The Place, Time, and Power of Representation | Peter Polack

Where to begin? Representation is the power that comes from the dominance of a particular point of departure. In our discourse, our arguments, and our explanations, we must always begin from somewhere, and this conceptual starting point represses alternative conceptualizations of reality. It disempowers new beginnings with recourse to old ones, or masks the beginnings of others with our own. What is unique about critical theory is that it recognizes the characteristic power of representation, and so it can destabilize it. We see this in the work of Edward Said and David Hudson: their contention is that particular points of departure – “Orientalism" and “global information inequality” – have overshadowed particular circumstances, and that taking the latter as a new point of departure is essential to destabilizing dominant conceptualizations of reality. At first glance, there seems to be a paradox here: why should we take Said and Hudson’s own points of departure instead of those of the Orientalists or normative “global information inequality” discourse? It is because the former are critical theory: only they call attention to the distinctive power of representation; the latter merely employ it.

To call attention to the power of representation is to take a representation as one’s point of departure, and to locate the conditions of its development as belonging elsewhere; that is, in another place or time. For Said, the emergence of the Orient takes place in the West. Orientalism is developed within the West according to “institutions, traditions, conventions, agreed-upon codes of understanding” that are absolutely removed from its subject matter. The Orient is thereby constructed and “restructured” in such a way that cultural or scientific representations of it take precedence over individual accounts of it. In this way, the West becomes the dominant point of departure for conceptualizing the Orient – for any scholar “to get at the Orient he must pass through the learned grids and codes provided by the Orientalist.” The critical theoretical move is to identify that Orientalism is a representation: it is a different entity than its subject matter, with its own rules, discourses, and internal consistency. That such a representation can take shape distinctly from its subject matter enables its power.

Accordingly, Hudson addresses the representations of “global information inequality” discourse, which take technological solutionism as their point of departure. To call attention to the power of these representations qua technological solutions, Hudson identifies that they mask historically contingent problems with invented problems of information access. For example, “good governance narratives” propose that certain nations are underdeveloped because they lack information technology solutions. At the same time, these narratives maintain paradoxically that information technology solutions are licensed by the developed nations that produce them. Therefore, “good governance narratives” deploy the solution of information technology to ostensibly resolve unequal material conditions without any mention of their historical emergence. By indicating that “good governance narratives” propose to solve longstanding problems with a scope of solutions that is framed by technological futurisms, Hudson demonstrates that their technological point of departure has developed distinctly from an understanding of material and historical conditions of inequality. However, he does not manage to elaborate how such a discrepancy can come to pass. What enables “good governance narratives” to take hold as a representation of material circumstances of inequality?

It is Said's critical theory that escapes the criticism of representation to address the conditions of its emergence, perpetuation, and power. Said acknowledges these conditions explicitly when he identifies Orientalism as “a system of opportunities for making statements.” To Said, Orientalism is not just a narrative constructed to dominate others (although its particular works have this tendency) as it is a self-perpetuating regime of discourse that rewards its adherents for “discursive consistency.” Whereas Orientalists are rewarded whenever they enforce or justify the legitimacy of their descriptions (herein lies their "didacticism"), non-Orientalists are also rewarded whenever they subscribe to or pronounce these prevailing conceptualizations. In this way, Orientalism is a system of representations that serves to penalize alterity – both in Western discourse and in non-Western ways of life – and every conforming contribution to Orientalist discourse can only “intensify, make more rather than less representative, the perspectives of the Orient.” The point of departure inaugurated by Orientalism exerts a centripetal force on thought.

The power characteristic of representation, then, is not an autopoetic force that emanates from singular representations of the Orient or the “developing world.” Instead, the power of representation is the condition of possibility that is produced and reinforced by a particular point of departure, which may itself comprise many representations. It rests not on the quality or the conviction of these representations but on their prevalence, their accessibility, and their inscription into cultural norms – in short, on their dominance over a field of possible places to start from. This is what Said addresses when he characterizes the Orient as “a system of representations framed by a whole set of forces that brought the Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness, and later, Western empire.” It is why Hudson asks us to “recognize that racialized difference is produced and reproduced contextually and often implicitly.” Representations frame our reality and shape our thought whenever we do not critically examine them as points of departure. Because whether these representations begin as accidents or conspiracies, they end in entrenchments. 

References

Hudson, David J. “On Dark Continents and Digital Divides: Information Inequality and the Reproduction of Racial Otherness in Library and Information Studies.” Journal of Information Ethics, 25, no. 1 (2017): 62-80. 

Said, Edward W. "Orientalism: western conceptions of the Orient. 1978." Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin (1995).

Exploitation and Internships: Evaluating the Exploitative Nature of Internships in Archival Environments from a Marxist Critical Standpoint by Sakena Al-Alawi

Archivists are constantly collecting, arranging, describing, digitizing, creating finding aids, and making archival collections accessible online. Their duties are labor-intensive, time-consuming, and require a specific set of skills and a significant amount of education. Some digital archivists are compensated or marginally acknowledged for their part in research, but a majority of their labor goes unrecognized. Volunteers and archival student interns receive even more subsistent compensation in the form of class credit for their work, yet the institution gets something more valuable—their labor. Separately, their labor is worth about equal exchange for what they are given in terms class credit, but their accumulated labor creates the very research that builds capital for the institution. I use Marxist critical theory to dissect student and volunteer digital archival labor in academic institutions to determine if they are being exploited. If so, is exploitation unavoidable? Is there a place for neoliberal, bourgeois ideology in digital archival environments?

Archival student interns and volunteers are neither hired by the university nor are they contracted freelancers, their labor is not as easily quantifiable as regularly paid archivists. Volunteers can give their time in exchange for just the experience or their enjoyment. Sometimes, students volunteer their labor for the same reasons as regular volunteers or they can use their archival experience on their curricula vitae to show prospective employers. Both laborers have the potential to earn wages or an exchange of equal value.[1] This earning potential affords student interns and volunteers the label of wage laborer, but I would go further in complicating whether or not their labor is being exploited by institutions in the same way that the proletariat’s labor is exploited through competitive antagonism in Marx and Engels’s Manifesto. The capitalist uses the labor of the proletariat and the proletariat uses the capital from the capitalist in an attempt to gain status, fueling competition between proletariats and the distinct classes.[2]

In the case of the volunteer, there is not so much competition as there is a love of their labor. Volunteers are enthusiasts. For a student, in terms of class credit, all are required to do the archival labor as part of an assignment, therefore there is no competition unless the student is interning, mirroring the paid archivist. When their labor is commodified is when exploitation occurs. Thus, exploitation is situational.[3] In Feminist Research Practices and Digital Archives, Michelle Moravec illustrates how student labor is situationally exploitative:

While there are clearly benefits to students from meaningful engagement in crowdsourcing projects, the authors of ‘A Student Collaborators’ Bill of Rights’ argue that students should not be required to perform digitisation or other routine tasks, which could be construed to include transcription, without pay as part of an internship or class project. […] Cifor and Lee note ‘neoliberal models for archival labour, which favour outsourcing and costing above all else, can also serve to support unjust and damaging institutions.[4]

The experience and knowledge students gain from their archival labor is immeasurable, but what the institutions gain from their labor is obvious and can be exploitative if pay is not introduced into the relationship. However, the only way institutions can make these provisions is if they can get the funding. In most cases, funding only comes when institutions have something to bring to the table by way of recognition and social power. Without exploiting the labor of students, production is slow and slow archival work means cutbacks. Institutions themselves are folded into the struggle of the factory system where the institution seeks to create more subsets of labor, dividing work amongst many student laborers to produce immediate results that they can show benefactors for funding.[5] As a result, they feed into the pre-established system that has devalued their institution and the archivists position. The bourgeois of Marx’s era has evolved into a neoliberal bourgeois class that has the technology to “obliterate all distinctions of labour” but we cannot ask the institution to be the one to make the change.[6]

In The TwitterEthics Manifesto, Dorothy Kim and Eunsong Kim suggest “if we want to transform the space to what we want it to be, we must disrupt the system.”[7] The way in which we can shift this paradigm is by finding a way to even out the exploitation. While opinion is split on both, I propose a fusion of two possible solutions. Firstly, hopefully, through means of pay but if not through means of pay, maybe in the form of acknowledgement. If going through pay, institutions would have to start by leveling the playing field between archivist and intern. This would have to come through the institution itself.[8] Whereas, if we were going to reverse exploitation through acknowledgement, it would come through the likely source of researcher.[9] The researcher is a key player in that they have the ability to change the system from the outside. It cannot be the job of the system to change itself, instead all archival users who access the digitized collection can aid in changing the system by citing and acknowledging archivists who made these collections available online in their papers. Neoliberal ideology is just a reimagining of a failed pre-existing capitalist system, whereas the researcher has the ability to create a new system much similar to the communism of Marx and Engels. Like Marx and Engels’ Manifesto, archival scholars’ writings can bring awareness to this imbalance of power. Together, both solutions can bring about change.

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[1] Karl Marx, “The Critique of Capitalism: Wage Labour and Capital,” In The Marx-Engels Reader, Part II: (New York: WW Norton, 1978), 204.

[2] Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” 1848. Available at:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf

[3] David Hesmondhalgh, “User-generated Content, Free Labour and the Cultural Industries,” Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization, 10(3,4) (2010): 276-248.

[4] Michelle Moravec, “Feminist Research Practices and Digital Archives,” Australian Feminist Studies, 32(91-92) (2017): 192.

[5] Marx and Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party.”

[6] Marx, “The Critique of Capitalism: Wage Labour and Capital.”

[7] Dorothy Kim and Eunsong Kim, “Twitter Ethics Manifesto,” 2014. Available at: https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-twitterethics-manifesto

[8] Stacie Williams, “Implication for Archival Labor.” 2016. Available at:

https://medium.com/on-archivy/implications-of-archival-labor-b606d8d02014

[9] Moravec, “Feminist Research Practices and Digital Archives.”

Bibliography  

Hesmondhalgh, David. “User-generated Content, Free Labour and the Cultural Industries.” Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization, 10(3,4) (2010): 276-248. 

Kim, Dorothy and Kim, Eunsong. “TwitterEthics Manifesto.” 2014. Available at: 
https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-twitterethics-manifesto

Marx, Karl. “The Critique of Capitalism: Wage Labour and Capital.” In The Marx-Engels 
Reader. (New York: WW Norton, 1978), Part II: 203-217. 

Marx, Karl and Engels, Fredrick. “Manifesto of the Communist Party.” 1848. Available at:      
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf

Moravec, Michelle. “Feminist Research Practices and Digital Archives.” Australian Feminist 
Studies, 32(91-92) (2017): 186-201. 

Williams, Stacie. “Implication for Archival Labor.” 2016. Available at:   
https://medium.com/on-archivy/implications-of-archival-labor-b606d8d02014 

                                                                                                                                              

"Bodies That Matter": Searching for Queer Bodies in Queer Archives by Marika Cifor

It is the work of queer archives to “find and imagine an archive or collection of historical traces in spaces that have often been overlooked.”[1] The possibilities of queer archives “to conjure,” a term used by sociologist Avery Gordon to describe a “particular form of calling up and calling out the forces that make things what they are in order to fix and transform a troubling situation,” is central to creating radically open, contestable and contradictory archives that queer histories, queer people and their traces demand.[2] A (re)focus on the body has been one of queer theory’s most valuable and interesting scholarly contributions. Drawing inspiration from queer information studies scholar Jamie Lee’s working conception of a “Queer/ed Archival Methodology” (Q/M) to develop strategies aimed at ensuring that “complex, contradictory and non-normative histories have their place in society’s record” this post will look at the often overlooked place of the actual physical queer body in the queer archives. This search will point towards the larger need to conjure up the bodies and their traces that haunt the archives more broadly.[3] I ground my queer theoretical analysis in the pit stains of a t-shirt, literal traces of physical bodies of the gay leathermen that haunt the ONE National Lesbian and Gay Archives.

            The white cotton t-shirt in my hands features in small size on right breast and in large scale on its back the logo, a cowboy hat emblazed with the word “Stud” riding atop the classic black leather motorcycle boot, of the Stud.[4] The Stud on Melrose was a Los Angeles bar serving the gay male leather community until it was sold and renamed in 1988.[5] The gay leather community has a long history in Los Angeles, the home of the Satyrs Motorcycle Club, the first gay motorcycle club in 1954 and many of the earliest leather bars in America. This t-shirt, one of many hundreds in ONE’s expansive t-shirt collection bears the physical marks of its history, twin yellow stains of perspiration creep out from the armpits, marking this as an artifact that has lived a life beyond safety of the Hollinger box in which it now resides.[6] These perspiration marks are evidence not only of past wear, but also ask us to reckon with in the words of archival studies scholar Verne Harris “more than evidence of what is past,” in the artifact and archives there is also always story, imagination and future to consider within the trace that remains.[7]

            The story, the mostly unknown provenance, of this t-shirt begs me to imagine the queer body that wore it, that marked its surface, as well as the queer bodies that have touched in its second life in the archives. It calls for me to queer, to consider an object beyond what is considered normal, normative, legitimate, proper, or expected, my understandings of the place of bodies in archives.[8] Like Lee I see queering as a verb “working on and within the archive” intervening in the conventional, the proper and hegemonic power dynamics of many archives and archival practices.[9] According to Lee, “as a methodology, queer must relate to the epistemological and world-making endeavor of archives built specifically to represent voices and peoples that are often excluded from what is considered proper, professional, and traditional archives.[10] The ONE is such an archives founded to collect and preserve materials related to LGBTQ topics, issues, communities and individuals.[11] There are concerns about the cleaning up queer history, making it confirm homonormative values. Looking at and collecting the history of queer bodies, particularly the bodies of gay leathermen, ensures that queer history was never and will never be proper. The leathermen who challenged with their bodies, desires, and relations the legitimate, the normal and the normative deserve a queer consideration in the archives.

I use a queer method to argue that archives are haunted by the slippery presences and absences of physical bodies, of those the documented and undocumented, and of those who perform archival labors. Used to colloquially to describe the lingering, the poignant and evocative presences that make difficult to either ignore or forget them the idea of hauntings is central to queer archives and to my examination of the Stud t-shirt. A more theoretical take on haunting by Gordon in her seminal work Ghostly Matters describes it as “an animated state of unresolved social violence is making itself know, sometimes very directly, sometimes more obliquely.”[12] Thus hauntings for Gordon are the feelings or senses that something is happening out there that we cannot see or that altogether fails sight; ghosts are then the empirical proof of such hauntings, “that special instance of the merging of the visible and the invisible.”[13] She uses “ghost stories” as the means through which we make ghosts visible and by which we actually make worlds by narrating ourselves into a particular account of the world. Bodies, while not usually physically present in archival collections or our descriptions of them, nevertheless haunt them and creating a particularly queer kind of connection that transcends normative bounds of space and time, signaling towards an archives that is always still becoming.[14]

The queer body is an important focus for queer people, practices, lives and their archives. While not reducible to bodies and their desires, queerness often is lived in and articulated through physical bodies. In addition to intellects and affects, it is through their physical bodies and their excretions that many gay leathermen expressed their desires, sexualities, and in the coming together of bodies in spaces like the Stud built communities, identities, stories, and futures. The choices of these men to express through their bodies queer forms of masculinity, to have and to live out their non-normative, both within and outside of the gay community, desires, fantasies and practices calls needed attention to the urgency of documenting complex, contradictory and non-normative (queer) histories in the archives. These are stories that can sometimes only be told through bodies and their traces. Queer studies has always had a significant focus on bodies in their various states. These engagements range from the queer responses to neglect, dismissal, and erasure of our histories by dominant cultural forces to reclaiming a queer past and producing queer histories that account for the complex, non-normative, and even the contradictory.[15] Particularly notable is the work on sexology and its bio-political strategies for the control, management and disciplining of bodies and their non-normative desires and identities.[16] From the initial construction of modern homosexuality in the 19^th century, the body has been central to both scientific and popular constructions.[17] The body’s features were examined, identified, measured and mapped to classify sexual deviance according to various typologies and to find the distinguishing features of same-sex desire.[18] Many queer historians’ efforts have reclaimed the examinations of the queer body for queer people. Other notable engagements with bodies include the work of queer theorists such as Judith Butler in Bodies that Matter on examining how the power of heterosexual hegemony forms the “matter” of bodies, sex, and gender arguing that power operates to constrain sex from the start, delimiting what counts as a viable sex and furthering her work on “performativity.” Bodies, and particularly queer ones, have been neglected in archival studies and practices.

The story of physical bodies and archives is underexplored territory for archival studies despite the central importance of the body in lived experience. The primary work on the relations of bodies and archives has been done scholars of performance, particularly dance and including queer performances. This work by scholars such as Diana Taylor, Laura Griffiths and Andre Lepecki has argued that in the context of performance the living physical body can even serve as an “archival document”, where the “lived, embodied traces of performances do not disappear but reside in the bodies…of those who encountered the performance.”[19] In addition to this work, there is a long history in archives of the contending with and of the collecting realia including certain bodily remnants and remains such as locks of hair, often kept and given as mementos of particular lives as was fashionable in the Victorian era.[20] More recently archival discourse has engaged with the idea of tattoos as archival records that cannot exist independently of the bodies they mark and as archival records challenging the norms of Western notions of archives.[21] The physical bodies and their roles in performing archival labors, doing research, processing, or providing access are also often ignored outside of the contexts of practical concerns such as the leaving of finger prints on the surface of archival photographs. Queering the archives opens it to new understandings and examinations of the physical, intellectual and affective dimensions of archival labors. Some queer stories are told through bodies be they in performance, bodies that suffer, or bodies that survive and leave their traces. Bodies, their remains, traces, and excretions tell unique and important stories the lived experiences of queer lives. Sanitizing queer histories of bodies by refuse the presence of bodily excretions point to the places where conformity to archival norms, though necessary at times, can also be “treacherous”[22] The catalog records for the t-shirt collection at ONE for example point to the sizes, colors, and inscriptions of the t-shirts, but ignore the bodies that once occupied them and the traces that remain. The absences of bodies, through sanitary efforts or benign neglect, point to other failings of the archives and archival descriptions to live up to their potentials. Bodies are also central to exploring the affective potentialities of the archives. It is through bodies and our slipping by and bumping up against other bodies, broadly defined, that we experience affect. Queer theorist Ann Cvetkovich has compellingly argued that “gay and lesbian history demands a radical archive of emotion in order to document intimacy, love, and activism—all areas of experience that are difficult to chronicle through the materials of the traditional archive.”[23] A deep consideration of bodies is needed to build queer archives.

Those two misshapen, yellowed and creeping stains of perspiration, those traces of queer bodies and their excretions are the ghosts that haunt the queer archives. It is high time to reopen the Hollinger box. By searching for the ghosts that haunt us, by conjuring up bodies and their traces we can queer, radically opening the archives. Opening the archives to queer bodies as evidence, and to stories they tell as well as the possibilities for the future they open up allows for an understanding of the archives that is always queer and always becoming.[24]

Works Cited

Calano, Mark Joesph. “Archiving bodies: Kalinga batek and the im/possibility of an archive,” Thesis 11 112, No. 1(October 2012): 98-112.

Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003.

Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

DeSilvey, Caitlin. “Art and archive: memory-work on a Montana homestead.” Journal of Historical Geography 33, 7 (2007): 878-900.

“GAR0876.” ONE T-Shirt Collection, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, USC Libraries, University of Southern California.

Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination.

Mankato: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Griffiths, Laura. “Between bodies and the archive: situating the act.” International Journal of Performance Arts & Digital Media 9, No. 1 (2013): 183-195.

Harris, Verne. “Genres of the Trace: Memory, Archives and Trouble.” Archives and Manuscripts 40, No. 3 (2012): 147-157.

Lee, Jamie. “Beyond Pillars of Evidence: Exploring the Shaky Ground of Queer/ed Archives and Their Methodologies.” In Research in the Archival Multiverse edited by Anne Gilliland, Andrew Lau, and Sue McKemmish, Forthcoming.

Los Angles Leather History. “Los Angeles Leather History Timeline.” Accessed June 5, 2014. http://laleatherhistory.weebly.com/la-leather-history-timeline.html

Lutz, Deborah. “The Dead Still Among us: Victorian Secular Relics, Hair Jewelry and death culture.” Victorian Literature and Culture 39 (2011): 127–142.

Marcus, Sharon. “Queer Theory for Everyone: A Review Essay,” Signs 31 (1) (2005): 191-128.

ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives. “History.” Accessed June 5, 2014.

http://one.usc.edu/about/history/

Terry, Jennifer. “Anxious Slippages between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’: A Brief History of the Scientific Search for Homosexual Bodies.” In Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture, edited by Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. 129-169.

Wright, Kirsten. “Recording ‘a very particular Custom’: Tattoos and the Archive.” Archival Science 9 (2009): 99–111.

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[1] Jamie Lee, “Beyond Pillars of Evidence: Exploring the Shaky Ground of Queer/ed Archives and Their Methodologies,” from Research in the Archival Multiverse, Anne Gilliland, Andrew Lau, and Sue McKemmish, eds. Forthcoming, 26.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid, 6.

[4] GAR0876, ONE T-Shirt Collection, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, USC Libraries, University of Southern California.

[5] The Stud was sold to new owners who named it The Zone, which became Griff's about six months later and stayed open for 5 years. It was sold in 1993 and re-opened as The Faultline in 1994.” Los Angeles Leather History, “Los Angeles Leather History Timeline.”

[6] The author is indebted to Rebecka Sheffield’s off-chance mention of stains on another t-shirt in the collections of the Canadian Gay and Lesbian Archives that sparked this search.

[7] Verne Harris, “Genres of the Trace: Memory, Archives and Trouble,” Archives and Manuscripts 40, No. 3 (November 2012), 153.

[8] Lee, 6.

[9] Ibid., 11.

[10] Ibid., 6.

[11] ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, “History.”

[12] Ibid., 18.

[13] Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Mankato: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 24.

[14] Lee, 7.

[15] Lee, 2; Sharon Marcus, “Queer Theory for Everyone: A Review Essay,” Signs 31, no. 1 (2005), 201.

[16] Lee, 15.

[17] Jennifer Terry, “Anxious Slippages between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’: A Brief History of the Scientific Search for Homosexual Bodies,” in Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture eds. Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 129.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Laura Griffiths, “Between bodies and the archive: situating the act,” International Journal of Performance Arts & Digital Media 9, No. 1 (2013), 186.

[20] Caitlin DeSilvey, “Art and archive: memory-work on a Montana homestead,” Journal of Historical Geography 33, 7 (2007), 878-900; Deborah Lutz, “The Dead Still Among Us: Victorian Secular Relics, Hair Jewelry and death culture,” Victorian Literature and Culture 39 (2011), 127–142.

[21] Kirsten Wright, “Recording ‘a very particular Custom’: Tattoos and the Archive,” Archival Science 9 (2009), 99–111;  Mark Joesph Calano, “Archiving bodies: Kalinga batek and the im/possibility of an archive,” Thesis 11 112, no 1(October 2012), 98-112.

[22] Lee, 13.

[23] Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings:  Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 241.

[24] For more on the archives as always in a state of becoming see Jacques Derrida, Archive fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 11, 91.