<p>The primal scene of archival research takes place in a dreary reading room.  A researcher sits at her table, inert.  An archivist enters, pushing a cart that bears a dozen dusty gray boxes.  (Can we get a close-up of a box, please, to show the label with the long call number? [note type="figure"]<a href="http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-1-fake.jpg"><img src="http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-1-fake-300x223.jpg" alt="" title="fig-1-fake" width="336" height="250" class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-378" /></a>A staged archival encounter.[/note])  The archivist unhinges a box, removes a numbered file folder and, placing it at the researcher’s elbow, steps back.  The researcher stirs, then sits upright with a mechanical jolt.  She turns sharply in the direction of the folder, flips it open and cocks her head towards the flimsy leaves inside; now she is reading.  (Zoom in on the eyes as they click into focus.)  Now she is reading, and now she truly comes alive; she bends towards the papers, taps her forehead in thought.  A sheaf of blank paper and a pencil appear on her table, and she begins taking notes.  Her fingers fly—and soon, so do the pages she is writing upon.  Caught up in eddies of excitement, they swoop to the ceiling and around the room and down to the floor, where they fall together into perfect piles.  Bindings sprout from the outer strata; the pages sew themselves into bright, tight, hard-cover books.  These the archivist gathers up and places on the shelves that line the room, next to other books and gray boxes.</p>
<p>I may have it backwards: in other versions of the fantasy, it is the archive that is first animated by the presence of the researcher, a Dr. Coppelius who waves a pencil and sets the dusty boxes to dancing.  But either way, the archival imaginary posits a symbiotic relationship between researcher and source, a photogenic pas de deux that leads to a finished scholarly product.  This work, in turn, enters the archive for the next generation of researchers; it might even be taken apart again so that its secret ingredients (notes, drafts, letters) can themselves be served up in a series of boxes.  Such a strangely private form of publication it creates, the coupling of researcher and source.</p>
<p>What Freudian trauma results from witnessing this sight?  Only the harm that myth inflicts.  This primal scene is a fiction, a dream of perfect union between researcher and source that ignores, first of all, the full cast of characters.  What about the archivist, who is rendered invisible?  What about all those within and without the archive, upon whose labor—acquiring, preserving, organizing, reading, cataloging, describing, interpreting, analyzing, debating, teaching, writing, editing, digitizing, referencing and publishing—the current project depends?  More a barn dance than a pas de deux: an archival encounter is an enactment of social authorship long before the researcher enters the room. [note]See Jerome McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) on the idea of social authorship, which could be described as “the dialectic between the historically located individual author and the historically developed institutions of literary production” that help create a work, eg, printers, publishers, editors and readers (81).[/note]</p>
<p>But even a barn dance is much too mannered a metaphor.  The sketch above misleads us more generally about the experience on the ground.  Doing time in an archive is often tedious, uncomfortable and bewildering.  For librarians, there is the struggle to promote and simultaneously protect what you have; the difficulty of fitting unruly materials into arrangements and workflows; and worries about space and time—where to put it all, how to address your backlog.  For researchers, there is the struggle to locate the archives you need and what matters to you inside them; the uncertainty created by unruly data; and worries about time and space— how to access what you need during your research trip, how to record and organize the information you gather.  At both ends, the archival encounter is counter-cinematic and erratic, days of monotonous sifting and dead-ends punctuated by one or two, or maybe zero, hidden moments of vivid, peculiar joy.</p>
<p>	So archival research does not fulfill its ideal outline.  So what?  Who cares?  Why dredge up the fantasy?  Because the fantasy continues to structure our archival encounters—what we expect and undertake in the reading room, what we allow it to mean.  Twenty years ago, Alice Kaplan observed that “conventional academic discourse requires that when you write up the results of your archival work, you tell a story about what you found, but not about how you found it.  The less the seams of your findings show, the better your discoveries lend themselves to use by others… tell[ing] these stories breaks their spell and violates the spirit of the archives.” [note]Alice Yaeger Kaplan, “Working in the Archives,” Yale French Studies 77 (1990): 103-116; 103, 107.[/note]  With a few word changes, the same could be said about what counts as professional archivist discourse: the impersonal, neutral genre of the finding aid, for example, should say what is in a collection, but should not discuss what is confusing or missing in it, or the problems it posed in processing. [note]See, for example, James M. O’Toole and Richard J. Cox, Understanding Archives and Manuscripts (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2006).[/note]  Despite the growing recognition that this sequestration is never completely possible—that the material conditions and social relations of the archive shape the work we do in it—that work continues to be represented in professional and scholarly publications as if it is.  Despite the recent call to move to the fore “the backstage of the archives—how they are constructed, policed, experienced, and manipulated” in order to support historiography “not merely [as] a project of fact-retrieval” but as “a set of complex processes of selection, interpretation, and even creative invention,” the “backstage” stays in the background. [note]Antoinette Burton, “Introduction: Archive Fever, Archive Stories,” Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History, ed. Burton (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 7-8.[/note]  Antoinette Burton may be correct that “many if not most historians operate under the assumption that history is a highly interpretive act,” but this belief is not yet reflected in the archival encounter: the ways that researchers (not just historians) and librarians report their experiences with primary sources; the ways that librarians and researchers work together; the ways librarians and researchers regard the involvement of “non specialists.” [note]Burton, 8.  Burton notes that “whether historians concede or fully countenance the impact of such contingencies on their work is another question.  They rarely speak of them, and even more rarely do they do so in print” (8).  Her books recuperates some of those archive stories but this effort, I’ll suggest below, is hampered by other kinds of obligations.[/note]  While the advent of digitization and electronic resource sharing has revolutionized the research landscape, making primary sources public in unprecedented ways, there remains in the archive a habitus of secret knowledge—the “spell” that Kaplan is loathe to break.  This is not necessarily intentional.  It is rather the effect of layering recent shifts in technology, theory and professional definition onto older foundations: petrified conditions, relations, expectations and systems that continue to operate in part through the enduring power of fantasies about research.   What we have in the archive is a stratified groundwork that still governs our archival encounters. </p>
<p>	But, you will object, the archive has already changed.  Now we have the “archival turn”—the scholarly interest in the archive not just as a source of evidence but as an epistemological mode.  Surely, this attention to the constructedness of the archive has led to a revealing reconsideration of what actually goes on inside an archive; surely, as a result, those archaic fantasies have diminished.  Have they?  In what follows, I begin by unearthing one stratum of the archival turn, the decade of the 1990s, as represented by three texts: Kaplan’s essay mentioned above, “Working in the Archives” (1990) [note type="figure"]<a href="http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-2-kaplan.jpg"><img src="http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-2-kaplan-300x224.jpg" alt="" title="fig 2 kaplan" width="336" height="250" class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-369" /></a>Photocopy of Alice Yaeger Kaplan’s “Working in the Archives.”[/note]; Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1994/95) [note type="figure"]<a href="http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-3-Derrida.jpg"><img src="http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-3-Derrida-300x224.jpg" alt="" title="fig 3 Derrida" width="336" height="250" class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-372" /></a>Print out of Jacque Derrida’s “Archive Fever” from Diacritics.[/note]; and Carolyn Steedman’s Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (2001). [note type="figure"]<a href="http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-4-steedman.jpg"><img src="http://stage.archivejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/fig-4-steedman-300x224.jpg" alt="" title="fig 4 steedman" width="336" height="250" class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-373" /></a>Library copy of Carolyn Steedman’s Dust.[/note] [note]Jacques Derrida, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” Diacritics 25.2 (Summer 1995): 9-63.  Web. 1 Dec. 2010.  Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001).[/note]  A cross-examination of these three texts reveals a pattern of interests, a set of efforts to defy customary practices—but only, it turns out, “in theory.”  While certain practices are challenged in these texts, they leave mostly intact the older strata of archival research fantasies and conventions.  Kaplan, Derrida and Steedman do not dislodge the forces that organize the actual archival encounter.</p>
<p>How does this happen?  Why is practice so stubborn?  We need another take on archival practice: not practice in theory, but practice in action; not the 1990s, but now; not in terms of textual patterns, but in terms that suit the subject: the terms of the archival encounter itself, and the eccentric, anachronistic and even monotonous experience it generates.  My second look at practice will take the form of a series of vignettes about a real-life archive, the George Peabody Library in Baltimore.  While this narrative structure may seem to recreate the division of labor between theory and practice, my hope is that—by giving practice the last word—we’ll be in a better position to synthesize the two.</p>

