This post is part of the Intergenerational Conversations series.

Review of Carolyn Heald, “Is There Room for Archives in the Postmodern World?”American Archivist 59, no. 1 (1996): 88–101, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.59.1.u854130x02844653; and Mark Greene, “The Power of Meaning: The Archival Mission in the Postmodern Age,” American Archivist 65, no. 1 (2002): 42–55, https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc.65.1.l914668v881wv19n.

By Patrick McGee, CUNY Queens College [PDF Full Text] | [PDF Articles + Full Text]

“What formerly was the matter itself is now but a trace; its shape is shrouded and become a simple shadow.”

—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit

Premonitions

In a citationless photograph posted to the X account of the U.S. National Archives as a summer promotional on August 12, 2025, a little girl and a large man ride on a merry-go-round.[1] I was struck by the image: the saturated glow of some hundred yellow bulbs; the blank expression of the little girl. It felt uncanny, thrown out of time. In my continued gaze I felt akin to the little girl, as though in scrolling I had stumbled upon something I did not yet wholly understand—a blank euphoria wrought by the machinic repetition of thumb throwing screen. The post’s caption reads: “From vintage site maps to photographs of iconic rides and crowds enjoying summer fun, our records capture the excitement of these classic destinations.” I followed the link provided in the thread, hoping to find more information about the photograph, and was led to a catalog search for “theme parks.” I scrolled through 320 images and could not find the photo.

I decided to instead search for “amusement parks”—the photograph was revealed immediately. Upon finding the photograph, I discovered that it was taken in May of 1972 by photojournalist Dick Rowan for DOCUMERICA, an Environmental Protection Agency program during the 1970s that photographed subjects of environmental concern. The project was “the United States’ first serious examination of its rapidly decaying natural environment,” producing more than 20,000 photographs taken by approximately seventy photographers.[2] None of this contextual information had been suggested in the X post and, in a tempting flight of conspiracy, even appeared to be deliberately concealed. Archivists are generally rather exacting in their citation, and while the National Archives Identifier (NAID) and photo description were available in the alt text of the photo, the faulty link in the thread made access arduous. At a time in which words such as “pollution,” “climate crisis,” and “trauma” are being systematically purged from government websites, a Fear and Loathing level of paranoia did not feel unwarranted.[3]

The photograph’s catalog page includes a description, which appears to have been written by Citizen Archivist ‘smithal’:

Color photograph of a row of horses on a merry-go-round. To the far left is an overweight Caucasian man with short, brown hair, who holds onto his horse’s pole with both hands. He wears a white golf shirt, a pair of sunglasses, a wrist watch, and a pair of dark pants. The man’s right arm is blocking most of his face, but he appears to be smiling. On the horse next to him is a little Caucasian girl with her hair in pigtails. She is wearing a dark jacket with white trim, a white blouse with red piping, and a red skirt or pair of shorts with a floral pattern. She holds on to her horse’s pole with both hands, and the expression on her face seems dazed or apprehensive rather than amused. The photograph has been taken slightly from below so that the roof of the merry-go-round, with its rows of light bulbs, is visible.[4]

There is something melancholic about the way this text, the X post, and the photograph itself interact. There is at once the evasion of its provenance as “a collective snapshot of the American environmental crisis”;[5] its reappropriation for the promotion of the National Archives’ collections; and the citizen description, almost other-worldly in its precision and attention to the subjects’ affects. Transformed by its context, the photograph evokes a sense of the postmodern. 

. . .

The constitutive features of postmodernity were defined by the late American theorist Fredric Jameson in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism:

. . . a new depthlessness, which finds its prolongation both in contemporary ‘theory’ and in a whole new culture of the image or the simulacrum; a consequent weakening of historicity, both in our relationship to public History and in the new forms of our private temporality, whose ‘schizophrenic’ structure (following Lacan) will determine new types of syntax or syntagmatic relationships in the more temporal arts; a whole new type of emotional ground tone—what I will call ‘intensities’—which can best be grasped by a return to older theories of the sublime. . .[6]

Here, Jameson poses the “new depthlessness” of postmodern art as that which refuses meaning, “a random collection of dead objects” removed from history, a form of mere commodity fetishism best embodied in the work of Andy Warhol. For Jameson, this severing of meaning from authentic desire in the age of late capitalism is also the severing of the subject from itself, clearing the way for “a whole new type of emotional ground tone.” The “depth models” of modernity, which he describes as the contradictions posed between essence and appearance, the latent and the manifest, authenticity and inauthenticity, and the signifier and the signified, are replaced in postmodern culture by a “waning of affect”—meaningful contradictions rendered fragmented emotional “intensities” easily swayed by empty images of nostalgia.[7]

Postmodernism is a form of literary criticism that could “read high and mass culture as objectively related and dialectically interdependent phenomena, as twin and inseparable forms of the fission of aesthetic production under late capitalism.”[8] For Jameson, this method of reading opened a “whole new field for cultural study” focused on the “social and aesthetic situation—the dilemma of form and of a public”[9] faced by both the high modernists and the populists.[10] This mode of critique became the major framework for literary analysis in North American universities during the 1980s, impacting every realm of the humanities, including archival theory. This new constitution of space, time, aesthetics, and affect emerged alongside digital technology; code, or the sublimation of messages into binary language, became the new guiding metaphor for communication and its failures. Both technological acceleration and cultural malaise in this period provoked a sense of crisis in the archives profession. In American Archivist, the first scholar to mention postmodernism was Canadian Carolyn Heald in 1996.

Postmodern Diplomatics

Composed originally for a 1994 reading course in archival diplomatics, Carolyn Heald’s 1996 essay “Is There Room for Archives in the Postmodern World?”begins in stark world-historical form, with an epigraph taken from forerunner of modern archival theory Hugh A. Taylor’s piece, “Transformation in the Archives: Technological Adjustment or Paradigm Shift?” It is worthwhile to quote this in full:

We are awash in a sea of mega-choice as we lay down the jigsaw puzzle [metaphor for paper records] and pick up the transformer [digital records]. Finding a way through may be a matter of finding our way back, not to some happy simplicity of some idealized archival past, but to the nature of our humanity, who we are and what we are about, as we grapple with the extraordinary freedoms and constraints of automation and electronic communication in general. (Taylor, as quoted in Heald, p. 89)

Taylor’s essay makes the comparison of electronic records to transformers, playing on both the children’s toy and the world of computation made possible by passive electrical circuits. For Heald, the metaphor has waned—her experience is one of alienation, of nostalgic distantiation from an authentic experience of continuity and amnesia: “Re-reading his article five years later, I could barely recollect what a Transformer was” (Heald, p. 89). She attributes this experience of amnesia to the postmodern condition—“A world of fads and fashions, fragmented, decontextualized, and global” (Heald, p. 89). Following Jameson, Heald defines postmodernism as an inability to think historically, a “historical (un)consciousness” commanded by “heritage shopping malls, Madonna, the return of tie-dye without the ideology that first inspired it” (Heald, pp. 89–90). In brief, it is the severing of image from meaning and the psychological effects of this break.  

Much of Heald’s article confronts issues of historiography and the archivist’s role in the wake of its relativistic upheaval. She begins by analyzing historical manuals used in graduate classrooms and the shift in historical composition from balancing facts against interpretation to providing narrative. The linguistic turn’s influence on historians, or the vision of “the historical imagination as another mode of writing,” worries her (Heald, p. 91). She poses questions raised by this sea of mega-choice: 

But if historical writing is fiction, then why do it at all? Why even bother to look at the traces . . . of the past that archives so diligently collect, organize, and describe? Doesn’t the postmodern approach herald the death of archives, and relegate all our traces to the dustbin? (Heald, p. 92)

The profession is in crisis, Heald implies, and the crisis is not relegated strictly to questions of historical interpretation. It is also a question of chaos, the threat of unregulated development:

. . . archivists are facing a problem of entropy: information overload, and the tendency for information to implode and cause disinformation . . . How can we avoid being overcome by the sheer volume of information and sinking at the same time into the philosophical quagmire of postmodern thinking that everything is relative, nothing is stable? (Heald, p. 92)

For Heald, at least upon initial assessment, we must turn to diplomatics in response—to continue to patiently cultivate an “understanding of the form and function of documentary records” (Heald, p. 92). This debate had been hashed out fiercely only five years before in the pages of Canada’s archival scholarly journal Archivaria with the publication of Canadian archival scholar Luciana Duranti’s six-part “Diplomatics: New Uses for an Old Science.”[11] On one side of the debate stood those who, in archival literature, are often referred to as postmodernists—Brien Brothman, Richard Brown, and Terry Cook. On the other side stood the diplomatic cadre, headed by University of British Columbia professors Duranti and Terry Eastwood, and their focus on authenticating the true nature of bureaucratic documents through a structural analysis of the records produced. 

To tear deconstruction down, Heald hastily applies a definition. She defines deconstruction as the forcible dissolution of coherent meaning, centering Richard Brown’s theory of archival hermeneutics as a foil for the debate. Brown, in a 1991 piece on records acquisition strategy, had identified the need for “a structural-functional model that ‘reads’ and assesses the bureaucratic discourse” as a strategy for negotiating the massive amount of government records increasingly being generated in an electronic world (Heald, pp. 92–93). Heald assesses Brown’s pursuit as “well and good” before writing it off as “philosophical jargon” (Heald, p. 93), highlighting Brown’s focus on context and interpretation as a “deconstructive technique for our archival assessments of records, or, in the language of discourse theorists, texts” (Heald, p. 92). Heald feels if it’s not been said, it’s all been done before—that deconstruction and the methods that follow from it are in fact synonymous with the work of archivy: 

Good archivists have always studied not just what is said, but how the message is expressed: the language, the medium, the technology of production, the historical circumstances and the context of writing (who the author is, who the intended audience is.) (Heald, p. 93)

It is not this facet of deconstruction with which Heald takes issue. It is instead the emphasis on information as subjectively negotiated through critical methods as opposed to records as objective evidence of events that so troubles her. A fear of entropy colors her analysis, a fear taken from Hugh A. Taylor’s visions of tradition and excess, of the implosion of information first hailed into existence by the atomic bomb.[12] It is not so much that deconstruction in its perceived relativism is necessarily dangerous—in fact, Heald perceives diplomatics itself to be a deconstructive mode of reading (“One could argue that diplomatics is a form of deconstruction”)—but rather that “the emphasis on cultural artifacts has been gradually giving way to an emphasis on information—decontextualized, decentred, and destructive” (Heald, p. 95). For Heald, information itself is unwieldy, chaotic, and best serviced by the archivist in a steely-eyed focus on form and function.

A sense of irony waxes as Heald weaves her variegated threads. Her final trek stretches through the dark forest of meta-archives: She calls for a “radical historicization of archives,” an “archivography,” defined as “a situating of archival principles and practices within the larger socio-cultural, historical context” (Heald, p. 100). It is here that her return to first principles, her self-reflection wrought by the postmodern condition, becomes most intriguing: “Can we deconstruct the diplomatic process itself? Why is a medieval practice being resurrected now in North America? Is it just the cycle of time, or does it have as much to do with the so-called postmodern condition?” (Heald, p. 100). This is a call for a dialectical reading of a discipline to transcend the crisis of postmodernity—a negation of diplomatics, a “focus . . . on the records themselves . . . as a willful act of postmodern self-consciousness” (Heald, p. 101).

Art and Reality, Memory and Evidence

The next piece out of American Archivist to touch on the postmodern came in 2002. In a paper originally presented at the Spring 2001 Midwest Archives Conference, future SAA President Mark A. Greene outlines the twin pillars of the archival mission as the preservation of “evidence of transactions” and a concern for “memory” (Greene, p. 44). He sees these concepts as properly held “in balance—not even in tension” by those who abide by the archival paradigm, a “chaotic” and “messy” form of planning in which both evidentiary and cultural documents are preserved for ongoing administration and accountability (Greene, pp. 44–45).

Greene approaches the work of Luciana Duranti and her fellow diplomatists as the central theorists of the recordkeeping paradigm, resurgent with the proliferation of computers. His concern with this paradigm is that an evidentiary approach to the cultural crisis of information overload will abandon the archival mission of preserving cultural memory. His issue is not with a theory of evidential value but rather with “the recordkeeping paradigm[’s] [presumption] to become the archival paradigm,” substituting the objective truth of records for the subjective and dynamic meaning of information (Greene, p. 44). He queries this conceit as the acceptance of a tautological definition of archives; for the recordkeepers, “Archives preserve institutional evidence of transactions because this is by definition what archives do” (Greene, p. 47). This definition of archives accepts an objective, limited, yet oddly transcendent nature of records that cannot be valued but as evidence of bureaucratic transactions. Recordkeepers have developed their theory of culture from this vantage, asserting that cultural authenticity derives from verifiable transactions. Greene most profoundly disagrees with this theory of culture, arguing that it cannot hold in a world in which the meaning of knowledge is so rapidly transforming. 

Greene’s theory of knowledge is grounded in the internal operation of corporations, and he turns his attention to the ways in which the needs of a corporation are served by its recordkeeping techniques. This analogy grounds the major critique Greene levels at diplomatics: The recordkeeper’s belief that records harbor an objective nature belies an inflexible cultural understanding. Greene’s use of the corporation also provides the necessary conceit for any archival discussion of late capitalism:

Databases and data warehouses, nontransactional and therefore nonrecords in the recordkeeping paradigm, are receiving more resources from government agencies and corporations of all sizes because sharing data for reuse and reanalysis is often more important to the efficient and effective functioning of an enterprise than audit trails for a specific type of documents called records. (Greene, p. 50)

And here Greene speaks through the veil of the symbolic: “Even documentary fragments have meaning for institutions and organizations because symbolism has meaning” (Greene, p. 50). In this rhetorical faint, memory has become synonymous with corporate needs, and archivy has once again become a meaningful act—an art wrapped up in what Theodor Adorno understood as the “consciousness of needs.”[13] Fragments have meaning—“meaning that transcends the immediate purpose for which the material was created and suggests the appropriateness of making it accessible for the long term” (Greene, p. 50). CNN making its web archives searchable was the future of meaning, a term Greene prefers to memory. Remnants of culture, as either information or records, transcend their meaning (or memory) through accessibility and transparency. For Greene, it is the modernist, positivist will to truth that occludes the cultural power of archives as sites of “an archival residue of value, utility, and effectiveness for a constituency that is large, diverse, and growing” (Greene, p. 54). 

When Epochs Fail

In both Heald and Greene, there is a tacit acceptance of “postmodern” as a term signifying a cultural epoch. It is used to encompass a political climate, an affectual experience, a historiographical method, and a set of citations rooted in postwar French philosophy. This decision to accept an a priori periodization concedes intellectual ground to a word fraught with “semantic instability” and political overtones.[14] The concept also comes with its own set of histories, debates, and controversies. By the mid-1980s, in large part through the publications of theorist Frederic Jameson, the “postmodern axis”had become the prime method of reading French theory in American universities, bringing a wealth of terminological distinctions under one epochal umbrella.[15] Beginning in French departments and making their way to English, the theories of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jean Baudrillard were slowly translated and applied to adjacent fields, including history, critical legal studies, theology, and archives.[16] This has been referred to as the “American invention of French theory,” the method by which philosophical texts were decontextualized and reassembled via popular quotation to produce a uniquely American corpus.[17] This is a historiography that archival theorists ought to have grappled with before assuming the concept as the signification of professional and cultural crisis. By removing the question of postmodernity from its discourse,[18] the concept becomes a floating signifier serving only as grist for a discipline’s mill, not without political implications.[19] By the application of what may in hindsight have best been conceived as an aesthetic diagnosis of late capitalism to theories of recordkeeping and the archival profession writ large, wetake up the mantle of a nostalgic irony with deep philosophical roots and forsake the archives as a site of political power capable of responding to digital fascism.[20] Archives are mediators of meaning—when we haphazardly accept contested cultural diagnoses as the ground of our theory, we are giving up the political power granted by our social, cultural, and technological position.

Postmodernism is no longer the debate situated at the heart of archival discourse. New concepts have emerged; popular citations today come from affect theory, new materialism, postcolonialism, and critical analyses of race, gender, and disability. These critical interventions are a continuation of the archival debate on postmodernism and its applicability to the archivist’s self-conception. However, this also means archival scholars are facing the crisis of the humanities borne of the antinomies of postmodernism. The use of difference, or the relativized and relativizing subject,as both the guiding motif of radical scholarship and the “principal instrument for the management of biopower” is forcing a reconsideration of the politics of writing, and thus of the archivist’s role in the preservation of traces.[21] If we are to harness archival work as a site of political power, we must immerse ourselves in the history of the critical condition and resist being swayed by scholarly trends. As François Cusset writes in his French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, there is much work to be done “in opposition to the fashionable fatalism of the postmodern age—about the end of history, for example, the lost generation, and their powerlessness.”[22]

The photo of the apprehensive little girl riding a carousel remains nameless in the void of social media. An image of cultural malaise in the face of overwhelming environmental catastrophe, the photo is rendered meaningless in form and function quacontent: a simple shadow where once was matter. Similarly, by decontextualizing and simplifying postmodernism and applying it haphazardly to theories of professional crisis, we remove ourselves from the realm of the political that is the work of archivy. There must be a reappraisal and strengthening of the historiography of archival postmodernism if we are to theorize the crisis of archival work in its embedded and social role today. We must write and act with a reinvigorated sense of the political, or risk all—history, structure, memory, and meaning. 

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[1] U.S. National Archives (@USNatArchives), “From vintage site maps to photographs of iconic rides and crowds enjoying summer fun, our records capture the excitement of these classic destinations,” X (Twitter), August 12, 2025, https://x.com/USNatArchives/status/1955269424077852758.

[2] “MERRY-GO-ROUND AT AMUSEMENT PARK,” National Archives Catalog, https://catalog.archives.gov/id/543213; C. Jerry Simmons, “DOCUMERICA: Snapshots of Crisis and Cure in the 1970s,” Prologue Magazine 41, no. 1 (2009), https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2009/spring/documerica.html.   

[3] The reference is to American journalist and author Hunter S. Thompson’s novel of American excess and death of 1960s counterculture, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream. The characters are throughout possessed by drug-induced visions.Words that have been taken off government websites can be found at Karen Yourish, Annie Daniel, Saurabh Datar, Isaac White, and Lazaro Gamio, “These Words Are Disappearing in the New Trump Administration,” New York Times (March 7, 2025), https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/07/us/trump-federal-agencies-websites-words-dei.html.

[4] smithal, Description of “MERRY-GO-ROUND AT AMUSEMENT PARK,” National Archives Catalog, https://catalog.archives.gov/id/543213?objectPanel=transcription.

[5] Simmons, “DOCUMERICA.” 

[6] Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 6.

[7] Jameson, Postmodernism, 6–16.

[8] Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text, no.1(Winter 1979): 133–34, https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduates/modules/ontheroadtocollapse/syllabus2018_19/jameson_reification_utopia.pdf.

[9] Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” 133–34.

[10] Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” 133–34.

[11] Luciana Duranti, “Diplomatics: New Uses for an Old Science, Part I” Archivaria 28 (January 1989): 7–27, https://archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/article/view/11567. All six articles are available via the Archivaria website.

[12] “The bomb is itself pure information defining our present obsessions and modes of thinking which Einstein also warned us would have to change and change quite fast. This applies as much to archivists as anyone else. If you find this metaphor hard to take, then the exploitation, destruction, and pollution of natural resources, vast economic inequalities, and the power of transnational corporations and the military-industrial complex bear witness to the consummation of the industrial age, grossly accelerated in the electronic world of a so-called “information society” in its transitional stage from the old order. I make no apology for moving outside the narrow bounds of the bureaucratic office, the records centre, and the archives, because I believe that the malaise which both Terry Eastwood and Terry Cook perceive as haunting Canadian archival practice is closely bound up with the breakdown of one culture and the emergence of another which affects society as a whole.” Hugh A. Taylor, “Transformation in the Archives: Technological Adjustment or Paradigm Shift?,” Archivaria 25(Winter 1987–1988): 14, https://archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/article/view/11451.

[13] Theodor Adorno, Critical Models (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 14.

[14] Ihab Hassan, The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Towards a Postmodern Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971), 264.

[15] François Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 215.

[16] Cusset, French Theory, 78.

[17] Cusset, French Theory, xiv.

[18] This includes Ihab Hassan’s The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Towards a Postmodern Literature, François Lyotard’s Postmodern Condition, the aforementioned Jameson text, and Jürgen Habermas’s cautionary responses and plea for a renewed modernity. See Hassan, Dismemberment of Orpheus; Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Manchester University Press, 1979); Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism; and Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (MIT Press, 1987).       

[19] The political implications are covered most completely in Habermas’ texts. See Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity;and Habermas and Seyla Ben-Habib,“Modernity versus Postmodernity,” New German Critique, no. 22 (1981): 3–14, https://doi.org/10.2307/487859.

[20] On digital fascism, see Christian Fuchs, Digital Fascism: Media, Communication and Society Volume Four (New York: Routledge, 2022). On irony and nostalgia, see Allan Megill, Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida (University of California Press, 1985);and Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason (Princeton University Press, 2004).

[21] Tiqqun, “Echographie d’une puissance,” Tiqqun 2, “Zone d’Opacité Ofensive” (2001): 217. Cited in Cusset, French Theory, 333.

[22] Cusset, French Theory, 334.