I had a great question from my colleague today:
Hi Adeola. I’m curious how you think about your archiving practices in relation to your archiving (analysis? retrieval?)… I know in your work you are more focused on studying rather than creating archives. But you do create them, so I’m wondering how the 2 activities relate for you. Is one more personal and the other more academic? Or can there be such a distinction for you? What do you think Benjamin was doing with the Arcades project?
This was a great question, because it forced me to think carefully and articulate my approach to archiving. Here is my answer:
I don’t work on “the archive”, per se, because I think that it is too fetishized as an object. I am interested in “archiving” as an everyday practice that has been part of modern life, for many people (anyone associated with a state, in one way or another) and today, it is THE modus operandus for most people who live in the world of electronic devices–from TV watchers, to phone callers, and email senders.
Right now, as I write I am engaging in an archival practice. To me this is more than simply creating an archive that someone can retrieve. I take a lot of inspiration from Benjamin’s arcades project, and many of his writings are part of my “top shelf.” I don’t want to make the comment TOO long, so here is a link to my blog, where I discuss Benjamin a little:
http://archivingthecity.com/2009/01/14/one-day-sculpture/
You will see that Benjamin is very interested in trash, debris, what as been discarded. Why? Not only because it needs to be retrieved and saved (the Arcades project was as much about his life in Paris, as anything else. It is far from a library, or national archive, or institutional archive), or worked with in any conventional way, but because looking at the trash–dumpster diving–was a way to re-train our historical senses, to begin to see how the past is never really gone, and does not necessarily need to be “retrieved” because it never actually left. The Arcades project is not conventional history, or even conventional archiving, in any sense. It is not about creating narratives. I think it is about training oneself as a researcher to do what, in one’s time seems odd, challenging, difficult or even embarassing. What is today’s equivalence of (academic) dumpster diving?
