Missing minor things
from Bethany Nowviskie’s reconstitute the world [12 June 2018]:
What I want you to take away from this talk is an understanding that the constitution — the very make-up and organization — of our natural history and cultural heritage collections becomes vastly more important when we accept two truths. The first is that we assemble them at the end of things. All “archives” of the Holocene (and therefore not just of print and manuscript culture and their digital sequelae, but indeed our archaeological and more recent paleontological records, and the stories we read in landscapes and ice cores) — all are archives of diminishment: of a shift to plant, animal, and human monocultures. They are archives, in fact, of the 6th great mass extinction of life on our planet. And accompanying that sobering thought is a second necessary understanding. The very make-up (again, the contents, the structure) of our heritage collections likewise becomes a matter of critical concern, when we realize that we no longer steward them for human readers alone. This is the strange confluence of our present moment.
It’s a striking thing to consider: the records of the ancient kingdoms of Mesopotamia—cuneiform, barbed and hectic, pecked into clay—all appears now as the archive of civilization’s rise. Reading transcriptions of sundry Sumerian accounts—debts and bills of lading, recipes and curses, the inexhaustible praise-songs of the kings—it’s hard to peruse such records without thinking, this, too, is how we begin. All of this, for those who would be modern, inescapably falls under the sign of emergence.
In the same way, our archives are archives of extinction. Not only the records of Dow Chemical and Shell Oil; not only the Biodiversity Heritage Library or the birdsong treasury of the Cornell Ornithology Lab; but all the things: Lloyd’s Register of Shipping; the records of the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions; the letters of John Singer Sargent; perhaps even the needle-pricked manuscript poems of Emily Dickinson… even now we could peruse such holdings and think, this, too, is how we come to the end.
This is not to encourage the dissolution of all the differences that are legible in our archives; not to advance the reduction of grounded and situational readings; not to avoid the responsibility to repair lost context, to care for the little data, the local things. Indeed, Nowviskie’s call to an ethics of care in the archive recognizes the need to chart digitalization in this moment of algorithmic ambition, to rescue the emancipatory possibilities of tools from the structure surveillance, extraction, and instrumentalization in which they may be implicated.
I realize that adding Dickinson to the litany above might have seemed a stretch. But reading her as a recorder of belatedness, we can find guidance here:
The Missing All, prevented Me
From missing minor Things.
If nothing larger than a World’s
Departure from a Hinge
Or Sun’s extinction, be observed
’Twas not so large that I
Could lift my Forehead from my work
For Curiosity.
Amherst — Amherst Manuscript #set 88 — Experiment to me — asc:3081 — p. 13. Emily Dickinson Archive http://www.edickinson.org, CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 http://www.edickinson.org/terms
I’m wrapping up elegiacally, but I should add that Nowviskie’s post mixes melancholy with resolve, charting not only loss, but also the charting the ways to renewal and repair. “[F]rom an elegiac archive, a library of endings,” Nowviskie asks, “can we foster new kinds of human — or at the very least, humane — agency?”
