The purpose of the archive is to produce “archivists.” Whether or not they participate in “my” archive, I intend to enable and provoke an archiving practice, which is an end in itself because archiving changes the way you orient to your surroundings. Becoming an archivist changes what you can “see” and what you can “say.” What can/should be recorded? What can/should be made publicly available? These are not innocent questions. “We don’t even know what the body (of an archive) can do!”
And I am now thinking that the cultivation of archival practices, infrastructures, and a general cultural value of the archiving practice, might be one of the main conclusions for my dissertation. I think archiving as a practice could be a way of “getting rid of the problem (Petro-culture) and its solution (technocracy)” as Deleuze and Guattari put in (in regard to the Oedipus complex and psychoanalysis). Or, that is, “Archiving,” is itself a way of “repunctuating” experience; and to become an “archivist” of a domain of interest (which also inevitably produces the trace of an archive of oneself), seems to me to be an important step that precedes and enables us to “map the connections that divisible governance fragments,” as called for by Howey and Neal. That is, by foregrounding the never-ending practice of archiving, rather than the enclosed dissertation/article/book, we are developing the practices of observation, recording, reflection, and regimentation that Foucualt called “caring for the self,” and which he saw as capable of enabling the production of new subjectivities. This, I argue, is exactly what a “just transition” calls for.
