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In this piece, I open with the term precarity. I want to be clear that when I talk about precarity it is with the full knowledge that precarity is a tool wielded by the white imagination to dispossess and silence a racialized form of others (for more information about this tradition, I highly suggest reading “Breath and Precarity” by Nathaniel Mackey). As a white woman, I want to particularly draw attention to the long history of white women who have and have continued to leverage our imagined and socially-constructed fragility in our own self-interest as a way to pass for precarity, even as that practice elided and obfuscated the voices of those who first used the term to testify to their lived realities. In using the term precarity to open this piece, I do so not to present myself as a victim of precarity, but rather to understand my role and responsibility as a participant in institutions that leverage precarity as a tool of oppression. 

This year feels marked by a growing chasm between individual precarity and institutional prosperity in a way that seems obscene. I want to say “seems” not because I doubt the vulgarity of the suffering that we bore witness to in the past year, but because I doubt the sense of exceptionalism. In recent years, we may have developed a new vocabulary to articulate these forms of suffering, but if we listen well we should all understand that the suffering itself is part of a much longer history.

And yet, a new vocabulary is not without its own utility. In the inaugural issue of the Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, (2017), Marika Cifor and Jaime A. Lee’s “Towards an Archival Critique: Opening Possibilities for Addressing Neoliberalism in the Archival Field'' (2017) opened a pathway for archivists to critique the politics and paradigms of our current moment in a new way. In the article, Cifor and Lee cite political theorists Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalization’s Stealth Revolution (2015) as a way to build a new foundation for understanding this moment in archives. In particular, Cifor and Lee draw upon Brown’s definition of neoliberalism to begin a new a conversation about a growing awareness of neoliberalism as the “rationality [that] disseminates the model of the market to all domains and activities— even where money is not at issue— and configures human beings exhaustively as market actors, always, only, and everywhere as homo oeconomicus” (38). Using this definition, Cifor and Lee began to interrogate the growing pervasion of the economic logics being applied to archives. 

Only two years later in 2019, Cifor and Lee edited a special issue of JCLIS “Evidences, Implications, and Critical Interrogations of Neoliberalism in Information Studies'' wherein additional theorists and practitioners move forward Cifor and Lee’s initial discourse as a way to discuss their experiences of neoliberal logics that govern both the Archive and an archives (e.g., the embodied placed where archival workers experience these effects first hand). Articles like Roderic Crooks’ “Accesso Libre” and perspectives like Katy Wildenhaus’ “Wages for Intern Work'' provided concrete critiques of what Cifor and Lee refer to as the “damaging constraints of living and working in [economic] competition” (9). Yet, even as the damaging effects of economization take center stage in that issue, there remains a continued tension. In nearly every piece, archivists seem inevitably forced to return to funding and capital as the only viable solutions to the very effects of neoliberalism’s market thinking.

In a way, this issue reinforces the noted teleological effects of neoliberal logics which, as Brown says, configure all problems as market problems and necessarily then configure all solutions as market solutions. Of course, this is not to say that there is anything wrong with these proposed solutions in and of themselves. We absolutely should advocate for intern labor to be valued and paid labor. We absolutely should advocate for creators in post-custodial relationships to be valued and paid. This work of solidarity is critical. Yet, I also worry that this work is not sufficient--that this work attends to the effects of neoliberalism but fails to address the cause. Ultimately, I remain skeptical that the fight against economization can be fought on market terms. 

For exactly this reason, I want to raise the issue of how austerity logic fits into the neoliberal paradigm both in the Archive and in an archive (per Michelle Caswell). In Brown’s formulation of neoliberalism, austerity plays a critical role. Brown writes, “in the transition from liberal to neoliberal democracy, citizen virtue is reworked as responsibilized entrepreneurialism and self-investment, it is also reworked in the austerity era as the 'shared sacrifice' routinely solicited by heads of state and heads of businesses.” (210). Brown goes on to explain that the “shared sacrifice” that austerity imposes “may entail sudden job losses, furloughs, or cuts in pay, benefits, and pensions, or it may ….refer to the effects of curtailed state investment in education, infrastructure, public transportation, public parks, or public services, or it may simply be a way of introducing job ‘sharing,’ that is, reduced hours and pay.” (210-211). Of course, austerity as imposed by “heads of state and heads of business” yields a “shared sacrifice” that is shared and distributed wholly unevenly. 

We need only look at the front page of the New York Times each day to confirm that in times of austerity and economic need (read: global pandemic), the first individuals volunteered up for a shared sacrifice are almost too predictable: immigrants, Indigenous communities, incarcerated individuals, dis/abled individuals, the poor, and generally any bodies that fail to conform to the white imagination’s racialized ideals of citizenship (i.e., Black bodies and more generally people of color). Of course, this is to say nothing of groups that identify at the intersections of these identities.

Among the damning effects of austerity in the neoliberal paradigm is its reproducibility: the most obvious solution to austerity becomes giving away capital. Yet, in this totalizing logic of neoliberalism, a capitalist solution provides an answer that can only reproduce the same problem over and over again. When we solve the issue of unvalued labor only on the terms of arguing for an increase in market value, we participate in that logical fallacy that Audre Lorde first warned us to avoid when she famously wrote that the “master’s tools would never dismantle the master’s house.”

And, yet, where do we turn to find new tools when the ones we have no longer yield anything of use? How do we imagine a way to build the Archive or an archive after austerity? Of course, there are many ways to answer any question, but I find myself turning to sociologist Avery Gordon. Gordon is the author of The Hawthorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins and in her biography on the University of California at Santa Barbara’s website she describes herself as “the former keeper of the Hawthorn Archives, which records the living history of a group of runaways, secessionists, and in-differents who form autonomous zones and settlements.” Gordon’s The Hawthorn Archive as well as the Hawthorn Archives themselves represent both the Archive and an archive. In both, Gordon and her collaborators and fellow “in-differents” ask precisely the question of how to build a kind utopia, understanding that an imagined world is required to access a place beyond the totalizing constraints of neoliberal logic and austerity. 

Images by Caitlin Rizzo from The Hawthorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins by Avery F. Gordon

In The Hawthorn Archive, Gordon offers: “It’s extremely difficult to let go living on their terms, to let go of the bad and the good and find another way. It requires a certain degree of embodied in-difference or organs for the alternative that conviction or rhetoric alone does not yield. It requires a certain practice or preparation in property relations with which we are often less familiar.” Gordon is here referencing two sources. First, Gordon is calling upon the philosopher Herbert Marcuse whose term “qualitative difference” is used  to “define the nature of the deep systematic change he associated with refusal, liberation, and the growth of ‘organs for the alternative.’” Second, Gordon references the Black writer and activist Toni Cade Bambara’s “abolitionist notion of ‘becoming unavailable for servitude back stiff with conviction’.” Gordon describes the significance of an “in-difference to the lure and the pull of sacrificial goods and promises ubiquitously on offer,” and goes on to define “to be in-difference” as “to believe that we are better and more human than the reactive subjects of a variety of abusive arrangements of power and authority” (48). For Gordon, in-difference is an essentially utopic project, a project of the Archive, and yet it also exists (impossibly) embodied in the “organs” of those who have practiced or prepared for something otherwise. 

In an archive, austerity manifests itself in a host of ways that have become so ubiquitous as to seem ordinary. Austerity can be the business office that insists that there is no budget to pay interns when we know there is a budget to buy books. Austerity can be the grant-based funding that forces archival workers to subsist without benefits, devaluing both their labor and the core work of archival arrangement, description, and digitization. Austerity can be the institutional valuing of professionals of color as tokens or symbols of virtuosity that allows those very same individuals to work the hardest, to sit on the most committees, to take part in the most emotional labor, to sacrifice themselves for the better of the institution without any additional pay. Austerity can also be the digitization practices that outsource key archival labor to incarcerated populations who would be denied the opportunity to work in archives for fair wages (at least or especially those that would require background checks) but who can toil invisibly for nearly no cost to the institution. 

"I Didn’t Check Email Today…" by Shaun Slifer, 2020 after Clifford Harper. Retrieved from Justseeds.

In the Archive, austerity is equally evident in the extractive relationships that the Archive relies upon for its existence--the inability of creators to fund the permanent preservation of not only their materials but their communities themselves that forces them to turn to institutions where those materials will likely lose their original context and ultimately decrease in value.

In short, in an archive, austerity can be me: the white woman, or the middle manager, who fails to acknowledge the effects and allows them to progress forward in service of the institution. In the Archive, austerity is also me: the white woman, trained to theorize and justify the mechanisms that perpetuate these systems. 

Asking how we compensate and value others is a critical step to hold institutions accountable, but accountability is not justice. In a neoliberal paradigm, capital cannot dismantle austerity. This is exactly the trick. I turn to Gordon because the work reminds me  of the necessity of refusal and resistance as a critical practice. If neoliberalism continually asks me to sacrifice others for the good of capital, perhaps I should, in the words of Bambara, “become unavailable.”

Citations

Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalization’s Stealth Revolution. New York, Zone Books, 2015.

Gordon, Avery F. The Hawthorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018.

Cifor, Marika and Jamie A. Lee. “Towards an Archival Critique: Opening Possibilities for Addressing Neoliberalism in the Archival Field.” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 1, no. 1 (2017). doi: 10.24242/jclis.v1i1.10

Lee, Jamie A. and Marika Cifor. “Evidences, Implications, and Critical Interrogations of Neoliberalism in Information Studies: An Introduction,” in “Evidences, Implications, and Critical Interrogations of Neoliberalism in Information Studies,” eds. Jamie A. Lee and Marika Cifor. Special issue, Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 2, no.1 (2019). doi: 10.24242/jclis.v2i1.122

Caitlin Rizzo is the Archivist for the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. She earned her MLIS from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2018 with a specialization in Archives and Digital Curation. Her past work includes positions with Eberly Family Special Collections Library at Pennsylvania State University, the Special Collections and University Archives at the University of Maryland, College Park, the Early Modern Manuscript Online project at the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Poetry and Literature Center at the Library of Congress.