In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault concludes his chapter on disciplinary training with a statement on the productive nature of power: “In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth.”[1] Through processes of hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and examination, Foucault describes systems of disciplinary power that construct classification and knowledge about individuals and moral society. Melissa Adler then applies this analysis to library and archive work through a critique of classification at the Library of Congress. Arguing that library classifications “reproduce dominant discourses and produce silences through censorship or undercataloging,” she calls for the implementation of self-tagging within these systems, thereby providing “opportunities for minority and marginalized voices to speak in their own terms.”[2]
In this post I will apply these analyses of disciplinary power to the work of the Skid Row History Museum & Archive (SRHMA), where I am interning this academic year.[3] As a community-based archive dedicated to the unhoused and neglected community in Los Angeles’ Skid Row neighborhood, SRHMA demonstrates a process of resisting dominant strains of discourse to produce alternative knowledge. Like Adler’s call for self-tagging, SRHMA creates the opportunity for production by the marginalized, not those in control of a surveillance system. Despite this potential, I conclude by questioning my own positionality as an MLIS student working remotely on this archive during the COVID-19 pandemic and contributing to its organization as an outsider.
As a project of performing arts group Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD, an acronym itself designed to confuse the nomenclature of power), SRHMA has its roots in previous LAPD projects that assert the past and presence of a thriving and artistic community, notably the 2002 exhibition Is there history on Skid Row?.[4] The archive today contains a variety of materials made by LAPD and affiliated artists across its almost forty-year performance history, collected from activist organizations working from Skid Row, and created by academics, journalists, politicians about Skid Row and its residents. The museum and archival workspace is situated in a storefront downtown and ordinarily hosts exhibitions, performances, and community gathering—though the museum is currently closed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
For Foucault, examination is one part of disciplinary power that constructs knowledge through “the accumulation of documents, their seriation, the organization of comparative fields making it possible to classify, to form categories, to determine averages, to fix norms.”[5] Archivists demonstrate this power through their collection and documentation procedures, thereby asserting significance about materials and deciding norms in the historical record. SRHMA’s mission is therefore to use this same power on behalf of the marginalized community to create alternative understandings of significance and normality. Furthermore, Michelle Caswell describes the productive power of identity-based community archives as “not just about collecting materials that document people who look like us … but about finding precedence in the past for how we move forward” – the archival imaginary.[6] By asserting the history and humanity of those who live in Skid Row, SRHMA produces knowledge for the future and tools for justice.
This process is executed through a collection policy that expands beyond materials made by Skid Row residents to materials from outsiders, creating a corpus of discourse about Skid Row to be analyzed and mobilized. One of the collections I’m working on consists of newspapers and articles related to Skid Row and homelessness, including many from mainstream publications – Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Herald Examiner – that present a dismissive view of the neighborhood. Simone Browne quotes Steve Mann to define sousveillance, a corollary to surveillance, as “acts of ‘observing and recording by an entity not in a position of power or authority over the subject of the veillance.’”[7] SRHMA’s collection presents a method of sousveillance of the systems marginalizing the neighborhood and its residents through popular and political discourse. Articles that emphasize violence, drug use, and portray Skid Row residents as criminals on the street by choice have fed directly into programs like the Safer Cities Initiative that increased the police presence on Skid Row dramatically.[8] Similar to the case study from Gillian Rose of historians studying London’s East End of the 1880s to “examine the way bourgeoisie produced an apparently truthful account of the working-class area, and to explore the effects that had on its residents in terms of the various institutional interventions legitimated by that ‘truth,’”[9] LAPD uses these collections in their performances and activism to advocate for better treatment and resources for Skid Row residents. The current exhibition at the museum, “How to House 7000 People In Skid Row,”[10] connects directly to LAPD’s organization of public comments on the City Planning Department’s DTLA 2040 plan, arguing instead for a plan to extend affordable housing zoning to all of Skid Row.[11]
Beyond simply collecting the material, SRHMA presents the opportunity for materials to be contextualized according to the community’s perspective. Adler discusses institutional Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) that misrepresent and marginalize groups that are deemed somehow flawed and “incapable of adequate social participation.”[12] Yet LSCH and other disciplined vocabularies are adopted widely by institutions to describe archival and library materials, regardless of affiliation to the Library of Congress itself or other federal institutions. The description and metadata at SRHMA does not incorporate LCSH and is instead formed from the vocabulary of activists and residents in Skid Row. As the archival work is typically undertaken in the same museum space that acts as a community gathering space, dialog can readily inform description. Additionally, as many of the collections are formed from LAPD projects written and performed by Skid Row residents, their perspective is inherent in the documents themselves. A project like What Fuels Development? (2016) that comments directly on events in the neighborhood—in this case, activism to halt a liquor license for a restaurant in the ground floor of a residential hotel housing formerly homeless people—demonstrates this process. Within the project is a critique of euphemisms for parts of Skid Row used by developers to rebrand the neighborhood without its current residents like “historic core,” “gallery row” or the “new downtown.”[13] The materials and recordings of the performances are housed in the archive and serve to frame and describe collected outside accounts of the events.[14]
Unfortunately, the days of the COVID-19 pandemic are not typical times. While archival work continues, I began my internship in September and haven’t been able to work in the museum or collaborate much with the community that would otherwise influence the description and classification I impart to SRHMA materials. While the pandemic has furthered hardship for Skid Row residents, I am privileged to have steady housing, food, and means to stay healthy. In many ways, I am an outsider, yet I participate in the discourse that produces knowledge in the archive. That my perspective may reproduce dominant discourse and limit the productive power of SRHMA’s archival work remains a challenge.
[1] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish and The Birth of the Prison. (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 194.
[2] Melissa Adler, “Disciplining Knowledge at the Library of Congress,” Knowledge Organization 39, no. 5 (2012).
[3] Sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the UCLA Community Archives Lab.
[4] Los Angeles Poverty Department, “Is there history on Skid Row?” https://www.lapovertydept.org/projects/is-there-history-on-skid-row/
[5] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 190.
[6] Michelle Caswell, “Inventing New Archival Imaginaries: Theoretical Foundations for
Identity-Based Community Archives,” Identity Palimpsests (Los Angeles, CA: Litwin Books, 2014), 49.
[7] Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 19.
[8] Heather Mac Donald, “Skid row in rehab,” Los Angeles Times, November 18, 2007, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-nov-18-op-mac_donald18-story.html/
[9] Gillian Rose, “Discourse Analysis I and II” in Visual Methodologies: 3rd Edition (Sage: Thousand Oaks, CA, 2012), 196.
[10] Video walkthrough available while the museum is closed: https://vimeo.com/481505119
[11] “Public Comments by Skid Row advocates submitted to DCP's DTLA2040 draft community plan.” YouTube video, 43:07, Los Angeles Poverty Department, January 13, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wx-aZN0IdRw
[12] Adler, “Disciplining Knowledge.”
[13] Los Angeles Poverty Department, “What Fuels Development?” https://www.lapovertydept.org/what-fuels-development/
[14] Gale Holland, “Alcohol permit denied for eatery in building that serves homeless,” Los Angeles Times, March 13, 2014, https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-xpm-2014-mar-13-la-me-ln-skid-row-alcohol-20140313-story.html
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