Research Guides
Sean Cook
Hon 394 B
6/6/12
Trading Tapes and Running a Temperature: On Sharing, Collecting, and Archiving
(Or: Archiving the Archivist)
Throughout the course of our time in Honors 394, we’ve explored a great many of the ins and outs of the ethnomusicological field. We’ve discussed what ethnomusicology is, why it’s important, and what ethnomusicologists do at great length—and, of course, one of the main elements of the study of ethnomusicology, the archive, has been a particular focus of ours. Though some authors leave some doubt as to the future role of the archive, and though other authors (such as our very own John Vallier) view the archive as a place where problematic power relations rooted in colonialism are reproduced (Vallier 41-42), none of the analysts and academics we’ve read in our class have questioned the importance of archives to the historical field of ethnomusicology.
In fact, curious at just what pushes academics to sort and compile and curate and manufacture archives, many of our readings have spent extensive amounts of time and energy speculating on the motives that animate archivists. Some of these motives are, at least apparently, obvious; archiving lets us preserve, store, access, catalogue, and maintain copies of cultural objects that we see as valuable. But, though there are certainly plenty of mundane reasons why we might want to archive, many authors have intimated that there is something untoward about the practice of archiving. Some academics see a certain mania, a not-necessarily-healthy “archive fever” (Derrida 14) of some sort, which pushes people to archive for not-necessarily savory reasons.
What would happen, however, if one of these academics attempted to take their theories out of the realm of textual and cultural analysis and actually measured them against the archivists they purport to represent—for instance, by conducting an ethnography or a systemic survey of academic archivists? Such a test seems necessary to give theories of archiving a veneer of empirical credibility outside the classroom. Unfortunately, it also seems highly problematic, for any attempt to gauge the motives of an archivist seems bound to run into a pretty deep-seated methodological problem: in all probability, the ethnomusicologists, librarians, and archivists approached for such a study might very well already be familiar with the theories being used to examine their motives and behavior. As academics who are invested in discourses about their own fields, ethnomusicologists and archivists are likely to have already stumbled upon articles and polemics about why they do what they do, and this seems like it might be a major problem for anybody craving an unvarnished look into the minds of these archivists. How can one study a theory about someone’s motives when the person is likely conscious of the theory being evaluated—and likely to be self-conscious about what they say as a result?
There is a potential answer to this particular methodological problem: talk to what I have decided to call “private archivists”, or private citizens who act as the self-appointed curators of large music collections of their own. Private archivists admittedly occupy a different space from archivists who are part of a library or a university; unlike these institutionally-beholden archivists, private collectors are obligated only to themselves, the law, and the constraints of their means and surroundings as they build and construct their collections. Their lack of official institutional affiliation may well influence their motives in ways which diverge from those of institutional archivists. But there is also likely to be some strong level of similarity between institutional and private archivists—there are, after all, far more than a few points of overlap between their roles. Like institutional archivists, private archivists must find ways to sort their collection, must decide who to give access to it (and how, and why), and must make ethical, legal, and perhaps even aesthetic judgment calls about what does and what does not belong in their collection. Curating an especially large music collection as a private citizen is a time-consuming task which both private and institutional archivists actively choose to take on. And, as these private archivists are not necessarily academics and unlikely to be connected to the discourse of archives, these archivists are less likely to be conscious of the discourses about why they do what they do.
Even if their motives bear little similarity to their institutional brethren,
I am quite curious about the question of what drives private individuals to archive. In the interests of full disclosure, I admit that some of this curiosity stems from self-interest—I myself am something of a private archivist. I don't work for a library or a government repository, but I do have an iTunes collection which encompasses, at last count, some 72,000 songs and podcasts—over a year's worth of solid listening, if I'm not mistaken. And. when I engage in my own music collecting, I have to admit that sometimes I feel an almost compulsive urge to acquire more. Why should this be? Despite the proliferation of technologies like iTunes, file sharing, and external hard drives—all of which should make amassing large collections of music easier, cheaper, and quicker than ever—many people (in my experience) do not choose to horde or amass large collections, perhaps because such collections still represent some significant investments of time, energy, money, and other resources. What makes private collectors different in this respect? What separates me—and those like me—from everyone else?
The Theories: Visions of an Archivist
Many different theories about the answer to this question have been bandied about, and—though I have neither the time and expertise to comprehensively describe all of them in this paper—any attempt to explore the issue to at least explore the literature which has built up to answer the question of what motivates public and private archivists. The most obvious answer to the question of the archivist’s motives, of course, is one which is rooted in the rationales archivists (and ethnomusicologists acting as archivists) explicitly use to sustain and explain themselves: as preservers and facilitators of use. In Archives and the Future—a publication produced by a workshop run by the Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology—audiovisual archives are described as “a place where recordings are stored for the purpose of both preservation and use” (Archives and the Future 2), and their words are echoed by several influential writers within the field. In pioneering ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl’s Theory and Method in Ethno-Musicology, Nettl describes archives as places originally established “for storing, processing, classifying, and cataloging ethnomusicological recordings” (Nettl 17) and places which have aided ethnomusicologists in research—in other words, places meant to facilitate preservation (by storing and processing recordings) and use (by facilitating research and making recordings easier to access by cataloging them). And, even while claiming that the vision of archives employed by early ethnomusicologists like Nettl was flawed and needed to be updated to the standards of a new age, author Anthony Seeger—another truly influential ethnomusicologist—claimed categorically that “The objective of archives is to outlive their individual contributors” (Seeger 265). Archives, in Seeger’s mind, were and are meant to be preserved, and (it seems) used as well—though Seeger saw the usefulness of archives as more along the lines of making cultural documentation available to current and future generations and researchers than in simply facilitating current research. (“While the theoretical positions of the scholars of the end of the 19th century are neither used by scholars today nor admired by the natives through whom they were developed, the material the researchers collected, the descriptions they made, and the examples they recorded on early cylinder machines are often still thought important by both the descendants of the people recorded and scholars.” (Seeger 266)) The literature produced by ethnomusicologists is, of course, less than homogenous in this respect—but by and large they seem to attempt to justify themselves and their actions by painting themselves as preservers and facilitators of the use of archival contents.
However, many of the writers who have looked at archiving have claimed to spot a more sinister purpose at work when they dug below the wholesome motives espoused above. Adopting a perspective influenced by legendary philosopher Michel Foucault, these authors claim that the archive is a place of power rather than simply somewhere to store things, a place in which the archivist wields an incredible amount of control and influence. Author Erik Ketelaar, for instance, describes records and archives as a “panopticon”—a type of building which within Foucauldian thought has become a byword for institutional control—and a “prison-like repository” in which members of the public are “subjected to a host of policing measures” (Ketelaar 234); he describes the archive as a place which “disciplines and controls through knowledge-power . . . embedded in the records, their content, form, structure, and context.” (Ketelaar 234) Archivists control this knowledge and the access to this knowledge in Ketelaar’s eyes; as an “archive kingdom ruler” (Ketelaar 236), the archivist acts as custodian, forcing users of the archive to hop through a number of onerous and humiliating security and preservation measures which are “to a large extent rationalizations of appropriation and power.” (Ketelaar 236) In Ketelaar’s conception of archivists, the members of the profession are not fastidiously attempting to preserve their archives and make them as accessible as possible; they are acting out relations power and ownership, those motives that really motivate them once the rationalizations are stripped away. And Ketelaar has not only Foucault, but also the vastly influential Derrida to draw from (Ketelaar 236); in fact, in Jacques Derrida’s “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression”, Derrida takes on the question of archives himself.
Derrida is, admittedly, a very dense—and often obtuse—author whose work I cannot say I fully understand (a fact which is not helped by his tendency to go rather far afield in “Archive Fever”), so take this bit of analysis with a grain of salt; nevertheless, Derrida seems to sketch out a vision of the archivist’s motives which is roughly equivalent to Ketelaar’s narrative. To Derrida, archives are intrinsically an expression of the strength of the establishment and the powers that be; Derrida claims that “There is no political power without control of the archive” (Derrida 11) and exposits that the root of the word—and the concept of the archive—was “from the Greek arkheion: initially a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded” (Derrida 9). It was these people—those who commanded—who “have the power to interpret the archive” (Derrida 10) and a responsibility to “ensure the physical security of what is deposited” (Derrida 10); in Derrida’s view, archiving was (as with Ketelaar) inextricably bound to power. Derrida differs somewhat from Ketelaar in positing an additional motive for an archivist—a so-called “death drive”, a drive which runs parallel to the work of the archive:
“. . . an aggression and a destruction (Destruktion) drive, it not only incites forgetfulness, amnesia, the annihilation of memory, as mneme or anamnesis, but also commands the radical effacement, in truth the eradication, of that which can never be reduced to mneme or to anamnesis, that is, the archive . . .” (Derrida 14)
In Derrida’s view, this drive—a drive to destroy and consign and shunt away—is a fundamental component of the motive to archive; he claims that “right on what permits and conditions archivization, we will never find anything other than what exposes to destruction, in truth what menaces with destruction.” (Derrida 14)
While Ketelaar and Derrida’s analyses of the motives which animate archivists are by no means interchangeable, they both advance arguments claiming that archives (and archivists) are nowhere near as innocuous as they claim to be. They set archivists up as people concerned with the possession and exertion of power rather than simple preservation—and, in Derrida’s case, argue that one of the fundamental urges behind archiving is a desire to destroy. Is this the case? Are archivists—or private collectors—motivated by a drive to exert power rather than a desire to help people use their collections?
Before I attempt to answer this question, there is one more theory I’d like to explore—one grounded not in theories about archiving but, instead, in writings about popular music. It is important to remember that while private music collectors share some similarities with ethnomusicological and institutional archivists, they are also independent individuals and music consumers—and a theory which attempts to analyze the behavior of consumers of music might also bring insight into what motivates them. Musicologist Theodor Adorno might well have offered the beginnings of just such an explanation. According to author Dominic Strinati, the Marxist Adorno wrote that pop is facile, standardized, faux-individualized pabulum—a commodity designed to provide a catharsis for listeners trapped in the undertow of capitalist oppression rather than an art object to be studied, appreciated, and dissected like a classical or avant-garde piece. Adorno dubs popular music “a perpetual busman’s holiday” (Adorno 310)—a source of leisure which quiets the masses without challenging them, bringing them “catharsis which keeps the masses all the more firmly in line” (Adorno 313-314) masked by the pseudo-variety and pseudo-novelty of most popular music.
If we were to take Adorno’s (admittedly controversial) commentary on popular music and the motives of the people who consume it at face value, we might also unearth a potential motivation for a private music collector. Because Adorno’s criteria for pop—broad enough to include genres like jazz and those forms of music which contained “hooks”, or catchy novelty lines (Strinati 67)—was so expansive, many private archivists are likely to have and consume large stores of what Adorno would likely call “popular” music; we could think of these archivists as examples—outsized examples, given their large collections and high rate of consumption, but still examples—of Adorno’s average music consumer, listening to the same music (and thus driven by the same motives) as those consumers but compelled by some force to collect and consume in greater quantities than the average person. Perhaps they are particularly disaffected or downtrodden people, people who need more catharsis than the average music consumer and are thus forced to consume far more than the average person to get that catharsis; perhaps they instead are attracted to novelty for some reason, but because (in Adorno’s view) pop music offers no true novelty, they are forced to collect greater and greater amounts of music in order to get their fix. Either way, a view of music conceptualizing private collectors as Adorno-esque consumers of music rather than as archivists provides an alternative and none-too-flattering explanation for why they do what they do—not because they want to preserve cultural artifacts or exert power, but simply because they are trying to fill a hole left in their lives by stuffing it with a lot of crummy music.
There is obviously no shortage of people willing to theorize and speculate about why people archive and collect. Some writers offer comfortable explanations rooted in preservation; others dig deeper and claim to uncover uneasy power structures; still others offer Marxist or language-based views on the topic. But it is one thing to discuss theory; it is quite another to go out into the field and actually try those theories out. If we are curious about why people archive and why people collect, why not go straight to the source? Why not talk to an archivist?
The Interview—Iain Tutwiler
In an attempt to get a bit closer to answers to the question of why public archivists—and private music collectors—do what they do, I set out to interview a private archivist and, using the theories I detailed above, explore possible motives behind their ravenous collecting. I rather arbitrarily placed a size cutoff for a “private archive/collection” at 10,000 songs or more when looking for a subject—under the logic that this is both much more than the average person is likely to have collected and large enough to represent a significant investment of time and resources. (After all, aside from the complexities inherent in compiling, collecting, and organizing it, a collection with a size greater than 10,000 songs requires a substantial amount of time just to listen to—10,000 songs (at ~4 minutes a song)=~667 hours of listening, the equivalent of around four months of a summer job.) Eventually, I managed to get a hold of a student who had just such a collection: UW sociology student Iain Tutwiler. With a music collection of an estimated 190 GB and at least 22,000 songs, Iain has—in my view—amassed more than enough music to be considered a private archivist, and while he is an academic, his chosen field of sociology is unlikely to have brought him into contact with theories explicitly about archiving.
The interview was conducted in McMahon Hall at the University of Washington on May
29, 2012—right after Iain finished working at The Nook, a convenience store which is part of the UW’s dorm system. In the interests of presenting as unalloyed a look at the footage as possible, I have tried to keep cuts and modifications to the footage found here to a bare minimum; still, some editing was necessary in order to make the footage presentable and watchable—especially since the phone I used to record the interview was very limited on hard drive space and ran out (abruptly stopping the recording) at several points. After my phone ran out of space several times during the interview, I ended up deciding to move to my laptop’s webcam recorder as a way of ensuring that we wouldn’t run out of space and be interrupted again; unfortunately, this decision meant that my footage ended up being divided into two different formats (.MOV and .WMV) that were quite difficult to edit or splice together. As a result, I have elected to submit my archival footage of the interview with Iain in two files—one of which (bearing the unfortunate name “My First Project.MOV”) contains the phone footage, complete with text explaining my project, and the other of which (named “Archive Iain Interview 2.WMV”) contains the footage collected by the laptop.
So, what did Iain have to say about music and why he was interested in collecting it in such vast quantities? Did he appear as a power junkie, relishing the control his collection gave him over the music in his life (and over people who wanted access to that music)? Did he manifest Derrida’s “death drive”—a desire to exclude or consign or destroy which mirrored his archiving desires? Or was his bent more benign, pushing him to preserve music for himself or for future generations?
Are these questions we should even be asking?
As far as the rest of you go, I cannot say.
As for myself: no.
Mea Culpa/A Failure of Analysis
Here, gentle reader, is where the entire paper falls apart.
My original plan in writing this paper was to take my interview footage with Iain and put the screws to it, applying a textual analysis and close reading rooted in Derrida and Foucault and Adorno and Seeger and Vallier and all the other authors I’ve worked with thus far in an attempt to answer the questions I’ve raised. Of course, as the paper went on, I realized that my ambitions outstripped my abilities and expertise in this regard; when push comes to shove, I felt nowhere near confident enough about my knowledge of Derrida or Foucault or ethnomusicology in general to pull off the kind of sweeping analysis I wanted to perform. So, as I wrote, my dissection of the interview footage became more limited, more guarded, more brief, and more in keeping with the scope of my own knowledge—but even as I performed this scaled-down version of what I had originally planned, I found myself unable to really throw myself into my analysis.
Iain Tutwiler is a private archivist. He is my interview subject for this paper. But he is also a person, and a person I consider a friend, and as I tried to apply the incredibly unflattering theories of people like Adorno and Foucault to what he told me, I could not help but be struck by how disrespectful and disgusting it all seemed. It felt deeply sick for me to speculate about whether he was driven by base consumptive urges or a drive to acquire power; ironically, the very act of speculating also seemed like a culmination of exactly the sort of unsavory urges I set out to test. In applying Foucault to Iain and his recording—twisting him into a shape which he did not choose and likely would not endorse—I was exerting power over him, purporting to understand what he meant better than he himself did; in exerting that power while acting as a representative of the University of Washington, I was taking part in something far more panoptic than I think any private music collector ever could.
I could not do it! I could not apply power in order to denigrate a friend like that. Perhaps this failure to do so represents a failure of character on my part, an inability to push past sentimentality for the sake of academics; perhaps it represents a principled decision not to fall prey to the dark motives I planned on evaluating; perhaps it instead represents some methodological error—choosing an interview subject who would prejudice my conclusions—that I should have tried to eliminate by seeking an interview with somebody I did not know. If the answer is the former or the latter, I recognize that I have few but myself to blame.
But that’s just the thing—I have no idea which of those answers is correct. I honestly can’t decide whether my failure to analyze Iain’s interview footage represents a simple deficit of nerves, a conflict of interest, or a principled decision not to inflict the tender mercies of a Foucauldian analysis on an unsuspecting innocent. So, I abdicate. I leave the questions I have raised, the theories I have summarized, the footage I have collected, and the analysis I have planned. I leave them to somebody with less personal connection to the interview subject and, hopefully, more fortitude than I; somebody who, I hope, will treat the task of analysis with moral courage and come to a principled decision on whether or not that analysis is fair or ethical. I leave it to you, dear reader. You may walk away if you want—either because you do not find the issues I have raised interesting (though I would like to hope that you do) or because you have come to the same choice I made. But, in case you decide to tackle the question I could not, I leave you with this, a modified version of the questions I posed to viewers of my video:
Did you notice any patterns in what Iain said?
If you are a music collector or an archivist, did any of what he mentioned resonate with your own experiences or motives?
Based on what you have read anything about archives—both inside and outside his paper—did any of his testimony match the literature on archiving?
Can you come up with your own answer to the question of why people archive?
And—for Iain’s sake, and mine, and yours—can you do it in a way that doesn’t debase the people you’re talking about?
I couldn’t. I hope you can.
Bibliography
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Derrida, Jacques. “Archive Fever: a Freudian Impression.” Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Diacritics. 25.2 (1995): 9-63. Web.
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Ketelaar, E. "Archival Temples, Archival Prisons: Modes of Power and Protection." Archival Science. 2.3 (2002): 221-238. Print. Bottom of Form
Nettl, Bruno. Theory and Method in Ethnomusicology. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1964. Web. 29 May 2012.
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Seeger, Anthony. "The Role of Sound Archives in Ethnomusicology Today." Ethnomusicology. 30.2 (1986): 261-276. Web.
Seeger, Anthony and Shubha Chaudhuri, eds. Archives for the Future: Global Perspectives on Audiovisual Archives in the 21st Century. Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2004. Web. 29 May 2012.
Strinati, Dominic. 1995. An introduction to theories of popular culture. London: Routledge: pp. 64-69.
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Tutwiler, Ian. Personal Interview. 29 May 2012.
Vallier, J. “Sound Archiving Close to Home: Why Community Partnerships Matter.” Notes. 67.1 (2010): 39-49. Web.
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