Meaning-making System Research Articles

The Role of Four Life-Story Aspects in a Collaborative Decision-making Process in the Field of Leadership Development

The aim of this conceptual paper is to add knowledge to the existing leadership development field. We examine the development of core intra- and interpersonal values, specifically the individual collaborative features, by considering life experiences (Day, Fleenor, Atwater, Sturm, & McKee, 2014), and how these personal collaborative features become integrated when leadership members (members of the leadership process) collaborate (Cullen-Lester, Maupin, & Carter, 2017). We formulate the following four relevant propositions: (1) Individual collaborative features should be integrated with the essential features of the leadership members' collaboration during a decision-making process. (2) A life-story aspect has substantive contents and the information drawn from it will therefore shape the leadership members’ collaborative features and develop their meaning-making system, while participating in a collaborative decision-making process. (3) The subject under discussion, the context, the actors, and the time of occurrence are the four basic criteria of a life story aspect, in which an event is selected to be placed in. (4) A life story aspect provides fertile grounds for unpacking collaborative tendencies in general and thus implies such tendencies, particularly in the work setting. Consequently, the theoretical contributions of this paper entail advancing and integrating the existing literature of the life-story approach and collaborative decision-making in the leadership development field.

Serving the need of people: the case for servant leadership against populism

ABSTRACT This article provides a contrasting perspective between populist and servant leadership. We propose four key differences based on distinct views on people centricity, the role of the people in the leadership process, the problem solving approach and the preferred leader role. Given the key function that meaning plays in leadership discourse, in particular during times of uncertainty and change, we further propose that populist leaders make use of simplistic meaning-making systems that emphasize monistic and over-simplified views around polarized options, while servant leaders in contrast use complex meaning-making systems that emphasize pluralist and reconciled views towards shared problem solving. Considering that populist leadership often makes references to serving, humility and self-sacrifice in defence of the people, we find it important to distinguish it from servant leadership. We advance, in fact, that servant leaders can function as an antidote to populism, being a genuine people centred approach with a reconciliatory and pluralist view and an adequate (but surely not perfect) response to many of our societal problems.

A Constructive-Developmental Analysis of Satisfaction, Challenge and Coping in Residential Child and Youth Care

The work of caring for children and youth in residential care is a type of “mental demand,” in Kegan’s phrase, and in this study we used Kegan’s constructive developmental theory to interpret the mental demands on front-line child and youth care practitioners. The research questions were (a) how do different meaning-making systems influence how practitioners cope with and experience the demands of the job, and (b) what do child and youth care practitioners, with different meaning-making systems, identify as the primary challenges and the most satisfying experiences, and how do they experience and cope with these challenges? From the initial pool of 99, eighteen participants were selected for in-depth, qualitative interviews to assess the ways in which they make meaning and explore their experiences in residential care. There was internal coherence among the self-authoring and socialized epistemological orders and across organizations. This way of understanding the work reinterprets practice problems, including boundaries and limit testing, turnover and burnout, and how to do supervision.

Экспериментальное формирование понимания подростками образа человека в художественной фотографии

The article describes a formative experiment in which teaching adolescents the basics of fine art photography was used as a means of developing their understanding of human images in photography. The study was conducted with 62 students of 5th grades and 63 students of 9th—10thgrades and employed the following techniques: a modified version of a technique for studying the perception of art (by V.A. Guruzhapov, Yu.A. Poluyanov), A.V. Karpov's reflectivity questionnaire, and the technique “Who am I?” by M. Kuhn and T. McPartland (modified by T.V. Rumyantseva). The formative experiment involved a specially developed programme for teaching the basics of fine art photography consisting of 16 lessons. It is shown that these lessons promote the formation of meaning-making systems of understanding of fine art and facilitate the acquisition of the cultural norm in the perception of fine art photography in high school students. Also, the lessons proved highly effective in developing personality-related educational outcomes (such as reflectivity and self-identification) in younger adolescents. Further research perspectives and practical significance of the experiment are discussed.

Reconstructing Poverty-Related Shame Among Urban Seniors in China: an Exploration of Their Narrated Experiences and a Reflection on Anti-Poverty Interventions

Poverty is an objective state, as well as a set of subjective experiences. This study explored how low-income seniors in urban China make meaning under the pressures of poverty-related shame. Based on two rounds of in-depth interviews with participants in Beijing, spanning 9 years, the researchers concluded that low-income seniors feel deprivation, experiences of being belittled and inferior and a sense of self-deprecation due to material scarcity. Under such pressures, the seniors actively reconstruct poverty-related experiences, demonstrating that older people living in poverty have a powerful meaning-making system, which serves as evidence of their resilience. However, reconstructing experiences of poverty should not be taken for granted, but be regarded as an appeal for dignity-oriented social policies. This rich meaning-making system could be a foundation upon which anti-poverty advocates adopt and advance various strengths-based interventions. These findings also point to implications for quality of life research with older people living in poverty and anti-poverty measures for this population in other developing contexts.

Fostering the Reconstruction of Meaning Among the General Population During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

The COVID-19 outbreak has seen people in many countries asked to radically modify their way of life in compliance with sweeping safety measures. During the current crisis, technology is turning out to be key, in that it allows practitioners to deliver psychological services to people who would otherwise be unreachable. However, professionals cannot solely rely on their traditional modes of practice, in that different methods are required to bring to light the needs of those affected by the emergency. People are being overwhelmed by a cascade of unusual and unexpected events that are putting a strain on their everyday routines and usual meaning-making systems; ongoing challenges to their employment and financial status will likely divert personal resources away from psychological well-being. We therefore argue that psychologists should also consider the needs of the general population. Among those who may require help–aside from the main targets of psychological intervention, such as healthcare personnel and COVID-19 patients and their relatives–specific attention should be paid to those who are not at the center of the crisis. We suggest that this large segment of potential users may benefit from a non-medical approach focused on the promotion of meaning-making processes. Indeed, the disruptive nature of the current situation hinders sense-making and threatens to undermine psychological balance and well-being, at an individual as well as at a societal level. The present article proposes a methodological perspective based on the reconstruction of meaning-making processes (sense of coherence, predictability, metaphors, narratives). Specifically, psychological interventions should promote personal and collective resources with a view to: “normalizing” current distressful experiences (i.e., acknowledging that such reactions are normal in light of the present situation); widening the observational field, taking relational contexts into account, and promoting an understanding of distressful experiences as coping strategies; fostering meaning-making/reconstruction processes through the use of appropriate metaphors and narratives; promoting a sense of coherence. We present two clinical vignettes to illustrate how these principles might be applied in practice. In conclusion, the exceptional psychological challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic require practitioners to adopt a broad and flexible perspective on clinical intervention.

Multimodal construction of ‘rule of law’ in Chinese anti-corruption public service advertisements

Multimodal construction of ‘rule of law’ in Chinese anti-corruption public service advertisements

Beyond faith and foxholes: vernacular religion and asymmetrical warfare within contemporary IDF combat units

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the vernacular roles that religious practices and experiences play within contemporary combat units of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). We argue for an anthropological perspective that highlights the modes through which rituals serve efficacious – as opposed to semiotic – ends. In this way, we seek to push back against what we term the ‘faith in a foxhole’ paradigm, where religion is primarily seen as a meaning-making system whose nearly sole function is to aid soldiers in coping with the chaos and uncertainty of combat. We demonstrate how amidst the low-level and long-term style of contemporary asymmetrical warfare, ritual practices can often function less as the matrix for broader meaning making systems but are rather mobilized in ways that are meant to support certain practical and pragmatic goals. The article concludes that while scholars have mostly focused attention on the institutional forces and political consequences of ‘religionization’ within Israeli society, they have missed the many vernacular ways in which Israelis mobilize and instrumentalize their use of ritual and religious practices in both military and civilian contexts.

"Ain't no more stories for you here": Vengeful Hauntings and Traumatized Community in Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing

"Ain't no more stories for you here":Vengeful Hauntings and Traumatized Community in Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing Megan Ashley Swartzfager Jesmyn Ward's 2017 novel Sing, Unburied, Sing Begins, in a sense, where Toni Morrison's Beloved ends.1 The novel, which earned for Ward her second National Book Award for fiction, grapples with the Beloveds—the persistent hauntings of slavery and other forms of racialized trauma—of an America that has attempted to bury slavery and its plurality of legacies beneath a formal history that proclaims the total and unmitigated success of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The novel takes place in the rural Gulf Coast town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, where all of Ward's novels are set. This town is Faulknerian in the sense that it grew from the seeds of racism planted during slavery, making it a microcosm of post-slavery America. Bois Sauvage is the kind of place where a black man might be shot dead because of a bet gone awry, and where the authorities might agree to deem the incident a 'hunting accident.' A place where ignoring a No Trespassing sign can get you chased off a white man's property at the barrel of a gun. And where being black and poor or white and unlucky [End Page 313] might get you sent upstate to Parchman Farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, which has evolved only superficially from the long-ago days when it operated like a plantation. (Smith)2 The novel is told in turns by the thirteen-year-old Jojo, Jojo's emotionally distant mother Leonie, and the ghost of Richie, a twelve-year-old boy who was incarcerated at Parchman Farm at the same time as Jojo's grandfather, Pop. Though Richie is the only ghost in the novel who speaks for himself, he is far from the only ghost. Leonie is haunted by the ghost of her murdered brother, Given, whose death at the hands of a white schoolmate was covered up as a "hunting accident" and who appears to Leonie when she gets high—an experience she seeks daily. These two young men—Richie and Given—are "unburied" in two senses of the word. First, the fact that they never achieved manhood, or the sense of community and love that Ward believes is essential to it, makes their deaths almost impossible to grieve, and this feeling is compounded by the fact that neither youth's untimely death receives adequate recognition. The justice system fails Given and his family, and Richie—who is killed by Pop in a protective act against the retributive violence of white guards and their dogs when Richie tries to run from Parchman—feels betrayed by the only father figure he has ever known and falls into the ranks of Parchman's innumerable Black victims. A lack of closure, of burial, allows these ghosts to haunt the living. Additionally, their stories, along with generations of trauma and slow violence, are exhumed—unburied—and brought to the foreground in a novel that begins with Jojo's quest for the same manhood that was denied Richie and Given. The intergenerational nature of the trauma that is exhumed in Ward's novel discloses the narrative's positionality in the evolving discourse on trauma. Literary conversations about trauma tend to focus on how trauma complicates the narrativization of experience. A member [End Page 314] of the Caruth school of trauma studies, Kristiaan Versluys writes about the cultural trauma of 9/11 and its representations in literature in his 2009 book Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel3 Versluys describes 9/11 as "ultimately a semiotic event, involving the total breakdown of all meaning-making systems" that mirrors the physical collapse of the World Trade Center (2). In order to emerge from the semiotic rubble, people have no choice but to rummage through the symbols that the culture puts at the disposal of the distraught individual. Trauma leads to numbness, flashbacks, or nightmares. These intrusive symptoms can only be dealt with when a traumatic memory gets situated within a series of events. Trauma must be given...

"God rest our hearts: Religiosity and cognitive reappraisal": Correction to Vishkin et al. (2016).

Reports an error in "God rest our hearts: Religiosity and cognitive reappraisal" by Allon Vishkin, Yochanan E. Bigman, Roni Porat, Nevin Solak, Eran Halperin and Maya Tamir (Emotion, 2016[Mar], Vol 16[2], 252-262). In the original article, in Table 1, an asterisk indicating statistical significance (p =.047) should have been included to indicate statistical significance of the correlation between religiosity and age. In Study 2A, participants were 57% female (rather than 54%). In Study 2B, participants were 48% female (rather than 52%). In Table 6, the mean reappraisal frequency was 4.68 (rather than 5.68). In Study 4, findings for motivation to regulate should have been Ms=4.35 vs. 3.01 (rather than Ms=4.36 vs. 3.03). (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2015-46881-001.) Although religiosity is often accompanied by more intense emotions, we propose that people who are more religious may be better at using 1 of the most effective emotion regulation strategies-namely, cognitive reappraisal. We argue that religion, which is a meaning-making system, is linked to better cognitive reappraisal, which involves changing the meaning of emotional stimuli. Four studies (N = 2,078) supported our hypotheses. In Study 1, religiosity was associated with more frequent use of cognitive reappraisal in 3 distinct religions (i.e., Islam, Christianity, Judaism). In Studies 2A-2B, we replicated these findings using 2 indices of cognitive reappraisal and in a large representative sample. In Studies 3-4, individuals more (vs. less) religious were more effective in using cognitive reappraisal in the laboratory. We discuss how these findings inform our understanding of the psychology of religion and of emotion regulation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Promoting growth in foreign and second language education: A research agenda for mindsets in language learning and teaching

Learners' mindsets have received much attention in psychology and education research, but only recently have foreign/second language acquisition (SLA) researchers begun to study these beliefs. Mindsets refer to lay people's beliefs about whether human attributes (e.g., intelligence, personality, language aptitude) are essential, pre-determined traits (fixed mindsets) or malleable propensities can be cultivated (growth mindsets). To encourage more SLA investigations on mindsets, we review existing studies of mindsets in language education to summarize current knowledge and to identify research gaps. We specifically address five questions: (1) What are people's mindsets about language learning ability? (2) How are mindsets linked to other motivational factors? (3) How do contexts influence language mindsets? (4) Do growth-mindset interventions contribute to more adaptive learning, and if so, how? (5) How can educators support students' growth mindset? We highlight that mindsets are systematically associated with various motivational factors in a meaning-making system that guides learners' emotional responses and behavioural acts across different situations. We discuss avenues for future work on whether, why, how, when, for whom, and to what extent mindsets impact different educationally relevant outcomes, including persistence, resilience, and achievement. Understanding these complex questions are important for informing effective education and advancing motivation research in SLA.

Percival Everett's Truth-Telling Fictions in Word and Image

In Percival Everett's Percival Everett by Virgil Russell (2013), the author uses words and images to carry out his metatextual investigation of poststructuralist theory even as he builds fictitious worlds of meaning. As in Glyph (1999) and Erasure (2001), Everett's strong wit enriches the semiotic inquiry that underlies his clever tales. The novel unfolds as a methodological field where the author plays with shifting signifiers and meaning-making systems as he does earlier in various poems, stories, and paintings. Paradoxically, Everett asserts a solid reality located in a place he depicts via various differential modes of signification. His patterning toward abstraction in language and in paint involves not only the repetition of figures, tropes, sonic and visual elements, but also the evocation of earlier twentieth-century conceptual approaches to questions of representation including those that challenge notions of origin, presence, and truth. By examining the way Everett defamiliarizes the world of objects and ideas in Percival Everett by Virgil Russell and several of his paintings, mainly from There Are No Names for Red (2010), co-published with poet Chris Abani, I argue that the very ambiguity, indeterminacy, and contradictions of his forms serve as pictorial elements. His works present and enact the often mysterious and even chaotic human experiences of perception and cognition, and in that way involve elements of realism and mimesis. Everett at once revels in verbal/visual language's ambiguity and semantic openness, and insists on its power to connect people and lend sense to an unpredictable and often surprising world.

The Franciscan Prayer Elicits Empathic and Cooperative Intentions in Atheists: A Neurocognitive and Phenomenological Enquiry

Religiosity influences the alleviation of troubles through cooperative and empathic attitudes, but these involve a sense of community offered in non-religious support groups and healthcare institutions too, where individual’s spiritual wellbeing is based on responsibility and solidarity. This is the case of the Alcoholic Anonymous program adopted by several care initiatives, which use the Franciscan Prayer as a fundamental text representing a western epistemic meaning-making system to provide guidance for cooperation and empathy. We aimed to identify the effect of the Franciscan Prayer on the neurocognitive function and emotional-social experiences in 20 persons declared as atheist (M age = 22.85 ± 2.60 yr.). Spiritual profiles, acceptance of religion, and dispositional empathy were psychometrically evaluated. Functional images were acquired in a 3T scanner to identify BOLD signals while reading The Franciscan Prayer, The Lord’s Prayer representing a culturally known religious text with no Franciscan elements, and a birthday serenade representing a culturally known non-religious text. Phenomenological interviews were performed to categorize emotional experiences and social situations associated with reading each text. Results show that spiritual wellbeing and empathic dispositions are not allied with religious beliefs. The reading of The Franciscan Prayer was correlated with activation in primary motor and premotor cortices, parietal primary and integrative areas, and occipital primary and associative cortices. These motor and sensorial functions might be essential for the empathic attitudes expressed in the Franciscan tradition allowing cooperative actions. This is congruent with the participant’s experiences of wellness, reciprocity, responsibility and helping evoked by this prayer. The Lord's Prayer was correlated with activation in prefrontal regions, as well as, in anterior and posterior portions of the cingulate cortex. These activations may imply mnemonic and moral processes that may be needed for conflict valuations based on childhood and cultural memories evoked by the participants. As testimonies indicate, disgust, confusion, or criticisms were associated with the religious property of the text. We conclude that thoughts, emotions, and actions evoked by The Franciscan Prayer are not inclined by its religious quality but by its empathic and cooperative properties, which may allow for self-reflection and social actions needed for support groups.

The Self in Social Justice: A Developmental Lens on Race, Identity, and Transformation

In this essay, Eleanor Drago-Severson and Jessica Blum-DeStefano add a new dimension to the literature on social justice in education and constructive-developmental theory by exploring how adult developmental theory can shed new light on the challenges and opportunities of teaching and leading for social justice. Drawing from their decades of research and teaching about leadership that supports educators' internal capacity building, they posit that adults' qualitatively different ways of knowing—or developmental meaning-making systems—will influence how they understand diversity of all kinds, as well as what it means to teach and/or lead for social justice. Given the imperatives of equity and access in educational institutions, US society, and the world, this essay aims to help us better understand how to support diverse adults in their efforts to serve all students well and to work more collaboratively and productively across lines of difference.

Basil Fawlty as a ‘pre-Thatcherite’ conservative in Fawlty Towers

Abstract The article analyses the popular British situation comedy Fawlty Towers (1975, 1979) as a comedic representation of conservatism and its lead character, Basil Fawlty (played by John Cleese), as a ‘pre-Thatcherite’. The article discusses how the character of Fawlty can help us understand the processes that led to Margaret Thatcher winning the election in 1979 and becoming prime minister. Fawlty promotes similar values to Thatcher, but with ambiguity as the series is a comedy; comedy makes interpretation of ideological issues problematic as it is an alternative meaning-making system to non-comedic forms.

Complexity and Cross-Boundary Effects in Security: Britain and the Unification of Germany, 1989–90

If one trend characterizes the study of foreign and security policy over the past several decades, it may be the search for concepts that assist in addressing the complexity of global politics.2 We embrace that complexity and reimagine security as a social phenomenon that interweaves between social collectives, bleeding across boundaries and tying collectivities together as they seek to reconcile different systems of security meaning-making. At its core, security is a socially constructed system for making sense of danger and threat (Buzan et al. 1998). Thinking about security as a phenomenon of linked social constructions opens the field of inquiry up to a massive amount of complexity and interactivity. We offer two concepts as a possible basis for …

God rest our hearts: Religiosity and cognitive reappraisal.

Although religiosity is often accompanied by more intense emotions, we propose that people who are more religious may be better at using 1 of the most effective emotion regulation strategies-namely, cognitive reappraisal. We argue that religion, which is a meaning-making system, is linked to better cognitive reappraisal, which involves changing the meaning of emotional stimuli. Four studies (N = 2,078) supported our hypotheses. In Study 1, religiosity was associated with more frequent use of cognitive reappraisal in 3 distinct religions (i.e., Islam, Christianity, Judaism). In Studies 2A-2B, we replicated these findings using 2 indices of cognitive reappraisal and in a large representative sample. In Studies 3-4, individuals more (vs. less) religious were more effective in using cognitive reappraisal in the laboratory. We discuss how these findings inform our understanding of the psychology of religion and of emotion regulation.

Managers’ Citizenship Behaviors for the Environment: A Developmental Perspective

The objective of this longitudinal study is to analyze the intrinsic drivers and values underlying managers’ organizational citizenship behaviors for the environment (OCBEs) from a developmental psychology perspective based on measuring the stages of consciousness that shape the meaning-making systems of individuals. At time 1, the stages of consciousness of 138 managers were qualitatively assessed using the Leader Development Profile test. At time 2, a quantitative survey measured the environmental beliefs and OCBEs of these managers. The links between stages of consciousness, environmental beliefs, and OCBEs were analyzed using hierarchical regressions. The main findings show that managers’ stages of consciousness positively influence two types of OCBEs, namely eco-initiatives and eco-helping, while environmental beliefs influence eco-helping and eco-civic engagement but do not appear to be connected with the stage of consciousness development. This paper first contributes to the literature on corporate greening by shedding more light on the aspects of behavioral and developmental psychology that underlie environmental leadership. Second, it bridges the gap between theories that have developed separately by showing the interconnectedness between the managers’ stage of consciousness and the more concrete environmental behaviors in the workplace that could have emulative effects throughout the organization.

Farms and Fables: Cultivating Difference in Community-based Theatre

Farms and Fables:Cultivating Difference in Community-based Theatre Catherine Ming T’ien Duffly (bio) “I followed behind the shovel pulling hard red tubers out of loose soil and tried to explain this project. Farmers, actors, giant puppets. You know, community-based theater.” —Jennie Hahn1 Created in collaboration with family farmers and farmworkers, Farms and Fables (2011) was a community-based theatre project about local agriculture, developed through a process of embodied research. The project, produced by Open Waters Theater Company of Portland, Maine, put artists to work on farms and engaged farmworkers in storytelling and acting. Throughout its process, Open Waters wrestled with the challenge of representing a local Maine farming community while also negotiating difference, both as occupational outsiders and within the local farming community. Drawing from what company members learned during their time working on the farms and in dialogue with farmers and farmworkers, the theatre company set out to address issues relevant to small farmers who are dealing with the struggle to hold onto their farms in the face of an uncertain future for farming in Maine. The play tells the story of two farms, one belonging to a family who has been farming in the state for generations, and the other to a family that is new to both farming and Maine. One farmer grapples with questions of how to sustain his family farm in the face of rising debt, as his new neighbors struggle to adapt to a new way of life. Throughout, two farmworkers represent the repetitive, enduring labor of a farm, as well as some of the issues faced by Puerto Rican migrant farmworkers in Maine. The farmers’ storylines are interspersed with group movement pieces that depict the labor of the farm (planting seeds and harvesting vegetables). Staged in Camp Ketcha’s historic barn in Scarborough, Maine, the group of performers was a mix of professional actors and members of the local farming community (fig. 1). A twelfth-generation Mainer, Jennie Hahn (the artistic director of Open Waters) set out to create a community-based performance rooted in her “relationship to place and to the state of Maine” (Hahn 2010a). Hahn’s objective echoes Jan Cohen-Cruz’s definition of community-based performance: “theater that stays close to its origins in terms of place, ethnicity or circumstances” (2006, 3). Drawing on the ecological implications of the term grassroots theater, Cohen-Cruz calls on farmer, author, and cultural critic Wendell Berry’s linkage of culture and agriculture: “The traditions, new ideas and interactions that generate systems of human meaning-making are like the particular soil, amount of rainfall and growing season that determine the particularities of plant life” (ibid.). In essence, Cohen-Cruz argues that community-based theatre must be as committed to the particular ecology of place as a farmer. Indeed, community-based performances are often collaboratively created, process-based, and committed to localism and/or site-specificity. Farms and Fables extends and makes literal Cohen-Cruz’s metaphor by siting the project on farms and emphasizing localism as central to its project. Due to this emphasis on localism, community-engaged artists like Open Waters Theater Company struggle with definitions of community that rely upon commonalties and universalities. [End Page 283] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Farms and Fables performance poster. Poster design by Nashbox. (Photo: John Bliss.) In Lucy Lippard’s seminal text The Lure of the Local, she identifies the importance of a deep sense of place for all people, and especially for artists creating site-specific or community-engaged work. For Lippard, a sense of place is an essential component for all human interaction, and especially so for community-engaged art practice. However, this focus on the local also has its critics. Applied theatre scholar Helen Nicholson writes that “drama projects that focus on straightforward constructions of local identity, shared histories and ideological unity to the exclusion of difference and diversity, are likely to reinforce the more conservative images of ‘otherness’ sometimes associated with localism” (84). Given these concerns about the problematic aspects of the local, how might artists create work with and about communities that stays true to the community’s particular ecology...

Embodied Knowledges: Synesthesia and the Archive in Monique Truong's Bitter in the Mouth

Subjects of twentieth-century Western modernity are “in need of archives,” Jacques Derrida writes in Archive Fever (1995). The characteristics of archive fever are numerous: “It is to burn with a passion. It is never to rest, interminably, from searching for the archive right where it slips away. It is to run after the archive. . . . It is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement” (91). In other words, symptoms of archive fever include the desire for that which is elusive (“right where it slips away”), as well as nostalgia not for the past in general but for the moment of origination and beginnings. Archive fever seeks knowledge that might secure us ontologically and epistemologically through an encounter with a primary self. But why are we in need of archives—defined for the purposes of this study not as specific places of documentation but as general “meaning-making system[s] that [allow] for some statements to be enunciated and others to lack intelligibility” (Ferguson)? Certainly, archives are intimately intertwined with our desire to locate ourselves, to make visible the residue of the past as it informs the present, and to make sense of legacies (historical, intellectual, and affective) that intimately inform our sense of ourselves as subjects. Yet archives have been called into question over the past several decades in discourses as wide-ranging as performance, queer, feminist, and postcolonial studies. Such critical work identifies the archive as a formulation by which the ephemeral and the personal are erased in favor of the enduring and the state-sanctioned. Nevertheless, despite our legitimate suspicions of the way the archive inevitably facilitates the consolidation of authority and the erasure of difference, we cannot leave the archive behind. As Derrida argues, “There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and access to the archive, its constitution, and its