La reflexión como guía para la consolación

As previously noted in the Introduction, there has been regular recognition of the fact that mainstream society has historically marginalised, and continues currently to marginalise, groups of people for different reasons. Marginalisation is not an uncommon concept in political discourse and the politicisation of marginalised groups has occurred throughout history, as those disenfranchised in some way due to, for example, economic status, gender, race or age have sought redress. The constituents of the groups on society’s margins change over time, as the disenfranchised (e.g., lower-class men) are given certain privileges (e.g., voting

25 rights) and become part of the mainstream or establishment, while others (slaves, members of religious minorities) begin to seek redress to injustices and access to privileges (e.g., freedom from slavery or religious persecution). Similarly, members of mainstream society can become marginalised if there are radical changes in the political structures or power balances, or at times of social crisis when groups may be demonised based on race, religion, nationality, and so on.

Marginalization was therefore an active concept – people had been excluded, an action had been taken, an attitude had explicitly been manifested. Since this research was concerned with situations that had not been politicized and yet were understood to be political (that is, if it is understood that all situations subscribe to some kind of ideology, regardless of how familiar or dominant), then how should the difference be articulated?

This was an elusive idea and hard to pin down, either in terms of describing what it meant or in terms of giving concrete examples of the types of records. The core of it, the important characteristic was the lack of deliberate action: what was being referred to was those records that were routinely disregarded as unimportant and the mitigating activity fundamentally was to foreground these within ‘the archives.’ That these exclusions are not deliberate means in one way that they are not political, in the sense that they are not the result of a political or governmental decision or policy, nor are they the result of a prejudice that has been itself politicised. At the same time, they are – or can be – political, or subject to politicisation because they may be, on reflection, a way in which a currently-unrecognised hostility, prejudice or exclusion is happening. Such neglect may be making the archives into a place where a currently normalized prejudice – one that may be politicized in future years –

26 occurs. The political nature of what is currently unremarkable is sometimes opaque, and two examples may clarify.

In her part of the introduction to one of the earliest works of feminist literary criticism,

‘The Madwoman in the Attic,’ Susan Gubar describes her experience of being a female academic in 1973; at a time where she was not politically a feminist but where ‘wives had to pay a steep price for wanting to work in the same fields dominated by husbands’ (Gilbert and Gubar 2000, pg. xv11 emphasis in original). In summarising some of the comments made at that time, Gubar says ‘Remember that old feminist device of the mental ‘click’ that you experience when you find yourself confronting what used to be called sexism?...I’d encountered a tap-dance worth of potential clicks…’ There was no law to prevent women working in academia but there was custom that meant academic women were commonly regarded as a surprise or an annoyance. The ‘click’ responded to the action or statement that manifested sexism or misogyny without these attitudes being articulated, acknowledged or official, very often without the actor or speaker having the intention of being sexist, or being aware that they were being so. The actions or words to which Gubar’s ‘click’ was a reaction could also be described as a micro-aggression.

In his article “Introducing critical race theory to archival discourse: getting the conversation started” Dunbar offers what he describes as a simplistic definition of micro-aggressions as ‘subtle forms or expressions of racism or bias’ (Dunbar 2006, pg. 6). Dunbar’s focus is racist micro-aggressions, but any form of ‘bias’ can be thus expressed. Although the casual misogyny encountered by Gubar and her colleagues were, in all of her examples, verbal, Dunbar notes of micro-aggressions that “It is in the non-verbal sense that micro-aggressions operate as thinly veiled, yet, well-embedded social conditionings and tacit social indoctrinators” (Dunbar 2006, pg.

27 116) The core value of introducing the concept of liminality into discourse about marginalization is that it can create a space for reflection on potential manifestations in ‘the archives’ of bias that has not yet been politicised and which may cause only a few people who are without agency in a given circumstance, to experience Gubar’s

‘click.’ In consequence, these biases may appear trivial, but, when accumulated, can reinforce that bias make it a ‘powerful social phenomenon.’

Throughout this text the word liminal is used, referring to records, or to people or to aspects of contemporary life. Literally, liminal means ‘of or related to a threshold or doorstep,’ and is used in in medicine and psychology to mean something that is barely perceptible. The threshold in question here is, of course, purely conceptual:

records, or people, or aspects of contemporary life that are so familiar or banal, that they are hardly remarked upon. The terms marginal or marginalized can extend a long way, too, and do not always mean very extreme exclusion of individuals or groups. However, marginalized carries with in an implication of deliberate action, whereas liminal is more passive. Records such as ‘to-do’ lists or shopping lists can be read as having value beyond their operational use (McKenzie and Davis 2012) but at the same time, few people and few archivists would elect to keep them (unless they were already validated by the patina of age). These are not being excluded actively, but little value is attached to them. An example in terms of people is

“outsider artists” (the English term being the equivalent of the original French “art brut”). Although originally, and occasionally in more recent years, the producers of

“outsider art” were institutionalized due to mental illness or perceived mental incapacity, there were also many, like Henry Darger (1892-1973) or Helen Martins (1897-1976), who did not live in institutions and functioned within mainstream society. Their art was ‘outside’ the usual norms of art production. Apart from the

28 question of mental health or intellectual capacity, an outsider artist is not formally trained nor do they become familiar usually with art history or theory, or the workings of contemporary mainstream art world). Usually, their work was not recognized as art, even by the artist, until it was contextualised by someone with the knowledge (and therefore the power) to do so. Many works have subsequently been sold to collectors of art, and have been displayed in curated spaces (such as the Centre for Intuitive and Outsider Art, in Chicago). “Outsider art” therefore illustrates the passivity that is a characteristic of liminality, but also another characteristic that it shares with both liminality and marginalisation, that of mutability. The excluded status can change, and the border between mainstream and non-mainstream can shift. Thus, liminal is introduced as an term in order to differentiate between records, people and/or experiences, that are actively excluded from the archives or who are disadvantaged and situations where records, or people, or cultural or social activities are disregarded, subject to what Cook calls ‘benign neglect’ (Cook 2013, pg. 101).

Harris took up, from McKemmish’s 1996 “Evidence of Me” article, the significance of the personal archives. In his contextualization of his deconstruction of McKemmish’s essay, Harris reflects on ‘the other’ as referred to, or implied by, the writing of Derrida, what Harris describes as “heeding to the call of the other, more precisely of otherness” (Harris 2001 pg. 1). Harris elaborates further on “the structural resistance to closure”: “Every circle of human knowledge and experience is always already breached” by that which is first not known, but becomes known; “in everything known is the unknown, the unknowable the unarchivable, the other.”(Harris 2001, pg. 2) In a way, the liminal here refers to the other. But Harris’ other, derived from Derrida, is dynamic and always becoming; the other that breaches the circles of human knowing is “unnameable…an (un)certain divine particularity…a coming which must

29 always be coming.” In the context of this research, the trace of the other is being sought in the expectation that it can be engaged with at some level and therefore it must be at least a trace more concrete than Harris’ description.

A word was required to attempt to capture the same kind of non-specific otherness that was – to some degree at least – behind the appropriation of the word ‘queer’ for

‘queer theory’; one of the first writers to use the term ‘queer theory’ was Teresa de Lauretis. She subsequently ceased to use it because it was further appropriated by mainstream culture and having once been a term of abuse, it became domesticated, and sanitized. Liminal attempts to capture the aspect, as it were, of otherness, without defining its nature. Refining the concept of otherness was also informed by some of the ethnographic writing of Dorothy E Smith, specifically the importance that she attached to the everyday lived experience of people’s lives. Smith’s work and research aimed at creating a way of observing the powers, processes, and relations that organize and determine the everyday context (Smith 1987 pg. 9).

‘Liminal’ was chosen as a description, to try to emphasise that the difference was in intention. Histories of conflict, do not suggest that situations become openly politicised without some preceding indications of the presence of conflict. Assuming this to be correct, some at least of these signs may have been the records. The value of naming this difference will be if records are processed (for whatever purpose, in whatever context) with the expectation that there is always an other, then the presence of the other may be detectable by the information curator. This could enable information curation to be active rather than purely responsive with regard to identifying the other in the records. In addition, processing with this expectation could also extend the opportunities that curators, who were concerned about absences or lack of “voices” in the archives but who had no obvious route to engagement. A

30 value of liminality as a concept could be that it perpetuates an interest in the excluded and in otherness, even in an environment that is primarily concerned with information or text rather than people or social structures, in advance of that which was marginalized becoming if not mainstream at least an institutional presence, for example, through being represented in academia as a subject worthy of scholarly attention.