88 / redefining a movement
within a network of women, which includes women old enough
to have heard Bikini Kill play live in the early 1990s and young
enough to have been born after the Newsweek article, who iden-
tify with Riot Grrrl as an aesthetic, cultural, and political move-
ment unique to their generation of feminists. My primary con-
cern, however, is with neither the controversy nor the affective
attachments generated by the collection. As I explore through-
out this chapter, preservation is a central part of the Riot Grrrl
Collection’s mandate, but the collection holds the potential to do
much more than preserve Riot Grrrl as it has been understood
to date. As the collection develops, it also holds the potential to
impact Riot Grrrl’s legacy and more specifically the legacies of
the women most closely identified with its development. As I
argue, the Riot Grrrl Collection may thereby be read as a radical
form of “position taking” enacted in and through the archive.
Pierre Bourdieu’s theorizing on the field of cultural produc-
tion offers a useful framework for beginning to understand how
the creative products of a so-called “subculture” might be trans-
formed through their entry into the archive and more specifi-
cally, how archivization might hold the potential to retroactively
align previously unconsecrated cultural works with avant-garde
movements. As Bourdieu maintains, every literary or artistic
field is a “field of forces” and “field of struggles,” and the meaning
of a work changes with “each change in the field within which it
is situated for the spectator or reader.”
9
The task of the literary or
art critic is to understand the space of positions and “position-
takings” within the field of cultural production. This, however, is
an invariably difficult task because the critic must reconstruct all
the people, forces, and conditions that shape the field at any given
time. On this basis, Bourdieu emphasizes that any sociology of
art or literature must be able to account for “the social conditions
of the production of artists, art critics, dealers, patrons, etc.”
10
and “the social conditions of the production of a set of objects
socially constituted as works of art, i.e. the conditions of produc-
tion of the field of social agents (e.g., museums, galleries, aca-
demics, etc.) which help to define and produce the value of works
redefining a movement / 89
of art.”
11
The objective is ultimately to understand any work of art
or literature as a “manifestation of the field as a whole, in which
all the powers of the field, and all the determinisms inherent in
its structure and functioning, are concentrated.”
12
Bourdieu’s theorizing aptly draws attention to the extent to
which literature and art are symbolic objects constituted by
the institutions through which cultural products are endowed
with value. While he lists many of the most obvious institu-
tions engaged in such work, including museums, galleries, and
the academy, he does not list the archive. Because there is no
doubt that the archive does belong in this list, the oversight is
especially notable, but the archive is also uniquely situated in
the field of cultural production. Unlike either the gallery or art
museum, which usually endows a literary or artistic work with
value in the present, the archive’s work is more often than not
retroactive. In other words, the archive is uniquely located to the
extent that it permits works to migrate across the field of cultural
production at different points in history. In this respect, a work
originally produced primarily for a mass audience (or a work
perceived as such) might become aligned with a work produced
as “art for art’s sake.”
13
The archive, thus, is not only an institu-
tion that Bourdieu overlooks in his theorizing on the field of
cultural production but also the institution that arguably holds
the greatest potential to disrupt the field as it is conceived in his
work. Once more, as I emphasize, this is especially relevant to
questions concerning the designation of an “avant-garde.”
While Bourdieu’s “field of cultural production” evidently
privileges the spatial, his theorizing on the avant-garde is first
and foremost temporal. If “conservatives” recognize their con-
temporaries in the past, then the avant-garde has no contem-
poraries and “therefore no audience, except in the future” (107).
An avant-garde, according to Bourdieu, establishes itself not
by recognizing their contemporaries in the past but conversely
by pushing “back into the past the consecrated producers with
whom they are compared” (107). If Bourdieu’s theorizing on cul-
tural production fails to account for the question of the archive,
90 / redefining a movement
then perhaps it is because the archive, more than any other insti-
tution, holds the potential to interrupt this supposed process by
prying open opportunities for an avant-garde to be established
retroactively. This is not surprising, however, because the archive
is first and foremost a temporal apparatus—at once committed
to the endless accumulation of time, as Foucault emphasizes
in his theorizing on heterotopias,
14
of which library or archive
exist as one example among many, as well as to the reordering
of time. As I emphasized in chapter 2, materials in the archive
are not necessarily aligned according to temporal logics. Players
once estranged in the field of cultural production may become
aligned. Contemporaries may be torn apart. Movements may be
defined or redefined. In short, archival time challenges Bour-
dieu’s assumption that avant-garde movements are necessarily
established via a series of displacements—through the anach-
ronization of one’s predecessors. In the archive, an avant-garde
conversely may be established via a series of strategic realign-
ments that make present players who never had the opportu-
nity to play in the same field but in many respects comfortably
occupy the same field nevertheless.
The archive as an apparatus can be effectively wielded in a
reparative manner, and this is precisely the movement I chart
in this chapter. I specifically examine how relocating the Riot
Grrrl papers from haphazard personal storage situations across
the United States to the Fales Library and Special Collections in
New York represents an attempt to redefine Riot Grrrl as a cul-
tural movement as deeply marked by feminist politics and punk
aesthetics as it is by legacies of avant-garde art, performance,
and literature. After all, in contrast to the other collections fea-
tured in this book, the Riot Grrrl Collection is housed in an
archive known for its art and culture collections (for example,
the Avant-Garde Collection and the Downtown Collection)
rather than holdings related to women’s history. As a result,
across Fales Library’s special collections, one discovers the
papers and cultural artifacts of several generations of innovative
visual artists, performance artists, and writers. Among them are
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