A Special Memorialized State

This account is in a special memorialized state.

It took me a moment to remember that “this account” was mine, and not my father’s. I’d logged into Facebook in order to look at his page, to see if his friends had posted anything there since he died last October.

But no, Facebook informed me: it’s you who’s dead, actually. This account is in a special memorialized state.

The full irony of this moment can’t be appreciated without some context. As a geographer who studies collective memory, I do a lot of thinking about time, presence, and absence. How it’s not so much that things naturally are of the past, present, or future, but that they may occupy any of these positions at different moments as we assign the presence or absence of each thing a place in time. I had just learned that Facebook was assigning me a place in the past, a place for the dead.

Let me explain myself. This place in the past is still here in the present. It’s the only way anything can be of the past; if it weren’t in the present, we wouldn’t know about it. I told my father so, in hospice, when he worried that by dying he was abandoning us. Ours is a ludicrously abstract family, and so the best way I knew to tell him was to go get my copy of Laurent Olivier’s The Dark Abyss of Time and read aloud: “In spite of all that we do, artifacts will deteriorate and age; that is their way of remaining with us, of existing in our present.”¹ Trying to stop this only destroys what you want to preserve. An archaeologist, Olivier argues that sites and artifacts are carried forward through such changes, not in spite of them. A cemetery is still a cemetery even as new graves are added and customs shift; a house is still a house after additions, electrification, or other remodeling; an erosion process caused by grazing, halted by abandonment of the site, can pick up where it left off millennia later if grazing animals are reintroduced.

Such sites, however, are not only places in themselves but constitutive of other places—the cemetery belongs to the town, the historic district to the city, and so forth. Designating these places as of the past is a way to make sure that our present accounts of time are organized: that we know what the past consists of, how it differs from the present, and where to find it. This is a significant aspect of what it means for places to have identities, and for people to recognize those places and maintain attachments to them. But these accounts are remade all the time. Rather than recording linear progressions of cause and effect, they construct such relationships; as Astrid Schrader writes, “Causality is an expression of the materiality of traces, which demand to be accounted for.”²

Nancy Munn notes that too much instability in these emplaced arrangements can become disturbing: “It is as if both places and people depart from each other, each disappearing from the other’s view.”³ As we (places and people) leave each other behind, the relationship of looking—which is itself a kind of contact⁴—decoheres; people grope after their attachments to places and begin to be unsure of where and when they are. Munn continues:

In this respect, the “practical system” of persons and places discussed above is shown in its characteristic operation as an arena for transposing the action of persons to objectifying forms, which then “look back” at people in these given shapes as aspects of themselves.⁵

It’s difficult, then, when places no longer look back at you. It’s difficult in the way it was the day Dad died, when I couldn’t tell for a while if he was looking at me or staring blankly in a direction that happened to intersect my eyeline. In his meditation on hauntology, Derrida called this “the visor effect”: what haunts you is a present absence that might or might not be looking back at you, whose recognition you can never ascertain.⁶

It does not satisfy. Dear being, how might I
responsibly interpret your incomprehensible
behavior? Where am I in it? ⁷

“Where am I?” is an inescapable question when you are uncertain of being looked back at. It becomes uncertain whether you are here; equally, whether here is itself still here; and whether you belong here anymore, if you ever did. Places, keep in mind, are not simply locations in space but normative contexts (which may have no stable spatial designation at all) in which we make sense of and regulate our own and others’ behavior.⁸ Agreeing on where the past lies, and on what belongs to the status of “past,” has great bearing on who does and does not belong in specific places. This agreement is called commemoration: it means putting some things in a special memorialized state so that the current account of time will be stabilized. It is part of how we recognize places as themselves, and through them recognize ourselves as ourselves—how we ensure they will keep looking back. Commemoration is also never perfect or complete; as struggles over monuments and whom they should recognize attest, much is excluded in this way. This account is in a special memorialized state. If you have any questions, please visit the Help Center.

My absentia was emphasized by Facebook’s automated initial layers of customer service. I got emails from no one (signing off with “Sincerely” and no name); when I responded to them (“Dear Blank,”), I got tangentially related answers indicating an automated system rather than human reasoning. I was a ghost, eliciting reactions but not responses, and shut out of the familiar, living realm of Facebook—even “my own” place in it. Try resetting your password. I wonder if this is how it feels to be a famous person when conspiracists insist you’re dead and being played by an impostor. What magic word or perfect gesture would guarantee your presence as yourself, and based on what? I dutifully sent in a picture of myself holding a photo ID. This, I was told, was not clear enough to verify.

This odd little incident and its procedural flourishes make me question what it means to be misfiled. Important work in Black and postcolonial studies has been done on archival absences, and how these contribute to ongoing attempted erasures of those who would inherit that missing material.⁹ But what of what is there and shouldn’t be? What does that exactly mean, for something not to belong in the archive? To be archived ahead of time—relegated to the past—has been discussed in relation to Indigeneity as a way of denying presence in the present, another tactic in the production of absence.¹⁰ These perspectives critique archival power, and so they necessarily fold unfitting presences and absences back into the fact of that power’s operations. Something “doesn’t belong” because it doesn’t fit the archiving authority’s practiced notions of relevance, importance, or meaning. If included, even as absence, it is therefore a clue to inquire after, a crack to dig in.

There are several lines of thought that could proceed from this point, ranging from the temporalities and boundaries of digital places to the internal geographies of archives—and I mean this spatially, not in terms of “mapping” the catalogue, contents, or institution. Archives are places, too, though this fact tends to be ignored in the course of analogizing them to everything else under the sun. But I am trying to ask about something else, about which perhaps little can be said.

The irony is that my account was archived and Dad’s was not, our proper places reversed; the absurdity is that this says nothing about power at all beyond the capacity to be arbitrary, which is only another name for power. The Kafkaesque inscrutability of the incident speaks for itself. It’s like finding, in the archive, not a structured presence or absence but your own shopping list for tomorrow. That is what doesn’t belong (yet). In the end, what I have here may be nothing more than the reminder that all our efforts to ascribe meaning to the archive, its forms, its contents, its potentialities and blockages, presences and absences, are accounts. We can never visit or experience the past, only construct it from what we have with us in the present; and the acts of others on which we rely to do so are, sometimes, simply arbitrary. The archive is not always looking back at us, despite the fact that everything in it is in a special memorialized state. Just so with grieving: there’s no help for it, but there’s also nothing else.

1. Laurent Olivier, The Dark Abyss of Time: Archaeology and Memory, trans. Arthur Greenspan (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), 57.
2. Astrid Schrader, “Haunted Measurements: Demonic work and time in experimentation,” difference: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 25 (2012): 151.
3. Nancy Munn, “The ‘becoming-past’ of places: Spacetime and memory in nineteenth-century, pre-Civil War New York,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3 (2013): 375.
4. Jena Osman, Public Figures (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2012); Solmaz Sharif, Look: Poems (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2016).
5. Munn, “‘Becoming-past’ of places,” 375.
6. Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), 6–8, 123–26; also see chap. 5.
7. Karen Solie, “Museum of the Thing,” Paris Review no. 210 (Fall 2014).
8. Michael Curry, “‘Hereness’ and the normativity of place,” in James Proctor and David Smith, eds., Geography and Ethics: Journeys in a Moral Terrain (London: Routledge, 1999), 95–106.
9. For example, see Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” small axe 26 (June 2008): 1–14; and Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Historiography,” Nepantia 1 (2000): 9–32.
10. Rebecca Roanhorse, “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience,” Apex Magazine, Aug. 8, 2017; Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).