Pedagogy | Teaching Archive Trouble

Teaching Archive Trouble:

An Exercise in Text Production and Manuscript Tradition

I'm teaching a seminar on feminist historiography, focused on how feminism interacts with problems of knowledge. The cornerstone of the course is working out a concept of the archive and the ethical and epistemic problems connected to it. Where do we get the texts that we have? Is the archive a neutral record of the past? How does the archive serve a quest for knowledge of the past? How does it interact with time, identity, and the social world?

The exercise I describe here arose out of a need to grapple with these questions without turning the class into a survey of post-structuralism or epistemological theories, and the need for a method which was consistent with my own commitment to feminist pedagogy. That means it had to move concepts fast, be accessible, engaging, collaborative, and include the agency, personhood, and diverse knowledge cultures of the students.

Set-up

Before class, the students read Marlene Manoff's excellent article, 'Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines'. My students are second-language readers of English, so this is a fairly steep ask. To compensate for that, the reading is posted to Perusall. I annotate it ahead of time, glossing difficult vocabulary and connecting the reading to prior class discussion. The platform allows for the students to add their own comments, glossing terms or phrases I may have missed, asking and answering questions, expanding on comments made by myself or by other students.

The students were also asked to sort their notes according to four key questions:

What is an archive?

Why are we talking about archives?

How do things get into the archive?

And why do archives matter for feminist historiography?

In class

I opened with a brief warm-up where they compared their experience of reading. The instruction was “Compare with your neighbor what was the biggest surprise for you, and what you want to know more about.” This gets them to re-activate their reading, and to think forward rather than with a mind to simply repeating the contents of the text. It gives you as an instructor a chance to pretend to be unpacking your bag or opening a window and to listen out for issues where they are confused or getting off track. This warm-up is also an early-intervention opportunity.

I then used puzzle groups to process the article. My seminar has a luxurious eight people in it, so this involved splitting them first into four groups of two, then into two groups of four. I've used puzzle groups with as many as 25 people before and it works well as long as you set it up carefully and nominate one person to chair the group, moderating discussion and keeping an eye on the time.

In the first half of the lesson (allowing about 20 minutes), groups of two worked on each of the four questions. Their instructions were to collect, compare, and clarify their reading notes on that particular question, and to document their answer and email it to me to be shared with the whole group. I explained that this would allow the facts and figures part of the reading to be circulated without them boring each other to death in the larger group (I have a lot of detail-oriented people in my classes), leaving room for broader discussion. This was effective in allowing them to lighten up about which person wrote which book about archives because they knew they were going to get that in written form. Initially, that was my only reason for asking them to document their summaries.

As I was circulating between the four groups to see if there were questions or issues to address, I realized I had created a beautiful monster: in effect, I had just set us all to producing an archive of our own. I could teach them about archive troubles we had just caused a bunch of archive trouble.

When they had finished their summaries and before re-dividing the groups, we reflected together about the little archive we had just started producing. I elicited issues with the archive by asking them 'What will keep our documents from being a clear and complete reflection of what happened in this room on Wednesday morning between 10:15 and 11:45? What has been selected in and what has been selected out? How would a scholar in 200 years be able to work with the materials we just produced?'

Here are the problems they came up with:

Selection: In putting together their notes, they weren't sure how detailed to be, what purpose the document would have beyond being uploaded to the group, how complete their answer should be, whether it should be in full sentences or just outline or note form. They were selecting according to the instruction that it should supply their fellow students with a solid overview, and that they were going to use it to teach their fellow-students this material twenty minutes later. They recognized in the discussion that their texts would have turned out differently if they knew that hundreds of people were going to read them, that their names would be on them, or if they could have made a summary answer to their question based on any secondary text at all and not just the one I had set. This made it clear that our summaries of current thinking on the archive could not possibly stand in for 'what people in Germany in 2019 thought about archives' or even 'what theology students in Halle in 2019 thought about archives'. The notion of selection also gave me a chance also to talk about the social conditions of textual production: our texts were the way they were because of the particular social practice we were engaged in.

Source text: The article which was the basis for our discussion was itself an overview subject to a certain process of selection. It was a different type of text than, for example, Derrida's Mal d'archive, and was not going to find itself at the centre of a knot of derivative discourse in the same way that individual theories of the archive might. In the context of theology, this could be connected to canonical and non-canonical texts, and which ones tend to attract proliferations. This point led to discussion of commentary and compendia and invited them to consider the relationship of their text to the article we had read.

Language: Since I teach bilingually, some students started writing in English, some in German. We all read both, but what if someone found our archive who only spoke French? Or what if they came to it 500 years from now, could read a little German but were now faced with German notes on an English text by somebody with the Slavic surname Manoff, taught by another person with a Slavic surname? How would this influence whether the texts we had produced moved forward through time? Would they think that Slavic women were particularly prevalent in the academic world or that there was an ethnic preoccupation with archives?

Variation: Their instruction was to email me their notes after the first half of the exercise, but what if they added to their notes during the second half and sent that version? Or changed their minds after sending the first version and sent another one later? Then we have multiple versions in circulation, whether on the shared platform, my inbox, or their own hard drives. I could explain that as the norm for ancient texts, but now they could see that it was also the norm for texts produced on Wednesday morning. This was an opportunity to talk about notions of corruption and interpolation and if there may not be other ways to engage with textual variance.

Uncertainty: The groups knew the notes were going to be shared, but they didn't know why. They knew the exercise was short, but they didn't know when I would stop them. Most had never done an exercise of this kind before. Each pair asked different questions of me, so each was operating with slightly different information. This is also well in-line with ancient authors writing about any given religious or social topic: no one has access to all the information, and no one knows for sure what all the other authors are doing.

Materiality: All of the groups produced word documents or pdf files of their notes. Some worked from hand-written reading notes, some from the Perusall platform, and some had printed and highlighted copies of the article as well as access to the online versions. This allowed for questions about which versions were going to last longer, what would shift if later scholars only had access to the paper versions, or how far we could potentially circulate the online versions we had made. What if our source text were to disappear? Would anybody be able to re-construct it, or even identify the author and the genre of the text based on our summaries? What if we couldn't access it ourselves but had had it read out? I knew they understood the interaction between medium and selection when one student recalled how she had been given a monthly calendar on the theme 'great women in history'. The medium suggested that their were exactly twelve great women in history.

Our discussion shifted between the perspective of intake into an archive (textual production and manuscript traditions), as well as enquiring about an imaginary future when an archive is accessed by scholars or students trying to paint a picture of the past. This discussion was very effective in relieving them of the idea that the archive offers a window onto reality. My assertion that what remains to us is a painting and not a window no longer seemed subversive or extreme.

We then re-mixed the students into two groups of four, so that they could teach each other their summaries. Their instructions were to listen for points of connection when each member of their team was explaining their portion, and to end their summary with questions to engage the rest of their group. This was to stop them from just mechanically going around the circle reading off their notes. They knew they were going to get the notes online, so they could focus on each other in class.

Follow-up

In their two larger groups, a certain frenzy was in evidence, arising out of the chain-reaction of conceptual shifts we had just produced. The students made connections between archives and nation building, to previous class discussions on the conditions of manuscript survival favoring both elite literary texts and things that get thrown in the garbage in Egypt, to Eurocentrism, to the ideas of retrieval and reform in feminist historiography, and to the interaction of the archive with university education and even to my syllabi. They were also very interested in the ethical question of 'what now?'. So, students who had been in a previous course on feminist approaches to early Christianity with me could recall and explain the notion of reparative reading.

To close the class, we went back to the same type of questions we had discussed at the half-way point. What about all the oral discourse we just produced? Where was that going to go? What if nobody remembered to email me their summaries? What if only part of the group did, and we had three answers to four questions? What if someone had made an audio or video recording of the whole lesson? Could they predict what the documents would look like based on watching our social interaction, i.e. if they really did have a window onto our Wednesday-morning past?

They were then set ongoing projects. Taking what they knew about archive troubles so far, they were each given one early Christian woman to research. Only they weren't supposed to research 'facts' about the woman, but to track down the source texts and come back with an account of the manuscript tradition on, for example, The Life of Mary of Egypt, Acts of Thecla, or the Passion of Perpetua and Felicity. This means that instead of coming back and re-telling these stories, they were looking at how we got those stories in the first place. For the rest of the semester, each student is the representative of their textual tradition, and each week requires them to apply a new concept to that tradition. This allows them ownership of their efforts, nudges them into more advanced research skills, and, by having them each explain their corpus to the others, gives them a more differentiated overview of the kinds of texts we are working with when we engage the early Christian archive than they would have if they just went off and each did a project independently.

This lesson can be adapted to any class involving ancient texts, and it can be expanded and varied. It wouldn't be futile to do another session on the Manoff article and focus on the who-said-what basics of scholarship on the archive, assigning one theorist to each student team, now that they understand the issues in a more visceral way. I could also see giving the students deliberate text-producing tasks connected to religion, be it secret teachings or a confession of faith, or, with a larger group, splitting them into teams of ancient authors, archivists, and scholars making sure that the scholars and authors can't see each other and can only communicate through the archivists. You could give each team different parameters: an agenda, or multiple agendas, for the authors, a set of selection criteria for the archivists, and a research task for the scholars. Or you could move from this exercise to a field trip to examine a physical archive and interview curators or researchers there.

The lesson was effective because it spirals around the same topic several times (in the reading, the first and second phases of the class exercise, and the follow-up research task), because the students are talking and I am not talking for the majority of the lesson, and because it has a major collaborative and social component. It also serves to make abstract things concrete and close to the students' immediate experience, and it makes exciting moves between metaphor and mechanics. Certain students shared afterwards that their friends were getting fed up with them talking about archives all the time.

Blossom Stefaniw is a Heisenberg Fellow of the German Research Foundation and author of Christian Reading: language, ethics, and the order of things (2019) and of Mind, Text and Commentary: noetic exegesis in Origen of Alexandria, Didymus the Blind, and Evagrius Ponticus (2010). Her current research focuses on textuality, pedagogy, ethics and masculinity in the ascetic literature of the late Roman world.