Rhetorical Responsiveness: Responding to Literacy Narratives as Teachers of Composition - by Cynthia L. Selfe and the DALN Consortium
Archives, for Derrida, are better understood not as static repositories but, rather, as active participants in the production of cultural knowledge, what Bruno Latour (1993) might describe as an actant, a non-human entity enrolled in, and having effects on, complex social network.. In this sense, archives don’t simply reflect history but rather participate in constructing and composing it.
Derrida (1998), for instance, argues that an archive
… is not only a place for stocking and for conserving an archivable content of the past which would exist in any case, such as, without the archive….No, the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content…The archivization produces as much as it records the event. (p. 16-17)
As Schwartz and Cook (2002) add,
Archives, then, are not passive storehouses of old stuff, but active sites where social power is negotiated, contested, confirmed. The power of archives, records, and archivists should no longer remain naturalized or denied, but opened to vital debate and transparent accountability. (p. 1)
This more dynamic understanding, as Skinnell (2010) points out, contextualizes archives as “incomplete, by design and by necessity, and... therefore unsuited to the task of authenticating historical events.” Within the context of this postmodern understanding, then, archives are less containers of historical truth constructed by careful professionals than they are incomplete, fragmentary texts which are continually shaped, influenced, and “composed” as much by users and contributors, by a range of social and cultural factors, as they are by archivists themselves.
Texts (which include images) are all a form of narration more concerned with building consistency and harmony for the author, enhancing position and ego, conforming to organization norms and rhetorical discourse patterns, than they are evidence of acts and facts, or juridical or legal frameworks. And there is not one narrative in a series or collection of records, but many narratives, many stories, serving many purposes for many audiences, across time and space.
(Cook, 2007, p. 7)
[Archives are]...incomplete, by design and by necessity, and…therefore, unsuited to the task of authenticating historical events.
...[T]he fundamental incompleteness of materials [in archives] leaves spaces for users to invent connections that make the archives salient and comprehensible.
(Skinnell, 2010)