No Archive Will Restore You, by Julietta Singh | Barbara Browning and Julietta Singh (29.3)
Barbara Browning: Singh! As you and (until now) only you know, this is how I always open my messages to you. (This is what they call “full disclosure”—a very fitting term in relation to your own book, which seems to attempt precisely that, full disclosure: we are friends.) But as I typed my habitual salutation to you just now, it struck me that it sounds not only like the enthusiastic hailing of a friend, but also like an imperative: Sing! An imperative, like a performative utterance, and like a hailing, is a very robust form of language, and this one sounds particularly demanding, sorry! But in fact, it’s one of the things I want to ask you about. What does the imperative of lyricism mean to you in No Archive Will Restore You? You write critical theory, you write poetry—can you say something about these modes of writing in this book?
Julietta Singh: I love that you begin with a “full disclosure” that confesses to a friendship—one that for me has been highly motivating while also overwhelmingly remote: I’ve lived in your apartment, I’ve studied your things, I’ve read your books, I’ve strummed your ukuleles—but all while you were far away. Sometimes we just begin with an intuitive leap into friendship, and I took our first email exchange, in which you employed this imperative-salutation, as a form of immediate affinity. So yes, we are friends!
I like this slip and slide between the enthusiastic hailing and the imperative—they may, in the end, be very closely aligned. I also submit here the fact that I have always wanted to sing, but have lacked the confidence to pursue it. (I was a tomboy with a penchant for resistance to authority, and was prohibited from access to the musical theater and dance circles I secretly longed for.) When you write “Singh!,” I feel in the utterance both a reparative appeal and a promise. Which is all to say, no need for apologies!
The lyricism question is, of course, related to this desire for song and dance. I used to write poetry “on the side,” as an almost secret outlet and an act of making more intimate the theoretical questions that were driving my thought. I was maintaining that strange fiction of theory being cognitive and poetry being emotive. But at some moment I realized that my poems were becoming theory, and my theory becoming poems (the only difference seemed to be the insertion of strategic line breaks!). The dismantling of that binary has been really important to my thinking, and in some sense No Archive is an experiment in refusing to distinguish between these authorized modes.
BB: If one were to try to locate this book in a single genre, one might be tempted to use a relatively recent catchword: autotheory. Do you have feelings about the term? Why do you think it’s become something people want to understand as a category of writing?
JS: I think of “autotheory” itself as a kind of hailing, one that summons theory to become livable. Many of us were trained by and through theory, but have felt a kind of dissonance between how we think and how we live. Autotheory works as a kind of suture, as a way of bringing theory into more intimate relation with everyday acts, with bodies and how they are inscribed.
When I was writing No Archive, I realized I had no vocabulary for describing what it was (and maybe I didn’t want one). “Autotheory” seemed expansive enough to work. But if the term can be said to describe the book at a formal level, it also falls apart in the logic of No Archive, because it really struggles to uproot this notion of a single, bounded self. There turns out to be no “auto” in the book, only sounds and feelings and bodies that are made and unmade collectively. If we need to describe this project, we may need to find some other utterance altogether …
BB: One of the first things I asked you about this book was its form of address. It’s, for lack of a better term, very personal, both in its approach to the reader and in its evocation of your own intimates (family members, friends, and both current and former lovers). And yet the second-person form in the book is often used in a colloquial way for what could, in more formal writing, be designated as “one.” But one, precisely, is never just one. Pronouns, like imperatives, say more than they seem to. Who is you in this book? (That’s not the same question as who are you in this book, but maybe it’s related?)
JS: As the book edges its way into the world, I’m keenly aware of how it is being read as a “personal” text. It is personal, certainly, in so far as it narrates some of my own experiences in and ways of reading the world. But it’s also a highly curated archive—both consciously and unconsciously—and it is also unquestionably a representational text.
This has something to do with the parenthetical part of your question, which wonders over who “I” might be in this text: I am unabashedly myself, and I am unequivocally not-myself. I am also, at times—and perhaps especially in the title—one of the collective members of the “you” that the book keeps summoning. But if the second person is in some sense me, it is a “me” that is a proliferating, messy, fragmented—and therefore infinitely more than myself, a second person plural. “You” is a ubiquitous call to a network that spills out in too many directions to be neatly gathered otherwise. It is a reach for more than can be named.
BB: When I read the manuscript, I was struck by your notion of an archive “so mundane as to be spectacular.” It’s always seemed to me that the most telling things contained in any archive are the most mundane ones: scribbles in the margins, coffee-stained shopping lists, creased little family snapshots … Orhan Pamuck has made a plea for the proliferation of unspectacular, intimate museums. He even built one to display the detritus (cigarette butts, a broken watch, a shaving brush) of his fictional characters. Yours is even more intimate. It includes the very matter that’s entered (and exited) your body—nonfictionally, and in graphic reality. Could you reflect on both the confines and the magnitude of your archive?
JS: It pains me so much to report that I actually cut that line in the final edit of the book! I’m now deeply regretful, but also so happy that you’ve given it a life in this text! I love what you say about how the accidental spills and scribbles and creases that emerge are often the most transfixing aspects of an archive. One way to read this book is as an offering of those spills and creases as the central, rather than the accidental or tangential, core of the text. That act of assembling the mundane (and even unpalatable) aspects of embodied life is spectacular for me in so far as it offers a radical perceptual shift in how we might experience and live through the everyday. That weird willful act of attending to the things we are supposed to disavow, or ignore, or steel ourselves against, has real potential for a different kind of earthly co-habitation.
In terms of the magnitude and the confines of my archive: I think the book is a deep and desirous flirtation with the idea of assembling an intimate archive of the body. If it can be said to assemble its own archive, it is one that is unabashedly partial. At its core, I think the book tries to reach for and lean into an impossible inventory, an act of holding what has been left in the body, and lost to it, and altered in contact with itself and with others. So the reach of this project is infinite, in the sense that it is an unrelenting act of gathering a body that is always taking in the outside and always itself dispersing.
BB: More specifically, could you say something about the notion of the “vaginal archive”?
JS: The book sets off with the vaginal archive, and then returns to it in more and less subtle ways. When I was in graduate school, a close friend of mine, Cecily Marcus, was doing research on Argentine women who, as political prisoners, stored subversive materials in their vaginal canals. Cecily called this “the vaginal library”—a term I love so much, and that had me thinking back then about how the body might be conceptualized as a repository of ideas, an organic archive that holds and circulates dissent through and among our bodies. I joke/confess early in the book that the terms “archive” and “vagina” are indelibly linked in my thought—I can no longer think one without the other. The vaginal archive becomes in the book an indispensable way to meditate dynamically on the body: on the body as an organism that takes in and offers over the outside world; on the misogynist fear and “mystery” of the female body; on birthing as an act of radical collaboration between bodies …
BB: Could we talk about excreta? That will perhaps sound comical to somebody who hasn’t read your book, but you recount an anecdote in which, precisely, a bright graduate student asked you why you always seemed to be talking about your shit, which you hadn’t fully realized you were doing until you received the question. There’s a wonderful line in the book: “I want to be responsible to and for my body, for everything it yields.” Obviously, this means many things. Would you like to riff on them?
JS: The “bright graduate student” of this narrative is Justin Linds, who is at work on a genealogy of eighteenth century fermentation at NYU. (I begin by naming him because, as you know well, the brilliance of graduate students often goes troublingly uncited.) Justin noticed that shit was operating dynamically in my first book, Unthinking Mastery—from evocations of childhood racial slurs about the color of my skin, to questions of compost and manure—and he wanted me to think with shit across the book. His question prompted me to abide by waste as a way of coming closer to myself. I’m interested in accounting for the waste I produce as a product of and participant in advanced capitalism, in the political project of taking stock of how I amass, how I discard, and at whose expense.
But I’m also—and more perversely—interested in how those questions are bound up with the organic waste produced by and through the body. If shit is the primordial “gift” a child gives over to its parent, it is also the first thing we want ourselves to expunge and forget as adults. No Archive returns over and again to the ways that “the body” is inextricably bound to other bodies. Attention to what we habitually conceal or make disappear from our bodies, to what constitutes waste and how we treat it, has everything to do with the politics and ethics of disposability that enables us to do away with, or turn our backs on, all kinds of other “things”—including other humans.
BB: Maybe it’s my penchant for film noire, but I couldn’t help noticing that as the narrative (if you could call it that, and I would—but maybe that’s another question!) of the book progresses, you seem to be returning to a series of crime scenes that you reconstruct—with a delicate care that recalled to me Frances Glessner Lee, the oddball heiress dubbed the “mother of forensic science,” who solved countless cases by recreating the crime scenes in doll houses of her own making. She’d even knit tiny socks for her victims! It’s a slow, careful and creative process. And now, Frances Glessner Lee is increasingly being looked back on as an artist. Your own approach to both personal and political violence has, to my mind, a similarly minute and imaginative quality. Does that speak to you?
JS: It DOES! (And it’s incredibly cool to be likened to Frances Glessner Lee!) In all honesty, it hadn’t occurred to me until your initial engagements with No Archive that the book really spins on a series of crime scenes that unfold across the narrative—scenes of impending burglary, scenes of mugging, but also invocations of unwanted sexual contact, of the desire for maternal carnivory, of public book burnings … But rather than to solve these crimes, I wanted to stay with the uneasiness and the complicated entanglements of each of these scenes, such that it might become difficult to understand the crime scene as an individual case, and instead to intuit the muddled forms of alienation, possession, and pressure that is being exerted in every act of invasion. In describing scenes in which I have been, according to the law, situated as a “victim,” I wanted to pursue the unpopular questions about how I was also wrapped up in the crime scene, how in various ways I was and am also criminal.
Like Frances Glessner Lee knitting tiny socks for the victims of her crime scenes, I wanted to offer some element of imaginative care not only to the victims, but to everybody involved in and surrounding the narrative frame.
No Archive Will Restore You, by Julietta Singh. Punctum Books, Montréal, Quebec, 3Ecologies Books/Immediations, 2018, 118 pp. US$19 (paperback), ISBN: 9781947447851, Open Access e-book, doi: 10.21983/P3.0231.1.00.