Towards an Understanding of Archival-Poiesis

This text explores the transformative relationships connecting F riederike Mayröcker’s writing, personal papers, and institutionalized fonds. It presents an interpretive case study in three parts: first, by establishing a critical context; second, by examining her own writing, interviews, and documentary footage on personal archiving; and third, by analyzing her archive on the Austrian National Library’s web portal. I interpret these activities using literature that challenges notions of individual authorship, reveal material networks and forces in textual production, and argue for collective and social models of archival arrangement. I warrant that these zones evince a shared activity which I introduce as the concept of archival-poiesis, a distinct process that constellates ongoing relations with the radical contingency of the ordinary. The resultant fonds is a text which does not represent a life as much as offer a trace of living. By emphasizing ongoing activity, attunement to the poiesis of the archival task invites meditation on the paradoxical iterative project of self fashioning, and being fashioned by the world around you, through discrete choices. By this, I mean we can begin to see living as a material project, an art in continual circuit navigating a journey from an unchosen starting place toward an unknown destination. Mayröcker’s project insists that we are missing out in searching for internal meaning alone. Her archival-poiesis, a singular case of a much larger spectrum of related techniques, draws attention to the expressive sensibility of exteriority as a territory for the potentiation of difference.