The Library of Congress classification for anarchism is HX 821-970.9 and Dewey is 335. I know these because the clicks of a keyboard once made me a representative of the Society of American Anarchists–Student Chapter.
I was mistaken as an anarchist following a meeting run by a Madison, Wisconsin bank. In the spring of 2011 I was President-elect of the Society of American Archivists–Student Chapter. In preparation for my upcoming responsibilities I attended a financial planning seminar that hosted by a local bank; they shared general financial resources for student groups, risk management for assets in case of theft or the death of the account holder, and other services or concerns addressable by banks. Although my registration was already recorded in a database online, I was required to write my name and affiliation by the door.
A follow up e-mail from the bank several weeks later thanked me for attending the session and gently reminded me of their services. Since I’d executed several of their suggestions already and my chapter was a long time customer there, I would have deleted e-mail immediately but for the previously overlooked greeting at the top. The e-mail began…
“Thank you Society of American Anarchists…”
For the first time in my emerging professional life I was living the cliché of an archivist being confused for an anarchist. Sure, I was periodically asked to pronounce “archivist” or define what an archive was or did…but anarchists? This was the stuff of legend! The year before during a seminar class titled “Problems in Archives,” which was effectively a course dedicated to perceptions of archives by employers and the public, my professor shared an anecdote from his time running for local office. At a debate on local radio he introduced himself and stated his profession. During the call in portion of the debate a community member stated, quoting my professor, that we should “not elect someone who supports the overthrow of the federal government.” The whole class roared. How incredulous! Did that caller really believe that someone who was a professional anarchist would run for elected office? But here I was a year later in a similar situation. I still laughed. Did this bank employee really think anarchists were so well organized that they would have a national chapter with affiliated students ones? And in Wisconsin of all places?
GIMP-shopping copyrighted material without attribution is kinda anarchistic, yes?
We archives students were not completely innocent in this whole affair. That very year the chapter’s Vice President Elizabeth Fox-Corbett designed and edited the second edition of The Archivist Cookbook, a fundraising publication for the student chapter’s coffers. Although the cover of the spiral-bounded book was a shiny pastel sheet with bucolic images of farms and prairie rather than crude black and white on thin paper, the joke was right there for the observant.
When I joined Twitter I knew what my handle would be—@anarchivist; I was after all “an archivist” and the first ‘i’ could be read as a ‘y’ and make the handle sound close to “an-ar-key-vist,” a subtle and plausibly deniable joke, but this handle was taken. I settled for @anarchyvist, which was unambiguously relatable to the political philosophy and whose pronunciation felt more awkward. Recently I took a spin with free or open source graphic editors to combine anarchy and archives. It was fun but I am, in my own way, exacerbating that confusion further. These images are intended as professional in jokes. I’m not an anarchist yet I collude in character in a vanity for the sake of a Twitter theme at perhaps some risk to myself. US immigration forms still ask if you are affiliated with anarchist elements and I may be sabotaging my chances of working for the government if a background check doesn’t look deeper than a twitter handle.
The Archivist Cookbook
Frankly I think anarchy is anathema to archivy. Ignoring the school of thought that archives represent the establishment rather than the oppressed and therefore should appraise and collect for the sake of the underrepresented, anarchy seems fundamentally opposed to the needs of the types of institutions benefiting from archival services. I graft my vision of an archivist existing within an anarchistic society to a fantasy version of a Madison, Wisconsin anarchist housing co-op. I imagine the hypothetical archivist is a tired soul rummaging through boxes of unordered materials on the off chance the minutes of a meeting held 80 years ago, which may or may not have been kept, contain a reference to a construction issue that plague’s his housing co-op to this day. Similarly I see an anarchist librarian scraping off Dewey numbers with a razor and placing books on the shelf by their relevance to their social and political utopia.
This is not a flight of fantasy; similar experiments happened in the early days of the Soviet Union when, in the spirit of Communism, certain institutions diminished the importance; this created worker-controlled factories with table cloths and candles in the cafeteria but also conductor-less orchestras. In early Islamic libraries history and mathematics were sorted by relevance to the Qu’ran. Human knowledge orbited the holy book just as planets orbited the sun.
I’m a native Minnesotan in Maryland–totally obvious
For the moment I’m reluctantly refusing to change my Twitter handle. After all, is @Gavialib (Library Loon) a bird? More reasonable explanations could be that she identifies with Loons somehow; perhaps she is from Minnesota or taking a firm stance against the International Ornithological Union’s adoption of a semi-British name “Greater Northern Loon” despite compelling Canadian and American stakes. Similar thoughts for @barkivist (Erin Lawrimore) and the two Welsh corgis as the representative image; is she a dog? If Rebecca Snowman can go by @DerangeDescribe without fear that others will think her mentally disordered, surely my Tweets and blog posts can dispel incipient notions that I favor the overthrow of the local, state, and national governments.
Without archives, and the inherent conscientiousness they engender, how many records would we even have?
[Edit 5/9/2015: I’ve finally changed my twitter handle. I’m now @farcivist, as is ‘farce-iv-ist’]
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Counterfactual Archivist 