Week V: looking to the future

As we continue to progress through this unusual term, I find myself thinking more frequently and more deeply about how this time will be remembered. As historians, we all have an understanding of the urgency that accompanies preservation and remembrance, but often it is difficult to bring that sense of urgency out of its theoretical location and into the material world of our daily practices and considerations. Any discussion that seeks to engage with “how historians will remember this moment” must foreground personal reflection, one’s own lived experiences, one’s own experiences as a historian. We are all historians; we look to the past for lessons. All too often, however, we forget to learn lessons from the present. We forget that, as the architects of a contemporary archive, we are responsible for making this moment coherent outside of our current context. We forget that the difficulties inherent to historical study are mediated through the work of archiving, and can be ameliorated by that same labor.

We must consider those things that have become commonplace, have become embedded in our prevailing assumptions about life in the era of COVID-19, and work to ensure that these concerns, anxieties, pleasures, and constraints are communicated through our processes of collection. In other words, the fact that I have effectively forgotten about the presidential election for the past month is noteworthy; we ought to find places in the archive for such subliminal alterations in the human psyche – these are necessary for making sense of the present, for making sense of the past. In many ways, consciousness dictates context; the facts of the past are only “authentic” or “true” insofar as they reflect the subjectivities of historical actors. To put it plainly, our experiences of this pandemic comprise the pandemic. As a moment in human history, COVID-19 can only be understood through the lens of human agency and human consciousness. 

We must also think of what disciplines our archival practices. The fact that we cannot be within six feet of one another is not merely a peculiarity of our current moment that is worth remembering; it is a momentous particularity that fundamentally shapes our ability to archive, to dialogue, to remember. These considerations are obvious now, but it won’t be long until they become disentangled with our collective common sense; historians of the future, including us, will not read the archive with an understanding of our current spatial concerns. They may not understand that the dearth of in-person interviews in the archive, for example, is not merely an absence but a historical fact in and of itself.

There is no thesis statement to my concerns, but for these reasons it is important that we stay vigilant in our collection processes, that we write lengthier descriptions and provide more context for our contributions, that we check our assumptions and deconstruct them in the space of the archive. The political implications of both history and emergency are currently in a dangerous entanglement; remembering is more important than ever.