Episode 531: Punctum

But archives exist to provide that context, and to convey that context and to maintain that context for a future, and to enable people to put the larger histories together with that appropriate depth.

Ugh. We have it because it's significant and important to somebody. But it's huge. It's dirty. It's heavy. We can't move it without Big Joe, the little pallet jack, or other encumbrances. I first encountered this in my professional life when I worked for the Japanese-American National Museum.

And amongst the items in the collection there are one of the tar paper barracks that people were incarcerated in during World War II, the 110,000-plus Americans, many of them citizens, many of them children, many of them prevented from becoming citizens by the Asian exclusion laws that were on the books until well after World War II. And overcome over even a presidential veto, the idea of material objects having a real significance.

Among the things that we had in that collection were a rusty bed spring that, again, looks like junk until you look at it closely and hear the accounts of people who were incarcerated, who say things like, oh, yeah, we would use the bed springs from the crappy cots from the War Relocation Authority in these very drafty, frigid, cardboard shacks to carve beautiful objects out of the incredibly tough mesquite wood, which was the only thing around for miles.

And so that rusty piece of junk, you look at the sharpened end of it, and you realize that this is not garbage. It is evidence of how human beings will, when placed in adverse circumstances, go to tremendous lengths to make beautiful objects that the creative impulse, the artistic impulse, and the impulse to give expression to the beautiful sides of one's soul, are ever present.

The museum collection at the Japanese-American National Museum is packed with items like that, little things scrounged together that were made into gifts and tokens of appreciation for the people on the outside, who were helping in whatever ways they could, or the people on the inside, who wanted to continue traditions of gift exchange or seasonal celebrations that might normally have been celebrated with decorations of fresh flowers or elaborate costumes.

These fragile remnants are the things that survive. And again, they're the kind of thing that could easily be mistaken for garbage if you don't know the stories behind them. A brick would not be considered a beautiful object, but I think that there were some bricks that people tweeted back to you that had some artistic value perhaps. But what were some of the bricks that stood out for you in those replies?

The most poignant exemplar, I think, was a brick that was part of a university archive collection that had been part of one of the original buildings on the campus and had been fabricated by an enslaved person and was part of the history, the complex history, of that institution as an antebellum institution in the United States, where the very foundational work of building the structures and creating those halls of learning was done by enslaved people.

And that brick had the fingerprints of its maker embedded into it. The marks of manufacture, I think, are one of the things that are incredibly beautiful about these objects and incredibly significant. I loved that institution had and recognized the significance of that small mark of manumission. I also think that corporate archives get short shrift when it comes to the beauty and the variety of what they hold, one reason for which is because it's very hard for corporate archives to be open.

There's trade secrets that they protect. There's proprietary materials, technology, and information. So a manufacturer of bricks has all of the bricks that they made, samples of all the bricks and finishes. Those can be incredibly beautiful. If you think about the McKim, Mean, and White buildings in New York City that are the classic brownstones.

And block-long brick buildings with the white finish speaks to a golden age in New York City at a time of rapidly changing industrial innovation and new coatings, techniques, fabrication methods. That was a time of tremendous technological advancement and the employment of science towards beautification. In the 1880s and 1890s, that's when we have the invention of the color mauve-- Perkins and his use of tar extracts and coal tar extracts and the invention of aniline dyes.

All of that stuff is super, super interesting. And so I love archival collections and industrial collections for that beauty and the sort of encapsulation of experimentation that can be in a little vial of dust or powder or a drawer full of masonry samples. If you are ever on a campus that has a materials engineering program, visiting that library and visiting the sample books and paging through things is fascinating and gorgeous, as is if you're at a textile factory.

I'm acquainted with somebody who used to be the corporate archivist for a major leather goods company. And she talked about how designers would come in and take the historic samples off the shelves and turn them inside out, these handbags, and look at how the lining was put together and be like, in all seriousness, can I take this apart? And they would say, no, you can't, but we have the schematics. We have the pattern pieces. We can show you the pieces. You don't have to take this to pieces.

So a brick can be a beautiful object in that respect as well. It can be something that is an exemplar and a showcase for finishes and techniques that have been arrived at with the investment of hundreds of human labor hours.

That happens for so many things. And for me-- and I've already forgotten what your question really was because I was all caught up and be like, oh, I get the cite Barthes. That's so exciting.

And it's a "bring your own film festival," where film archivists and local communities invite people to come and bring their home movies, get them off the shelves and out of the shoe boxes, and view them often on equipment that they no longer have access to, whether that's a VCR, free VHS tapes of your wedding in the 1990s, or an 8-millimeter projector for your grandparents' home movies they shot in the '20s and '30s.

I got a big, like a "face-ful" of punctum at the Home Movie Day event in Los Angeles in the early 2000s, where somebody-- I think it was 2006 maybe-- 2005, 2006-- where one of the participants brought Super 8 footage that his parents had shot of their boat journey from Bremen, Germany to the United States when they emigrated in the early 1970s-- 1971.

They had some footage that was very typical of an immigrant's journey and an arrival in New York Harbor of Liberty Island and the Statue of Liberty and lower Manhattan, including the Twin Towers under construction. They were about 3/4 and 2/3 built at that time. So the Twin Towers are partially standing in this footage.

And an entire room full of people watching this material reared back in their seats and went, oh, because for all of us in that room, the last time we had seen the towers, they looked like that. They weren't fully standing. But they were coming down, not going up. And that is material that, before 9/11, 2001, would have been extraordinarily banal. It would have been extremely ordinary to see that footage and that viewpoint of lower Manhattan.

But to all of us in the room who shared a cultural experience, an experience of trauma, that was so inextricably related to that image of those buildings in that state, that formerly banal image is never going to be the same. And because of when we were seeing it and how we were seeing it, we had a much different and deeper visceral reaction to that image.

And I think that there-- any given item that we encounter in the world can accrue that knowledge, that sort of numinosity, that power, depending on the journey that it takes to get to us or the time and place at which we are encountering it.

So a brick with a fingerprint of an enslaved person, who was making it to build an institution that hundreds of years later or many decades later, would be coming to reckon with its own difficult past of enslavement and complicity in the American heritage that is so complicated at a moment-- and for us seeing that now, at a moment when intellectual institutions are embattled when they are trying to teach and grapple with this history, the vilification of critical race

theory and the idea that you're not allowed to talk about these things, or you must present these things with caution lest you make people experience that punctum, that emotional charge, the moment where history becomes reality to you, that you understand in some small way what it must have been like, that little peek through the crack in space and time.

It's one of the best things, I think, about working in an archive, is getting to experience that, getting to see other people experiencing that, guiding folks to that moment, and sitting with them in what can be a painful encounter with the past. It's a real privilege.

There was a flyer in my neighborhood a couple of years ago where it was just like, that video camera, that camcorder, had the footage of my son's first steps on it, and I would do-- you can keep the camera. I just want the memory card back. I will trade you a fresh memory card just to get that back. So that's a wafer of silicon. But it is every bit as powerful as-- it smashes you in the heart just as heavily as any brick or any piece of film can do.

I think that the punctum platform agnostic and medium non-specific.

We have in our archives four bricks from a campus in Winnsboro, South Carolina, which is about 20 miles north of the state capital, Columbia. The model of this campus organization was that every student and faculty member would contribute two hours of manual labor six days a week as part of the sort of grand utopian experiments that were going around the country in the 1830s and '40s. We somehow got a notion of that and decided to create this live-work campus. It didn't work.

After three years, the students rebelled, and the experiment was over. These young men, fairly affluent men, who were training to be preachers and teachers, did not want to contribute manual labor to the organization and the well being of the community. Furman had a deficit and a problem on its hands-- what to do. They hired in enslaved labor from the surrounding plantations and landowners to work the farm, the plantation, during this time.

And so we have receipts in the archives that show the document, this hiring in of labor to grow cotton and corn and harvest it and bring it to market for profit. This is 1837 to 1851. The three bricks that I'm looking at right now, that are in our reading room, have been fashioned into bookends with the marker on them that says, Furman Institute, Winnsboro, South Carolina.

And the one that I posted to Instagram, it's from the brick building of the classroom or the dormitory-- we don't know which-- at the Winnsboro campus. Pressed into the surface of the largest flat side of the brick are sixth round indentations, and they perfectly match up to the middle finger, ring finger, and index finger of an adult. This is human hands forming or pulling this brick out of a mold into a kiln to fire it or [inaudible] and out again, when it was still soft.

And so this brick is a very tangible reminder and a totem, really, of our university's history-- small liberal arts university going back almost 200 years now-- that its founding, its financial footing, and, indeed, most of its 19th century existence was predicated on the uncompensated labor of enslaved people and the profits that rose out of the slave economy in South Carolina from enslavers who supported, founded, and sustained the university over those years.

This brick is one part of Furman's story and Furman's history. But it takes you directly back to the makers and the uncompensated sustainers of the university.

And I got to see firsthand the process by which stuff becomes evidence because stuff isn't inherently evidentiary. And there is a process of appraisal that takes place, through which, as in an archive-- we appraise collections, and we process them-- a CSI in a law enforcement agency processes it. And that's the word they use. They process material property for things like fingerprints or for DNA evidence or for chemical composition.

So if somebody searches your car, if a law enforcement official searches your car and retrieves a baggie of white powder from the backseat, that is just property until it has been processed and chemically analyzed and identified as an illegal substance like cocaine or methamphetamine or whatever your drug of choice might be. We use a lot of the same language, and we take our stuff through a lot of the same processes-- labeling, identifying, preserving a chain of custody or provenance.

Those processes are all identical within law enforcement agencies and archives. And if you look at the property room of a local law enforcement agency, what you have is a trauma archive for that community. You have records of people's worst days. And the kinds of records that they have, it's not dependent on the material objects either. It can simply be the paperwork that causes that recognition or that moment of visceral feeling that the-- and some of them are celebratory.

I was filing evidence sheets, and the case numbers are assigned sequentially. And they have a temporal component. So there's 1991.00001, is the first crime that takes place or the first 911 call that gets placed on the first day of the new year. So guess what that is? Illegal fireworks. You know, New Year's Eve. It's midnight. Fireworks start popping off. Neighbors call police.

Boom. You have a piece of paper that speaks to our culture or our history in a really unique way in the nature of transgressions that get documented. I also saw a very-- just sort of a novel on a page. Again, a very regimented form about the seizure of stolen goods from a pawn shop. The name of the victim and the name of the suspect-- same last name, both female-- female-presenting given names. The victim was in her 50s, and the suspect was in her 20s.

And the list of items seized in connection with this case was just a few pieces of cheap jewelry. And so that, to me, tells a story of a daughter who has stolen her mother's jewelry and pawned it for drug money. So there are these little novels inherent in every single piece of packaged evidence. That is these stories are told within the boundaries of a very formalized data-collection instrument, like a form, a chain-of-custody slip.

They are reified through processes that are consistent and done according to guidelines that are promulgated by state or federal agencies. They are subject to rigorous examination in the courtroom. But it all comes down to the stuff. And the stuff in a property room is what makes it a haunted place.

You can look at the very mundane Rubbermaid, roughneck, big, gray, plastic garbage pan-- garbage pail that's full of implements that have been used in violent acts-- little paper tags on them that say, homicide or assaults. And it's a rake or a ho or a shovel. There's also-- this is a little less heavy, but there's also just a giant tub full of really hideous bongs. People be smoking some weed out of very, very ugly paraphernalia. So--

There are archives of LGBTQ history that include arrest forms for cross-dressing, people who were arrested for wearing the wrong number of the wrong kinds of clothes. And, you know, I like to think about Eddie Izzard and how they talked about how they're not women's clothes. They're mine. I bought them.

How we have created and characterized social transgression, how we've criminalized certain kinds of behavior-- that is all archived in the property room in a way that it's really recorded in very few other places because criminality, transgression, bad behavior tends not to be found in the traditional archive, the heritage institution. We tend to celebrate the great and the good, people who obeyed the rules or broke them in a way that society found acceptable.

We tend to find the lives of lower-class people, lower-income people, marginalized communities in the property room in a way that they're not represented in a city archives or a historical society collection. And I think that that overrepresentation in one place and underrepresentation or another is something that we as a community, as a professional community, are seeking to reconcile for things like remedial collection and identifying invisible materials in our collections.

And those things can take the form of bricks with fingerprints on them. Or they can take the form of paperwork or just documenting the absences, the records that we don't have and should. MARLEE GIVENS: You've been listening to our interview with Archives and Collections Consultant Snowden Becker about bricks, shacks, home movies, and other commonplace objects that take on a new significance when we bring them into our libraries, archives, and museums.

My favorite thing about the brick really isn't the brick itself but more of what it once made up, which was the Knowles Dormitory. In the archives, we have documents and photographs of the Knowles dormitory. The architects were Bruce and Morgan, who also designed Tech Tower. Knowles Dormitory was completed in September 1897 and had 36 rooms, a gymnasium, showers, and a dining room for the all-male student population at Georgia Tech at the time.

We have photographs from the early 20th century of the interior rooms, such as student rooms. This really gives the researcher an idea of how students lived and what the rooms look like during that time. We also have documents stated that after one year of the dorms opening, the building was already overcrowded. Originally, the rooms were designed for two students. But by 1898, there were three students per room.

By the mid-20th century, the building was used as offices and then finally demolished in 1992.

OK, but we're talking about punctum. Have any of you, show team, experienced that moment, where the object you were looking at seemed to connect with you personally, in a way you weren't expecting? WENDY HAGENMAIER: The first thing that popped into my head-- it's actually not about me. So I'm kind of cheating. But I've observed other people experiencing this, I think, in an interesting way.

So in our retroTECH Lab in the library, we have a bunch of older technologies-- older computers, slide rules, cool cameras. We also have some flip phones from the early 2000s, which seem super mundane and like, why would we take up space with these?

But a few years ago-- I'm not sure if it would be the same now because things change so fast, but undergrads would come in and merely weep seeing these flip phones because they reminded them of when they were toddlers or whatever, little kids holding their parents' phone, and having memories of being really little. And it just shot them right back there. And it was just fascinating to observe because I did not share the same experience.

And this magazine probably inspired a bunch of feelings and thoughts in him that I would never quite be able to understand. But that magazine, which is a disposable piece of pop media, is something completely different because of who bought it and when it arrived in my quote, unquote, "collection."

And I realized that it was probably the only thing that I had-- the only example of his handwriting that I have, maybe that exists anywhere from someone who died in 1987. And I just pictured him at the kitchen table, probably labeling these bottles and saving these coins.