the will to archive and the responsibility of archives towards the radical voice
The archives’ job is to preserve and maintain “historic” materials that are not books or objects, forever. Yes, forever. Our tools and techniques are meant to last hundreds of years. We often touch something in the hope that the original might never be touched again our lifetimes, to preserve it. But how do archives work? What makes a piece of material a good candidate for saving? Who decides what to keep and what are the methods they use to decide? Are archivists good people? Unfortunately, our profession often works actively towards minimizing the alternative voice and that has special relevance for researchers and writers and even activists today. What archivists internalize in their work:
The reliable narrator is a myth
The trustworthy source is a myth
What archivists usually don’t internalize:
The neutral archivist is a myth
“Keeping your nose to the professional grindstone, and leaving politics to your left-over moments, assumes that your profession is not inherently political. It is neutral. Teachers are objective and unbiased. Textbooks are eclectic and fair. The historian is even-handed and factual. The archivist keeps records, a scrupulously neutral job. And so it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut says.” Howard Zinn to the Society of American Archivists in 1977
Zinn was invited because at the time he was intellectually sexy and interesting and had already written books on “alternative” history and archivists were interested in the concept of “hidden” histories. But his condemnation of our profession was a wake-up call for some and a chance at re-entrenchment for others, and both camps went their own ways. The archival profession in the US is and has always been majority white and middle-class, so the biases of that group are always going to frame the narrative and normalize the things that white middle class people know about — and this has led to some stark problems in our field over the past 200 years. Zinn saw this, and I’m going to come back to this issue in a little bit. But first I want to talk about what we can and do keep.
Written communication, although posited to have been invented by bureaucrats, has side-stepped control in every generation, and there is a long and respectable history of using print for resistance (see: Cicero, Socrates, the Torah, etc). Archives keep print, historically, and we are very good at it now after 10,000 years. So IN THEORY, it should be easy to keep alternative print voices in archives and we should see them all over the place!
But do archives actually keep these voices?
You must know: archives are dependent on two things above all: the means to keep and the will to keep.
Archivists are employees of other entities (tho’ some archivists are challenging that narrative, the reality in our field is and has been that the more powerful your employer, the more important you are to the field of archives). Employees of powerful organizations can always claim after the fact that they were just following orders but in practice it means that neutrality becomes a cloak of security which wraps up the archival community in false benevolence.
The alternative voice is by definition not the voice of power, which means the alternative voice’s access to the halls of historical memory is fraught and often either destroyed through disinterest in “unreliable”/ “hysterical” voices, or actively destroyed by agents of power.
The importance of keeping the “alternative” voice cannot be overstated. We have, as a profession, done a truly abysmal job of keeping those voices in our care. While individuals have always been able to keep the records of their own voice, regular homes or offices are not supported in the same way as archives traditionally have been. Functionally this means that the alternative narrative is lost to the more powerful one. We can take the example of the Jewish people as one of struggle against odds, but they are the exception that proves the rule, as we have lost Mithraism, many forms of now-heretical Christianity, and even earlier forms of Judaism to the dominant narrative. Time is a great eraser, and without diligent care, any voice can be erased.
In the digital age, we have more power to make others see us. This is why the alternative media in the 2000s is so powerful, historically speaking. One click, one like, can change a post from reaching 5 people to reaching 50,000. This is a level of power that was previously unattainable and it helps alternative narratives on both left and right (BLM, Charlottesville). So how much of the current “alternative” media is kept today? The truth is, not nearly enough. In the 40 years since Zinn’s speech to the archives profession, there has been an attempt to take in more than just rich white people’s archives (or the things their children made in rebellion of their ways), but the fact that we even call these “alternative” voices is presuming an otherness, a special case, which is at best patronizing. We have not done well, but we can do better.
“I know there are some good things being done in archival work, some pioneering efforts in recording events, in oral history with ordinary people, in black history, in labor history. But let’s resist the characteristically American trick of passing off fundamental criticism by pointing to a few reforms.” — Zinn
