Both books for this week address Derrida’s discussion of “archival fever,” and interestingly enough, both offer a critique of the materiality of archive: Steedman looks at dust, while Burton (in the introduction) talks of “googlemania.” More importantly, both challenge certain assumptions about what the archive is and the role of the archive in conducting historical research. For today’s post, I will briefly examine Steedman’s notion of archive fever, and I will delay discussion of Burton’s collection for class, for I would hate to comment on it without having finished reading it.
In Dust, Carolyn Steedman suggest that dust is the philosophy of indestructibility (164), which runs counter to most understandings of dust as the destruction of the archive. She claims that there is a circularity of dust (i.e. fibers -> rags -> paper -> dust -> fertilizers), which means objects never fully disappear; rather, they become part of a new history. Steedman gives dust the ontological status of being a necessary corporeal and incorporeal component of history (i.e. the physical sources of history and the ideas of history). As she points out, the physical process of book making led to the spread of anthrax to tanners, book makers, and even historians who encountered anthrax spores in the archives. The historian’s encounter with the anthrax spore led to what Steedman calls Archive Fever Proper. Though this feature of the archive is interesting, Steedman is saying something much deeper: namely, the historical relics that we encounter in the archive are like dust in the sense that they “infect” our thoughts and ideas. Just like the anthrax spores that cause sickness, the remnants of past cultures infect our bodies and give us an unshakable sickness. It is not a coincidence that the non-proper type of archive fever typically attacks the researcher the penultimate night or on the flight home; it is during these lucid moments that one sees how transient the archives are. Meaning, one can never fully complete one’s research, and even if one could, the materials in which one’s research is recorded are doomed to deteriorate.
Posted on November 23, 2009
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