Digging The Archive

this reader, these texts, and all my and their relations spec. "sans a priori forms of organization"¹
OR → notes towards writing about “bodies of knowledge of bodies"².

Verbal creation is an archaeological dig into the imagination —is an archival dig, post-inscription, post-textual; —is also essentially anarchic—anarchival³—a defiance of external ordering until desire seeks out meaning.

Almost all books we read are inscribed with LC classification numbers and ISBNs, also subject headings established by the Library of Congress for academic libraries and the Dewey Decimal System (less specific) for public libraries with less specialized holdings.

Categorization of the felt process of language—in imaginal conception, utterance, in translation into speech, writing, and its effects and affects, in texts of differing types (“genres”) and the conjugates of listening, hearing, reading—of all such languagings—creates an amorphic cycle that we try—many of us—to capture, to trace, in a response that further states engagement—its pleasure or its pain.

In the field of library & archive studies, the primary function of the worker is to [attempt to] organize and show “bibliographic control” of gathered or inscribed knowledges using systems of ordering or classification as “finding aids” according to a theoretical construction that uses culturally accepted categories to identify [assign identity to] texts re: the “order of things,” Foucault’s “archaeology of knowledge.”

Rizzo also refers to Foucault in the context of Deleuze: “Contemporary thinkers on culture, namely Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, both note significant postwar changes as well, perhaps the most salient of which we find in “Postscript on the Societies of Control”: “‘Control’ is the name Burroughs proposes as a term for the new monster, one that Foucault recognizes as our immediate future” (Deleuze 4). The preceding century, especially in the post-war “permanent war economy,” excelled/excels in creating “societies of control” (William Burroughs and Michel Foucault, Rizzo para 2, Jacket 37).

BUT the archive compiles—originally, indifferently, haphazardly—like the vast networks of caves whose urform goes back 30,000 years or so, where the “juniper fuses” of the first maps embellished the walls, the painted outlines, carvings, and markings, the first visible products of human imagination, “offering a foundational dream for universal creativity.” (Eshlemann p. 136)

Our archives go back that far—how possibly to comprehend them? Archaeology is a process of sifting, digging—systems of sorting are applied . . . each object placed according to the value assigned to it by . . . .? [the poet/archaeo-imagist].

The Influency Salon site is itself an archive, a gathering of writings about poetry, poetries of a trio of poets renewed at specific intervals.⁴

What Fond creates is a non-systematic (according to hegemonic regularity) manner of replicating archival material (mater-ial – where “matter” comes from). It’s a fertile poetic anarchy of personally validated writing—it’s an “anarchive” that resists the control implicit in organization of knowledge.

Fond puts me in mind of the workshop/laboratory experiments of OULIPO – writing that is variously branded as “non-poetry” or as being in some way “outside understanding” (even by people who are well-read in many ways but find poetry’s waters too frightening to swim in).  We have all been inculcated from childhood in certain cultural understandings of what language does, what poetry is (exceptions: formation of language potential in intense play with six-sided alphabet blocks and the permutations of alphabetic arrangement). Such poetry bears the crux of seeming impermeability.

However, if we allow ourselves to expand an understanding of texts to the incorporation of our own experience, our own bodies, our own ways of knowing and sensing, the “intertext” [and intersexed] admits/radiates a multidimensional web along lines of reading and knowing that can lead to a dismantling of the power lines of societal control. “Of these, so many are written / on the substrate”—“bodies of knowledge/knowledge of bodies” as FOUND in Fond:

Stratification seems to defy archives of a body.

 

[...] headlines on Bill C-38

 

Attention Readers [...] Isolate the body.

 

What’s recorded may be another psychical element closely associated with the experience in question.

 

Body – it has initially a house there,

or secret in an absolute manner.

 

Where bodies appear mere surfaces still there is skin

 

It is more by implicit design that certain knowledges are not transmitted culturally and educationally and through the mainstream media, that certain books are not reviewed, that certain writers are considered irrelevant, until they can become “placed” in the appropriate category of the operative “classification scheme” of our culture’s archive.

Trish Salah, not only transnational but transsexual, writes in a dominant cultural context wherein political boundaries are assigned as determinants of acceptability for powerful nation-states and sexual boundaries are assigned as determinants of predictable human relationships for those same states.

In Salah’s poetry isn’t her body’s skin an archive recording experience?

What Stephen Collis in his Anarchive calls “the always of revolutions that propels poetry through the gate of the radical world” as if in conversation with Rizzo's writing about Creeley in Jacket 37: “it is such affectivity and sensation—actual experience in spatiotemporal contexts or environments—that engage[d] [Robert] Creeley” (Jacket 37) and others, and that continues to engage poets I would say in particular, for the most part, because of the intimate explorations of language, meaning, [etc] in the making of poetry.”

From the “actual experience in spatiotemporal contexts” in Fond to more profond considerations of archives →memory →keeping memory fragments alive and sourceful → a project of anamnesis i.e. countering cultural amnesia. Aptly, Joan Retallack self-reconfigured to K. Callater, writes:

“It's not the angel of history, it's the angle of attention.” (PE 102)

With respect to the aperçus in Fond, the preceeding requires further imagining/thinking/non-linear processing, more digging, contingent with “no desire for endings.” No page number reference possible in Fond; readers are invited back into the experience of the archive's contents to reconnect.