ENGL 7453: Modernism In/And the Archive

Having not had the most experience studying modernism so far, I truly thought that modernism in this context would be an entity that is vague, too abstract, or possessing some other kind of unclear nature. In one sense, I do find it difficult to subscribe to only one definition I've read in this text, but Sherry succeeds in giving the reader a certain freedom to decide, making sure to include ample historical context. From what I've gathered, I think I would choose to view modernism as a force which spans centuries, but never means one single thing. As modernism ages with the generations that study the term, the one trait that can be identified is that it always has this urgency to it. Scholars born centuries apart can understand the "right now" which modernism is concerned with no matter its other subject matter.

 I came to this opinion about it by taking in the various definitions supplied by this work, wherein Sherry points out this urgency with which modernism is always concerned. One quote on p.6 gave a great example of the way modernism can be identified with no matter the specific terms or moment in history. Sherry writes, "and so the verbal token of crisis time - conveying not just the expectation of change or renovation but the feeling of an acute present, a preoccupation with and in a brink instant, of living in a Now explicitly different from a Then or even a Next" (6). This idea was, at least to me, a wonderful way to explain the larger than life entitity that is "modernism." To describe its nature as crisis time, an acute present, and the Now was a nice way to tie its reach together for me. 

Sherry and Latham both operate on known ideas surrounding "modernism." While Dr. Latham does state that "there is no such thing as modernism--no singular definition" (Latham 1), he does give a great way of understanding what contributed to this great cacauphony of different styles, ideas, and forms. Meanwhile, Sherry acknowledges the controversy of the word "modernism" itself as he gives a historical framework from which readers can attempt to draw conclusions about modernism.

One thing that I noticed in both texts was the idea that modernists were focused on the present, but not in a urgent or naive way. Instead, the two scholars give these ideas of a long present. Sherry describes this view as "a vision of days winding away into a future that is at once infinite and diminishing, an eternity that is both meaningless and menacing" (7). It seems as though the present is both overwhelmingly arriving constantly, but it is always slipping away. This view of time fits well with many of the things going on historically--everything was constantly shifting from war to peace, from prosperity to depression. Not only were there many events going on, but technology was rapidly shifting and would continue to do so, even until now.

This push and pull of time passing by is kind of mirrored in modernist writing styles. Dr. Latham wrote a lot about the importance of literary tradition in modernist literature. The writers were not tied to it in any particular force, but tradition was a way for them to push some boundaries--almost like a visual/textual representation of how time was not stopping but felt so long. Traditional forms from all over were used, but they were adjusted to fit the writers' needs or goals.

This class has taught me about intersections between different, and what has commonly been thought of, as opposing disciplines. Literature and Technology are two of these disciplines, often kept apart, instead of intersected, the coding activity that we did on periodicals showed me the intersectionality that is part and parcel of periodical studies. From the makers of the MJP site to the other periodical websites that you prescribed to us, they would not be possible without technology. Why then, is a more robust technical knowledge not integrated within the English Literature degree? I feel that English Literature students, humanities students in general, are taught to fear the technical world, to think of it as their enemy. When really, what they should be taught is to think of the technical world as their ally. I love the field of English literature, and I love books, but I can't help but wonder after reading the readings for this week if our profession wouldn't be taken more seriously by outsiders if there was a more recognized technical element to our scholarship? A common misconception of English Literature scholars is that they just sit around all day and read numerous books, of course, this is not true, but the integration of technical skills would make our profession seem more relevant to the current time. Ironically, in job interviews, or for companies that are hiring, an employee who is both well written and well-spoken, seems to be valuable skills that are sought out by many employers. So, if this is the case, why do outsiders tend to think of the English literature field as irrelevant? How would requiring that every English Literature student, Undergrad, and Graduate, take a one-semester coding class change this perception? 

The combination of this week's readings, and today's class discussion, greatly expanded my notion of what the archive is and what it contains. I had always thought of an archive as a historical repository of historical memories, depicted through: art, books, poems, personal portraits, personal items, etc. that were from the past. Today, I found out that there are traditional archives like that, but also, unconventional archives that do not deal with artifacts of the past. For instance, social media is a type of archive, even though it doesn't house historical objects, it is a system that houses information that can be accessed by others for viewing. This made me think about the influence of time and the archive. How does time influence the relevance of certain kinds of archives and their respective receptions? How relevant is a historical archive about the history of papyrus paper relevant to a 21st-century culture that is obsessed with technology? Why do we still need to know about paper? To me, the very presence of these historical archives answers that question in a positive sense, to borrow from Foucault's "The positivity of a discourse (pg. 126), the fact that historical archives still exist despite our ever-increasing digitization of culture, speaks to its importance and relevance. Without these archives, how would we physically experience times of the past that have shaped the culture and society that we currently find ourselves in? I see a totality within the archive that contributes to the present. To move forward, we have to know how we started, where we come from, and the origins of events. The archive serves this monumental function of educating us about this information. 

My next question is: based on the regulation and repression of certain archives and their containments, like books on sexual orientations that Mikala mentioned today, affect how we see and think of the archive? How do we fill in the gaps (what Foucault calls "the aporia" ) of this missing or as is the case today in many instances, the erased history? Even though archives are categorized by their specific containments, there is a totality of the way in which the function of all archives is, on some level, to house memory, information, documents, objects, etc. in a preserved fashion. I am interested to see how the notion of the archive will change as our relationship with technology changes. Could Instagram be the next new archive of social media data and information in the next 20 years? Only time will tell. 

So, last week wasn’t actually my last blog post. I apologize for the premature fanfare. No one is more disappointed than I. Anywho, I’m interested this week in Derrida’s construction of the physical archive as a displacement of certain psychic prejudices and consignments. Derrida observes that the archon inevitable installs themselves as a kind of administrator of culture, an extension of the State’s need to classify, order, and categorize cultural material, a recuperation of civil law which imposes vast and horizontal taxonomies of experience. To what extent does the archive play an active role in establishing those taxonomies which render the dynamism of experience inert? Derrida sites the liquidation of stable generic categories as essentially unorderable. If generic deconstruction is insurmountable, “order is no longer assured” (5).

I wonder how Derrida’s challenge to generic purity applies to periodization. Are you periods out of touch with the generic slippage archival efforts have exposed? As I pick my exam fields, I’ve sort of been conditioned to choose periods based on the skills they provide. To oversimply to the periodic taxonomy to an absurd degree: Nineteenth century is for the novel, modernism is for media tracking media proliferation, and contemporary is for deconstruction. Despite our efforts to deconstruct the canon and the traditional archonic procedures around the emergence of post-colonial reason, our periods have largely remained the same. Look, grad students aren’t stupid. We see what’s happening in the academy. The mission of the expert has failed. The interdisciplinary challenges of modernity have exposed specialization and mastery as illusory. I’m not sure that’s a positive development, and I’m not ready to turn the academic process into a cafeteria line, picking and choosing as we go, but it’s a concern I have. If I earn an academic job, will it be as an expert, or as a mere citizen of an ecology of art that has become overgrown and wild?

One concept I found running through our readings was the idea of proximity. In the opening of Archive Fever, Derrida stresses the importance of the archons (the magistrates, the law makers, guardians, the conceptualizers, interpreters) being in physical (topo?) proximity to the objects in the archive and that others do not have this proximity (I think this is the idea of politics—power-- and the archive). He refers to this as “localization” (2).

There is also the nomological aspect of the archive which I think means how the archive is ordered and governed (or maybe what order and governance emerges from the archive? Both and?). The concept of consignation touches on this as well. And as Derrida is talking about limits—what is included/excluded, interior/exterior—he’s essentially discussing the conceptual thinking and decision making about what is proximal to the archive. “Where does the outside commence?” (8). Which then sets up the the idea “No archive without outside” (11).

This is what struck me about Freud’s note about “nothing” that Derrida discusses (8) and the preface from Freud’s father (23). What is useless? What is exterior to the archive? These moments push on and challenge the limits of what should be included in the archive--just as the “Exergue” does. It serves as a paratext, a “prearchive a lexicon” (7). It’s a question of function, really—if they belong within the limits (if they are conceptually proximal to the archive which the implication is that they are), what do these moments/texts then do? This gets to the heart of the first 23 pages which is all about the tension between the death drive (erasure, loss, forgetting) and conservation for the future (preservation, continuance, remembrance). At once the archive is dependent on proximity (physical but more than that conceptual closeness) and distance; and the archive itself is the agent that creates its own proximity and its own distance. The space between is where the archive is born: “the archive takes place at the place of originary and structural breakdown of the said memory” (11).  The “breakdown” to which Derrida refers is a location, a place, where proximity is brought into question. The archive is it's own thing, really. It doesn’t solve the issue of breakdown because the death drive is important and necessary, nor does it inhabit/recover the “originary.” It’s close to the place of breakdown and the originary (proximal), but still separate from it.

As I type this final blog entry, I hesitate. Each letter that I’ve programmed into my fingers’ memory, each typographic symbol on my keyboard, smacks me. When I write by hand, which I rarely do, I am effectively drawing. Preverbal decisions are made: “should I cross my ’t’ before or after the sentence?”; “I meant to write an ‘a,’ but the tail is too long: it looks like a ‘q’. I should erase.” Grammatical expression (spelling out the thought) is a dial-up simulacrum of speed—the speed at which those thoughts about how I'm writing are processed by the brain, that is. Here, our clunky grammatical expressions draw attention to the writer’s (drawer’s) ability to encode the text legibly for readers. It’s semantic.

A pen out of ink leaves its mark: a reader can envision a manuscript's ink fade as the pen traces from letter to letter until at last! The ink is renewed, stark and jet. Material conditions like this second example, perhaps more than the semantic, undergo dramatic changes that affect how typists type, writers write. I don’t mean to sever semantic from material considerations completely: they are, as a reflection of us, surely entangled (Hillis 2016). I only suggest that this blog post is a record—not of my hand or fingertips; not of my tremors or mistakes made in dried ink. I can't tell how many times I have clicked the backspace key while trying to write this post. It's less laborious to erase self-perceived mistakes by pounding my right pinky on the backspace key than it is by erasing physically on paper. To me, this feels like converting the writing process into a zip file.

By those terms,

1) is there a program that documents every keystroke I make on this computer?

2) What does lossless literature look like? 

What we read for this week, specifically Dr. Drouin's Surrogate and Voss and Werner's Toward a Poetics of the Archive, has me thinking about special editions of books, or more specifically, the Limited Editions Club that ran its course from 1929 to 1979. This book club printed special editions of canonical works and commissioned famous illustrators and painters (Picasso was commissioned for one) to create art for their respective books. Their most famous production was likely Ulysses, for which Matisse was hired to illustrate. Of the 1,500 copies produced, Matisse and Joyce signed 250 of them. The copies remaining on the internet are selling for upwards of $4000, and I find it insane that someone might want to buy an NFT, a digital and non-palpable thing, for more than triple the price of a rare find that will only increase in price... Or will it? Are there no wealthy Joycians itching to get their hands on a copy? "Every act of copying creates an effigy: a likeness, portrait, or image that lacks the character of the original yet stands in for our pursuit of it," says Drouin, and I wonder how this might relate to things like limited editions of texts, because although these objects lack the historicity of the original, do they not embody an altogether different kind of historicity? 

Further, images of these rare editions are sparse. We are not allowed to see what lies within--we have not paid the very high price, which makes me think that these items, opposite to digital surrogates, do not "become levelers of class inequalities among researchers," or "allow access for those who cannot afford to travel to the archives that house rare artifacts" (279). These rare editions are special cases of art, because we know that they exist out there, and we know that it's probably much harder to see one of these than it is to see the Mona Lisa (unless you don't want to wait in a ridiculous line). This, however, begs the question of desirability. Has the Mona Lisa lost some of this because of the crowds waiting to take selfies with her? Have our interests drifted away from holding, preserving, and investing in rare things and drifted toward more profitable, digital, and immediate fancies? Why buy an old dusty book when you can be the owner of digital photo of Spongebob or a psychedelic monkey?

Please don't roast me for my limited NFT knowledge... I just haven't been able to get the concept out of my mind since we started discussing digitization and archives, and I wanted to find a way to bring it up in the discourse! I also wondered if anyone else had been thinking about these concepts in relation to the physicality of art and books versus what is currently highly sought after. All this to say, though, is that I don't think we'll ever not value the physical things. We've just found another medium, I guess. 

While reading Dr. Drouin’s “Surrogate” article, it was hard not to think about our midterm projects. Although his focus is on the physical impact of BLAST, and the “physical experience of reading…necessarily contributes to the interpretation of its content,” I was thinking about how our midterm project transformed for me during its different phases (280). I spent roughly 10-12 hours with my primary material The Seven Arts in its digital format before going into the archive for it. I did content analysis, close reading, background information, and image analysis. In short, I felt like I had a pretty solid understanding of what this magazine “was.” Despite this, I found that my language to describe its audience was more vague than I’d like. It was not until I visited the archive and interacted with the source material that I felt an immediate connection to the intent of the magazine. I could get all the quantitative information that I wanted or needed from online: content, dimensions, etc. However, I could not feel the pages or print. By physically interacting with The Seven Arts, I was able to understand the everydayness of its intended audience through the pulpy paper, the letterpress pages, and the individually curated covers. It would never have occurred to me to suppose that any circulated magazine would take the time to individually hand-draw their logo on each copy of their magazine. That is what they did, though. Each copy truly is unique and intentionally created—not just mass produced by machine.  The Seven Arts was created in order to call out the artistic from everyday individuals, and it emulated that with its materiality. Born digital (or only digitally findable) materials miss out on the opportunity to connect with the senses in the same way. 

While reading Graphs, Maps, and Trees by Moretti, my attention was caught by the fact that he discusses the rise of the novel in Britain, and the fall of the novel in Japan, France, Italy, and Denmark. That is not to say that there was not a fall of the novel in Britain, or a rise in the other countires, but that way Moretti presents the information is the most important to him, and that is was caught my attention. Why is the rise of the novel in Britian more important than the fall, and vice versa in the other countries? Moretti does point out that many of the times that the novel fell in either production or popularity had a political origin, but he also acknowledges that is not the case in every instance. However, given the fact that paper has continuously been one of the first resources limited during war I wonder how many other countreis that are not discussesd by Moretti had this fall of the novel and what they would add to the dataset he has already formed. Would the results stay the same or would they vary in some capacity?

This is my last blog post of course work. I read many of these articles for my some of my first blog posts during my first semester at TU. Now that I’m feeling misty-eyed and nostalgic in the JJQ, I’ve decided to reflect. Having just left my MFA at the time I read these articles the first time, I was disillusioned with the creative writing world, especially about what I had called at the time the current-ification of art. That I read and loved Joyce and other modernists was always seen as an eccentricity, some kind of mental block that had cleaved a difference between the other students and myself. One MFA candidate would periodically invite me over to her house, where she’d hand me a book or two published in the last three years. I’d promise to read it, but I knew I wouldn’t. I never gave any of them back until our MFA was over, and we were moving away. I handed back a couple dozen books I never opened. I had just finished War and Peace and I had begun Finnegans Wake for the third time.

When I read these the first time, I don’t think I understood them. When we talked about the archive, I conjured up discussions of the canon I had during my MFA. We’d always talk about the canon with a special intensity, as though it were some hulking monster just outside the conference room where we had class. Saying the words James Joyce would strengthen it. We would die right there in our chairs, dead-white-man’d to death. I don’t mean to dismiss the relevant and necessary conversations about inclusion and representation of historically marginalized literature. Still, I grew weary of those conversations that seemed so sentimental. What were we really talking about? Was I reading all the wrong books? Was I going to be left behind by all the books that will be published this year and the year after, etc.

I understand the archive differently now. If a discussion of the canon was always theoretical, ideological, and an exertion of the mind, the archive is about materiality, the actual physical processes of collecting, keeping, restoring, and excavating. It’s a marriage of past and present. It resists current-ification, by bringing to light the old work that is restored and reintegrated by our newest solutions to the old problems. It’s important to remember that digital does not mean non-physical or immaterial. The digital condition is only a displacement of the physical, not an abolition of it.  

This week's readings drove home the point that digital humanities is helpful in its numbers and graphs and pure, cold data. And while I agree with Franco Morretti's assertion that "data is ideally independent of interpretations," I think it is human nature to start trying to fill in the blanks data leaves us ("Graphs" from Graphs, Maps, Trees 9). Why else would it be interesting to see the graphs Moretti includes in his book? Why else is it compelling? Moretti certainly recognizes this as well, but I keep thinking about what these graphs might suggest than just economic downturns or war (though these are incredibly important factors not to be discounted). What about the spread of ideas or inventions? It would be an easy assumption to believe that colonial influence brought about these sharp rises in novel publications--that the printing press is being exchanged at points of contact around the world. Yet the fact that Japan follows so sharply on the heels of Britain's novel production, while Italy and Spain (closer in region) are much, much slower to increase production. In a colonial viewpoint, then, it is perhaps a point against British imperialism or colonialist interference. In that same point, it is interesting that Nigeria's novel production rate rises sharply as Nigeria becomes its own country and no longer a British colony. In this example, like Japan's, there is the interesting corralation of data that collaborates how these countries might have operated around British influence or despite of it. 

Still, data isn't necessarily meant to be interpreted. The hypothesis that come from data, however, are endless and generate testing grounds for how digital humanities can help the field of literature studies.

After reading Moretti and a bit of Manovich, I was inspired to create my own data set. As I’ve mentioned in class, I’m having trouble finding a foothold into the Crisis. I’m going to go forward with examining how the magazine uses the idea/image of lynching to argue for civil rights and against Jim Crow. But even this doesn’t help too much. At least, I don’t feel solid or focused going forward.

Process: So I thought about how I could use data and a “wide view” of the magazine to help me find a foothold. Here’s what I did: I started with volume 12 (the first in a series of arbitrary decisions, but one that essentially takes the Waco/Jesse Washington lynching as a starting point) and tallied up the number of times the word “lynch” appears. My thinking was that “lynch” accounts for the verb as well as the gerund, lynching. There are downsides to this, however. It also picks up on names: John A. Lynch was a regular contributor and Lynchburg, VA pops up quite a bit. To make my data more reliable I toggled through the front and back matter to eliminate the times when “lynch” hits as a name. I should admit that I didn’t account for where names would appear in editorial content. I also searched “mob”—with a space after it. One pattern I noticed before collecting data was that the magazine connected the act of lynching with the image of the mob. I wanted to see how often the magazine used both terms and where they appeared together. I did this through volume 16 (took about 45 minutes to download each issue, search my terms, and record the number of hits in each issue).

Reflection: As I went through, I uncovered magazine issues where there were spikes and dips with the use of each term. I now have a big question mark with Crisis 13.4 as “lynch” appears 65 times, way above the average. Also, volume 13 includes that word the most by far of the 5 volumes I searched through. Why is this happening months after the Waco/Jesse Washington lynching? How is it being used? This is a great breakthrough. I can also, in line with Moretti, start thinking about dips in the data. For instance, what is it about volume 14 wherein “lynch” appears considerably less often than other volumes? What is the magazine focusing on instead? Another lead.

Idea I’m left with: first, the feeling that I’m charting a path through this data that is limited. I’m not sure exactly what to look for, so I’m roughly following the path of someone else (others have written over lynching and the Crisis). The path that I’m following isn’t especially refined, either. Chasing the connection between “mob” and “lynch” is interesting, but it doesn’t capture the idea that I have: the Crisis using lynching as a justification for a militant response from the black community. But what terms can I search to better pinpoint this thought/reading of the Crisis? I’m not sure. Searching the terms I did was an arbitrary decision. And, as I went through each issue, I looked at the black spaces on my excel spreadsheet. I could search anything if I wanted. Any word, any concept. Just add it into the search process. But I couldn’t think of what else to look for. In this open field of data collection, I can’t help but consider how limited my thinking is and thus how much I’m missing.