On September 9, 1931—after almost half a century of lobbying efforts by the American Historical Association, the Daughters of the American Revolution, veteran’s associations, and other epistemically powerful organizations—the long-standing Central Market in Washington, D.C.’s Federal Triangle was raised to make way for a new National Archives building. In a move to achieve what Jean-Francois Lyotard identified as the “geometry of the dominance over perceptual space,”[2] this transformation disciplined what was once a relatively unregulated social and commercial mooring, a discombobulated mass of push carts and produce stands owned by rural Americans, immigrants, and formerly enslaved peoples [3], into a federally controlled, bureaucratized spatiality. The Public Buildings Act of 1926, which authorized funding for the construction of the National Archives building, enabled “the Secretary of Treasury to provide suitable accommodations in the District of Columbia for the executive departments (…) and for courthouses, postoffices, immigration stations, custom houses, marine hospitals, quarantine stations, and other public buildings.”[4] In this context, the construction of the National Archives was part of a broader project to form a network of interdependent sites of surveillance [5] through which discipline can be “circulated in a ‘free’ state.”[6] The National Archives, then, is imbued with knowledge/power as expressed through its architecture.
In defining discourse analysis II, Rose offers two perspectives from which to analyze how particular institutions (or groups of institutions) concurrently condition their visitors to be seeing subjects and construct ontological realities that mediate the visitor’s capacity to see. First, institutions can be examined from within to explore how technologies of display, interpretation, and spatiality regulate the visitors’ perceptions of themselves, each other, and their surroundings. Second, institutions can be examined from the outside as components of a larger “intersecting paradigm”[9] of intertextual relationships between groups of images and institutions. I begin my analysis by applying the first perspective.
A quick look at the National Archives’ main level on the Visitor’s Guide map reveals a network of darkened, shadowy blocks juxtaposed with a brightly colored and centrally located semi-circle representing the Rotunda for the Charters of Freedom. Compartmentalizing the architectural space through a play of darkness and light, “establish[ing] presences and absences”[10] that dictate where the visitor can and cannot travel, this map immediately guides the crowd into the Rotunda’s 75-foot dome. Subtly illuminated from the periphery of the dome, far above the visitor’s field of vision, but remaining dimly lit at eye-level, this space plays with light and shadow to suggest the presence of an impersonal and omnipresent “conquering gaze” from above. Vertical visibility is prioritized over horizontal visibility. This gaze sees all visitors and subjectifies them by honing their individualized visions to particular signals within the room— most obviously, to the life-like Barry Faulkner murals depicting the drafting of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, as well as to the “Charters of Freedom” exhibited below.
The Rotunda accomplishes what Ann Reynolds describes as the transformation of the "visitors’ eyes into magnifying glasses, microscopes, or scalpels, which could reveal the invisible workings of a previously familiar but superficially understood (…) world.”[11] In this world, our so-called founding fathers manifested the standards of citizenship and freedom that continue to serve as a yardstick for normativity and belonging vis-a-vis a national surveillance infrastructure. When viewing the familiar scenes of early America as depicted by Faulkner, mounted high above eye-level directly below the dome, the visitor-eye enters an illusion that has been made to seem natural through Faulkner’s use of photographic realism. Indeed, Faulkner relied on contemporary portraits to recreate the likenesses of his murals’ subjects.[12] Displayed this way, the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights, enclosed in prominent cases along the room’s periphery, are fixed as evidence to legitimize a national history that can be seen but not touched; a one-sided visuality is constructed through which a pre-established ontology is inserted “between the [visitor’s] retina and the world.”[13] Through the exhibition space, a distorted narrative of America’s founding is reified and injected into the present. However, in light of Simone Browne’s assertion that “the historical formation of surveillance is not outside the historical formation of slavery,”[14] the absented violence and oppression lurking under the surface of the Rotunda’s nationalist discourse serve as “negative evidence” to reveal the glaring whiteness of the disciplining gaze.
The strict partitioning of public versus private spaces within the National Archives building also contributes to the discourse of visuality. The Public Vaults, situated as spatial extensions of the Rotunda, are open, brightly lit interactive gallery spaces that employ interpretive text, dioramas, and display cases to encourage contemplation of a curated selection of records. This space is meant to allow visitors to “experience the feeling of going beyond the walls of the Rotunda into the stacks.”[15] The displays are organized chronologically according to a Record of America timeline that outlines the progression of presidential communications (i.e., from handwritten letters to telegrams and radio to satellite images). Here, the confluence of manipulated spatiality and temporality prescribes visitors to see American bureaucracy as transparent, communicative, participatory, and empirical. The actual stacks—the inaccessible storage spaces fragmented into small storage compartments connected by winding staircases and narrow hallways—look more like Bentham’s panopticon than the Public Vaults reveal. Without the pretext of a monumental benevolence through which the National Archives proudly permits visitor-citizens the opportunity to see the “raw materials of our American democracy,”[16] the Stacks represent the site of knowledge construction in action: the place where the “raw materials” are selected, preserved, and made meaningful for visitors’ eyes by archivists/researchers whose invisibility affords them power. This conceptual tension between constructed visuality (the Vaults) and unmediated sight (the Stacks) reveals the disciplinary function of the National Archives’ architecture and the truth regime it produces.
In discussing the Public Records Act that authorized the construction of the National Archives, I have already touched upon Rose’s second, external approach to discourse analysis II. Anne Gilliland advances my argument by asserting that—because of state resistance to a centralized Federal government, a paper shortage after the Revolutionary War, and inadequate communication infrastructure—early America suffered an “absence of recordkeeping consciousness” until after World War I.[17] Consequently, the construction of the National Archives building, sandwiched between the newly constructed Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission, and two blocks east of the Department of Commerce, was meant to both normalize this disciplinary turn and condition American subjects to visualize their identities in relation to the state’s newly centralized gaze.
The physical embodiment of what Foucault terms governmentality, the buildings comprising the Federal Triangle are the very sites in which examination, hierarchical observation, and normalizing judgments are carried out, (dis)affording claims to citizenship and belonging. Considering, for example, the blatant racialization of the prison-industrial complex (re: the Department of Justice) and accumulation of property-wealth (re: the Department of Commerce), the discourse of visuality produced by the Federal Triangle can be reframed through the lens of Fanon’s “epidermalization”: rather than “the imposition of race on the body,”[18] though, this discourse imposes race on the landscape. Built in part to erase the existence of tenements and other under-resourced areas, [19] the federal buildings’ whitewashed (marble) façades, when seen together on the Mall, were made to have a high degree of imageability[20] in the national conscience to superimpose the state-eye onto the public-eye.
In recognizing the discourse of visuality that is produced by the National Archives building and its surroundings, it is important to also consider the physical and theoretical spaces within the US bureaucratic infrastructure that are intentionally obscured from view. It is in these spaces—which evade the “trap” of visibility[21]—that imaginative and liberatory disruptions of epistemic violence can and do occur. As LIS professionals, we can follow Browne in questioning the positionality of the National Archives’ discourse of visuality to expose its racialized, gendered, ableist, and heteronormative biases. We can also, as Rose suggests, recognize the autonomy of disciplined bodies who have always worked to agitate oppressive truth regimes through the formation and/or upholding of community archives, storytelling traditions, and participatory local histories outside of the mainstream discourse.
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