Tag Archives: death

Week 11: Archives as Places of Power

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A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog post about bookwork and Carrion’s characterization of the archive as a cemetery for books. This idea is revisited in this week’s reading of Shadow Archives: the Lifecycles of African American Literature by Jean-Christophe Cloutier. In the introduction, Cloutier cites Achille Mbembe’s essay, “The Power of the Archive and its Limits,” for Mbembe’s analogy of the archive as a tool for resuscitation and resurrection of texts. After this reading, we can expand upon the metaphor. An archive isn’t just a cemetery. Archives and cemeteries, rather, are two spaces which serve similar functions in society. They are both places of power, created to heighten the experience and abilities of those within them.

When I went back to get the link for my blog post, I saw that Sierra left a comment I missed when it was posted, which expanded upon the analogy of archive as cemetery. Part of this comment is a refutation:

“Why cemeteries and not memorials, or something else? The idea of cemeteries are to host the dead, but why are books dead? In our interaction with them, do we not make them alive? They are not really dead, because when one person looks at the book they are seeing it through their own lens (societal, religious, political, etc) and it is different for each person.”

Mbembe has some answers for these questions. Memorials are objects of commemoration. Mbembe says that commemoration is, “part of the ritual of forgetting” (24). Memorials serve to help us let go. Cemeteries do hold memorials, such as gravestones, but they also hold the dead themselves. They are haunted. They are places to remember, relive, and revisit as much as they are places to let go and forget.

Archives are comparable to cemeteries because, “fragments of lives and pieces of time are interred there” (Mbembe, 19). Archives conserve work produced by those who are now dead. They hold onto work by living authors, saving them for future generations. Books carry information about creatures that have gone extinct. Many physical books in archives are made from the fibers and skins of dead plants and animals. Their existence may be overlooked by many readers, but the archive is still their final resting place. Books are objects of the dead.

The content of the books, however, is in many ways immortal. I think this was Sierra’s main point in the above quote. The codices and the printed text in an archive are alive in that they continue to exist and degrade when not in use. The ideas come to life when they are revisited by the reader. That visitation becomes an impression in the reader’s memory, forever changing both the reader and the idea. A powerful enough memory will not die. Even as it fades from conscious to subconscious, it will continue to influence the reader.

The physical space of the archive is designed to heighten its ability to create a strong memory. They are not just places to access the remnants of the dead, but places to access immortal, perhaps divine, ideas. Mbembe does not just compare archives to cemeteries, but also to places of worship:

“… the physical space of the site of the building, its motifs and columns, the arrangement of the rooms, the organisation of the ‘files’, the labyrinth of corridors, and that degree of discipline, half-light and austerity that gives the place something of the nature of a temple and a cemetery: a religious space because a set of rituals is constantly taking place there” (Mbembe, 19).

Cloutier explains that these comparisons are based in the conventions of “genre fiction” (Cloutier, 19), but I don’t think that means we can’t also take it seriously.

When I visited the reading room, I felt a genuine sense of religiosity. I had to perform the requisite rituals of filling out forms and checking out books. The priest and acolyte (a trainer and trainee) quietly discussed the esoteric knowledge of proper handling as they set the books up at the tables. The library is generally pretty quiet, but it was extra quiet in the reading room. There was a feeling of being watched, not just by the acolyte at the front desk, but by some higher power that would ensure the safety of the books (or maybe CCTV). I entered through the dome, which always feels a bit like the entrance to a sacred space (even when it’s raining and they have to set up buckets to catch all the drips)(maybe especially then). Although I was looking at a book made of paper towels and cardboard and typos, a book not meant to take itself too seriously, the space elevated the experience. The book had a greater impression on me because of the architecture and aesthetics of the room and the rituals I had to perform to look at them.

Week 4: “Mineral, Vegetable, Animal”

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In The Book (2018), Amaranth Borsuk foregrounds the networked production histories of book media. In an example from 1153, hair follicles on a parchment page evidence the remediation of a living being into book materials (52). I have been reflecting on Borsuk’s reproduction of this parchment page in comparison to Jonathan Senchyne’s warm instances of human “traces” through book media in The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2020), which I encountered in Dr. Pressman’s Literature’s Media course in Fall 2024. Senchyne’s traces manifest moments of human interconnection, creating an empathetic bond between readers throughout time and place that situates how a book object traversed its setting. In one example, the handprint of a reader marks time from 1657 (Senchyne 15). The organism which traces its memory in Borsuk’s parchment leaves the trace of a time marked more violently: unlike the human craftsperson, the animal/s lost its life in the parchment production process. How do we read media for traces not only of life, but of death?

If its materials influence the ways that we interact with and perceive a book, the book also influences the ways that we interact with and perceive its materials: that is, our understanding of trees is influenced by our interactions with paper, and our understanding of animals is influenced by our interactions with parchment and vellum. Borsuk notes that, in first millennium CE Egypt, the cyperus papyrus plant was exploited to near-extinction in papyrus production (14). Did a similar fate befall the animals whose hides were culled for use in parchment production? How did the economy of parchment shape human-animal relationships, contextualizing the role of animals in human trade and information production?

The parchment product mediates a power organization and economy of human-animal relationships in which animal bodies are exploited, alive or dead, and in which their passage from living to dead is directed by human actors. This leads me to question how life and death are configured in “media ecologies,” and how significant death is to media production. The reeds, the animals, and the trees which compose common book media interact with eventual readers as de-autonomized bodies – traces of once-life and the conditions which created their death. The plant or animal’s body is remediated from living to dead. This exploitation interrelates with the ecological violence of capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, and their social permutations.

Considering this, Borsuk’s chapter has raised new research questions for me. How were the bodies of animals used for parchment and vellum production symbolically and culturally encoded as products of information production, economy, and “the very nature of thought itself”? (44) How were human interactions with these animals shaped by the association of living organisms with product? Further, how were the lives and animal cultures of these creatures shaped by their exploitation in the vellum and parchment trades? Did botanical and zoological adaptations occur through these contexts? This would make good material for a study of nonhuman reader networks and media ecologies, which N. Katherine Hayles gestured towards in her presentation at SDSU last semester.

These questions relate to my capstone project-in-progress, which in part historicizes scientific galvanism through a disability studies framework. The galvanic slab is a site of networked interconnection between human, nonhuman animal, and technological bodies – much, I’m now realizing, like the parchment or vellum page. We know that the information in a book can be violent – and so, I need to emphasize, can be the production of the book. The medium might be fatal. I’m now thinking about anthrodermic bibliopegy (the custom of binding books in human skin) as it relates to spectacles of capital punishment, which also featured heavily in galvanism. Borsuk’s materiality study has made me more aware of the ecocritical, ethical, and thanatological implications of the human-animal-technology circuit in disseminating information and encoding meanings through trans-species interactions with book media. The dead reed, animal, or tree is a key model in contextualizing the material production of book objects. Who died to make this object? Who killed? How does the fact of death-production influence how we interact with and present the object? Now that I’m finding some footing, I want to get serious with media studies and explore these wider effects as I handle objects in Special Collections with more attuned sensitivities.