Why Archive Fever?
Dracut Repository - Living with Boxes
I’ve got a fever! And the only prescription! Is more! …. archive?
Wednesday April 23rd 2025: This post is actually more like a digital garden plot than it is a finalized blog post - I will tend to it and prune it over time as my thoughts & methodology evolve here.
I produce things for saving. Every moment becomes history.
Tom Walker
Maybe someone reads this when I become dust, and maybe he understands me, and maybe he loves me?
Valeska Gert
It is particularly important that the theatre, the most transient of all the arts, which leaves nothing behind but a few inadequate photographs and vague memories, be caught in print if it makes claim to historical significance and progressive development. For that reason the theoretical discoveries that have been made deserve to be recorded just as much as the facts and events.
Erwin Piscator
WHY ARCHIVE FEVER
I’ve got a fever! And the only prescription! Is more! …. archive?
In his book Archive Fever, Derrida begs many questions: Which materials do we consider “archivable?” What is worthy of recording/making part of the ‘record?’ Who is allowed to enter and interpret the archive? How does ownership come into play? And how do these decisions limit what narratives/what materials can claim archival authority? How is the archive at once a repository of memory (both personal and collective) and a tool of power, shaping our understanding of past, present, and future?
Derrida defines the idea of “archive fever” as the sense of being overcome with “irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia.” I caught my fever from The Living Theatre (still very much alive, tho pronouncing it dead is a move beloved by critics throughout the late 20th and early 21st centuries).
I am lucky - I am encountering the archive very much in its living form; living with the archive seems to be a rite of passage of sorts. Brad tells me stories about sleeping in the “archive room at Clinton Street” and moving boxes to make way for his mattress. Tom slept amongst the boxes too, in that tiny apartment on 10th Street, on his daybed in his office surrounded by the things he saved and loved and preserved from his own life and things he took from the “A File” along the way… and now, I sleep in Brad’s parents basement in Dracut MA and most of the boxes live up in the loft in the garage but 5-10 of them at a time make their way down to our basement bedroom and I live amongst them, like Brad and Tom and Judith did, and I feel…connected to life?
And LOOK I know that paper is just a bunch of dead trees, and I realize that I’m largely just going thru boxes filled with dead trees collected by dead people. So…why does every page in every box feel so alive in my hands?
Why do I feel so close to these dead people, most of whom I never met but whose handwriting on sight fills me with a loving reverence reserved for only the dearest people one knows? Why does Judith’s cursive bring me close to tears when I see it in the corner of a doodle or inscribed in the inside cover of a book? I don’t know for sure, but I think it’s probably the same reason that I find myself overwhelmed with giddy awe when I realize that whatever I am holding in my hands was also held by Tom or by Judith or by Hanon or by Julian. When I was a kid, I loved the idea that when I took a book out of the library I was holding the same copy of the same book that someone else had held, too, and that maybe someone had cried while reading it and their tears had hit the page and that when I touched that page that all the feelings and all the thoughts of every person who’d touched that book before would somehow be transmitted to me. Especially having grown up with the internet, there is something extra special about the connection to other human beings that one feels when holding something that someone else (especially someone you could never meet) held.
Soooooo my desire to return to the origin, my sense of nostalgia for a time before my time and my homesickness for places I never called home would probably qualify me for a diagnosis of “archive fever.” Or…. maybe what I have is more of an archive fervor than a fever, because I understand that returning to the origin is only the first part of the journey; I want to preserve and catalog these materials not just to satisfy my own desire to covet them but to make them more readily available to DO SOMETHING WITH!
I don’t know…I felt like I needed to provide some context for the title of the series “Archive Fever,” and it is an inside joke with myself but also a reminder to myself that the task I am currently engaged in is only the first feverish task at hand- the broader task of bringing these materials to life and making them useful is the thing this work is in preparation for, so I need not get too obsessed with provenance and file naming conventions and metadata (not yet), I just need to get through digitizing the stuff in the boxes. And when I do, the fever will break, and the rest of the work will begin.
