In his article “Rearranging the Files: On Interpretation in Media History“, Jonathan Sterne shares an anecdote in which a literary scholar congratulates him on his archival research, and makes a revealing comment: “That was great. I wish I had someone to do archival research for me” (76). The reason this is revealing is that this comment succinctly describes the great divide between hermeneutics and discovery, interpretation and examination, or perhaps even the mediated and unmediated. This raises a question: what is so dissuasive, so alarming about archival research? Why does this literary scholar so clearly feel that her job is exclusively interpretive, or, if we are being cheeky, hermetically hermeneutic? She represents “the flip side of the historians who [do] not wish to speak of interpretation,” and in her mind, her role is that “she interpret[s] texts; she [doesn’t] find them. That [is] someone else’s job” (77).

Yet this woman is hardly an exception. The academic world is full of people who create imaginary boundaries and hold firmly to them, locking themselves in their metaphoric rooms within the ivory tower. These are, strangely enough, the same people who gaze out the window with envy at those who have successfully “cultivated their legitimate strangeness,” (Char) and are free to go as they please. The key to this freedom is reflexivity. To become self-aware is to put ourselves miles ahead and at the same time miles behind the pack. To think reflexively is to begin to question our own involvement in academic pursuits, and to become aware of our own subjective nature and the influence this will have on our work.

A perfect example of this is the nature of history and historiography. Any historical writing today is concerned with authenticity, impartiality, and objectivity, much like other fields such as anthropology and ethnography. The glaring oversight, however, is that we cannot insert ourselves into something, as observer, as narrator, as ethnographer, and certainly not as historian, without changing the outcome by our very presence, let alone our own subjectivity. This is true even on the most primal, physical level; in quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle, also known as the Heisenberg principle, posits that merely observing a given particle changes its position and its momentum, or more precisely, its measurability.

This inability to locate or measure something brings us rather neatly to the question of absence. Historians, in order to get on with their work, must paradoxically accept that absence is necessary for them to perform their tasks, and yet simultaneously “put all their methodological energy into erasing that absence, as if documents are evidence of things that happened” (Sterne 81). The performance of interpretation – and it is performative – creates a presence where there was absence, almost like a reversal of Lacan’s notion of erasure. Engaging with this absence is somehow impossible and yet the production of the historical document is accepted as real, rather than a near-fictional construct that a human person has applied him- or herself to, and presented to a collective who have suspended their disbelief for so long that it is now accepted as authentic and true.

How can we engage with something that is not there – even one whose absence is, in its own way, almost willingly constitutive – and not be in our own way? It is like standing in front of a mirror and trying to see something behind one’s own head, and in recognizing this, it becomes necessary to recognize our own rootedness in the materials that allow us to give presence to absence. This calls to mind a lovely passage from George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which illustrates the point beautifully:

An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me this pregnant little fact. Your pierglass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! The scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. (Eliot 251)

We are the candle. We can never get enough out of our own way to see the scratches that lie in other directions. It is in this sense that historiography is doubly blinded; the necessarily subjective nature of history, specifically the act of writing history, is already quite enough to contend with, but then there is the added layer of historiographical analysis. It is impossible to engage with this seriously without recognizing that it is, in a way, the ultimate game of broken telephone.

We have, as the central object for our probe, the game Telestrations. This game perfectly illustrates the ways in which one’s own subjectivity impedes and interferes with truth. This is the very mimesis that Plato rejected for its tendency to mediate, and therefore alienate, truth. To play the game, one is given a notepad and a word, phrase, or item to illustrate therein. Player one has a minute to draw an image that represents this item. Then the notebook is passed to player two, who can only look at the image and deduce what the item is, which he writes on a fresh page and passes to player three, who then illustrates the word player two wrote. It does not take long for the breakdown of truth to occur. It is an amusing game, but it also lends itself quite well to philosophical inquiry. How do we reconcile the problem of our own human subjectivity with our perhaps equally human impulse to discover and proclaim truth?

Sterne points to C. Wright Mills’ The Sociological Imagination’s argument for a craft-based model of research: “Only by conversations in which experienced thinkers exchange information about their actual way of working can a useful sense of method and theory be imparted to the beginning student” (Mills, qtd in Sterne 77). This is, within the framework of this discussion, woefully inadequate in terms of a proposed solution. But what would be adequate? Sterne suggests that “to refuse the act of interpretation is to become an instrument of an inchoate world we project back onto our sources; to refuse interpretation is a double impensé because it requires an imaginary positivism, or perhaps … an equally fantastic transcendental idealism” (86). As far as conclusions go, this is also inadequate.

All of this inadequacy demonstrates two things. We can either accept that this is the sort of question that allows us to comfortably point fingers without ever having to supply any sort of solution – a deeply ineffective approach which lands us squarely back in the camp of the woefully inadequate – or we could consider that maybe we could be asking better questions.

Right, but what was the question?

This is where the questions begin to shift away from epistemology and onto ontology (never a comfortable thing) and it brings us back to the “deeper questions as to the materials of history and the role of interpretation” (Sterne 78). Materiality is key here, and may be the beginning of an answer (or question) as to why the archive – or really what the archive means in the anecdote above – is so upsetting to certain types of scholar, particularly the adherents of the hermetically hermeneutic.

Works Cited

Adams, Douglas. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. London: Pan Macmillan, 1979. Print.

Char, René. Fureur et mystère (1948), René Char, éd. Gallimard, coll. Poésie, 1962 (ISBN 2-07-030065-X), partie SEULS DEMEURENT (1938-1944), Partage formel, p. 71. Hyperlink http://fr.wikiquote.org/wiki/Étrangeté

Eliot, George. Middlemarch. New York: Barnes & Noble Press, 1872. Print.

Sterne, Jonathan. “Rearranging the Files: On Interpretation in Media History.” The Communication Review. 13.1 (2010) : 75-87. Web.