Making A Fuss was my attempt to create a language for engagement within a system that is based on fear, control, and the rejection of engagement. I then introduced the concept, Daring To Archive, as a discursive-practice that furthers Fussing. Fussing usually emerges within a time-space, then subsides. The practice of Archiving helps create an ongoing mark of Fussing, continually performing into existence some meanings-and-materiality by reciting and reiterating. What is archived creates a story, a materiality, a reality. It can widen existing realities, enhance them, challenge and complicate them — which are great aspects of Diffraction.
Donna Haraway was the one who first brought the phenomenon of Diffraction to the attention of social critical theorists, emphasizing that to be diffractive is a commitment to understanding which differences matter, how they matter, and for whom. In terms of archiving:
- Archiving is not neutral: Choosing what to include, how to name it, what to exclude, or where to place it — are diffractive cuts that create meaning and value.
- Archivists are not "collecting what’s already there," but participating in the making of history and memory.
- Differences matter — and must be accounted for:
Whose voices are missing? Whose perspectives are centered? How is a name or category producing invisibility for some, while amplifying others? Which differences are we reinforcing or erasing by doing this? Which differences are being made to matter — and at what cost?
- Archives create past-present-futures: Archives are world-making tools — they create and circulate memories, knowledge, marks of identity, and histories.
To be diffractive is not to accurately reflect the world as it is, but to trace patterns of difference, how and why certain differences emerge, and what effects they have — especially in terms of power, visibility, and meaning.
In 2022, I was part of a research cohort that examined museums, galleries, libraries, and public art in Denmark to diffract the complex practice called archiving. For example, we listened to archivists explain their struggles and debates on how to name this painting that’s placed inside the National Gallery of Denmark:
Although the nanny is the focal point of the painting, she had never been mentioned in the name of the painting. The painting, made by Wilhelm Marstrand in 1857, was nine years after the abolishment of slavery in the Danish West Indies, so it is most likely that the young nanny was born a slave. The painting was mostly called Portrait of Otto Marstrand's family, which includes the 2 daughters on each side and Otto Marstrand, the wife Annie, and their son Osvald who were strolling in the park in the back. It was only in recent years that the painting is renamed to Portrait of Otto Marstrand's Two Daughters and their West Indian Nanny, Justina, in Frederiksberg Garden.
This example, though, is still a work negotiated within a large institution and reworked by "professional archivists". To further include other archivists, I am particularly aligned with Foucault and Butler on how power is not just repressive or held from above (as Marx suggested), but is everywhere, channeling through everyday practices, discourses, and performed norms. I was more interested in how the so-called mundane people and activities can ethically rework history-present-future.
A lead I had was in the works of Ursula K. Le Guin, called The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (1989), who proposed the first human tool was the bag instead of the spear — we learned to carry before we learned to kill — thereby reimagining a history that is accumulatively sustained by gatherers instead of hunters (or heroes). Mindy Seu then posits herself as a gatherer. It was a brilliant way of reconfiguring the past while opening up participation in the present to propose a more diffractive future. In tandem, I then posited myself as an archivist, breaking the gates that kept history-making practices only within institutions of power.
Postscript: The zine Daring To Archive (alongside Fuss and Werewolf) was introduced at Saigon’s Zine Fair by volunteers. It was later requested by an indie publisher for Kuala Lumpur’s international zine fair, and by a professor in Hanoi to use as examples at the national art university. Certain art stores continue to request them for sale, as they quickly sell out. A zine only costs a few dollars—the point isn’t that it makes any sense economically, but that its ideas circulate organically and prolifically within a cultural typography of disengagement, without any of my participation. That continues to astound (and challenge) me.
