life of paperwork’ (p. 16) or the fears and desires generated from working with paper. The field of early modern science studies, with its focus on paper and note taking in the recording and circulation of new knowledge has, together with the history of science, generated fascinating insights into the way particular tools of inscription enabled ‘the transformation of rats and chemicals into paper’ (Latour and Woolgar 1979, cited in Latour 1986, pp. 3–4; see also Jardine 2017). Indeed, as May and Wolfe observe, the increasing availability and relative affordability of paper established it as ‘the connective tissue’ of the early modern period (2010, p. 125).

A similar burgeoning interest in documents, forms and files is evident in critical legal studies, where scholars have sought to interrogate the paper document’s status not only as a material object but also as an analytical category and a methodological touchstone (Riles 2006; Vismann 2008). Additional impetus has also come from recent developments in media archaeology, with notable works such as Markus Krajewski’s Paper Machines: About Cards and Catalogs, 1548–1929 (2011), Lisa Gitelman’s Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (2014) and Anke te Heesen’s The Newspaper Clipping: A Modern Paper Object (2014). These latter three studies trace the evolution of different document forms and they explore how the various printing, systematizing, copying, cutting and pasting technologies with which they are associated have been adopted and become embedded in the everyday. Perhaps the most energy, however, has come from studies in the history of the book, a field of knowledge with a long history but one that has developed rapidly in recent decades. It is broadly dedicated to understanding ‘the book as a force in history’ (Darnton 1982, p. 65). This dynamic field of study insists upon the recognition of the book as a material object and upon the materiality of textual production, and has its origins in the new bibliography of the early twentieth century, which aspired to become ‘the science of the material transmission of literary documents’ (Greg 1914, p. 39). Book history and studies of the ‘material text’ (McGann 1991; Brayman et al. 2016) have together sponsored increasingly sophisticated understandings of the processes, institutions and materials that together give a text presence in the world and of precisely how the material book matters. They have also uncovered the complex historical interrelationships between publishing and paper as ‘the primary material of literature’ (Darnton 2007, p. 498). These investigations have been accompanied in recent years by an upsurge in popular histories of paper, including Ian Sansom’s Paper: An Elegy (2012), Lothar Müller’s White Magic: The Age of Paper (2014) and Mark Kurblansky’s Paper: Paging Through History (2016), all of which attest to a new-found fascination with what is assumed to be a threatened—or at least diminishing—technology. Indeed, together these histories reveal how paper and print are specific technologies belonging to a particular historical moment, one that is thrown into relief by the arrival of digital technologies. None of these works, however, tackles the specific case of archived literary and personal papers nor do they focus on the productivity of the archived page as this book will. But what each of them does achieve is the work of making visible something which so often falls from view.

I am alluding here to the manner in which paper is experienced by many archival researchers as something that simply disappears before their eyes or slips from conscious apprehension. In this respect, there are striking similarities to Andrea Pellegram’s exploration of paper in the context of office work, where it was everywhere and nowhere. As she writes:

The workers do not think much about paper, however. They are continually holding it, reading the words upon it, crinkling it up i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. The Matter of Archival Paperwork: An Introduction
• 2. The Weight of Paper
• 3. Archival Mess
• 4. Dark Archive
• 5. Afterword
• Back Matter