Historic Entropy
Historic preservation is a means of manipulating the collective memory. When we discuss History from the Underground, we must understand that the public memory is never unconsciously constructed; what is preserved, as Foucault noted in the Archaeology of Knowledge, is always a conscious choice of the person(s) preserving it. As such, we should remember that our own decisions as proponents of historic preservation have a direct impact upon how people in the future will remember the way things were. Our goal as a profession is to stave off or subvert the ravages of time and the decomposition of the present into historic entropy.
What precisely is historic entropy? In my current efforts in the Confluence Area Queer History Project, I encounter the concept every day. It is a state of being where no reasonably undertaken investigation may return a range of past potentialities-for-being of a present-day inquiry. To use Heideggerian terminology, historic entropy is the end-state of all phenomena, in which there are no accessible potentialities remaining for the being of a thing. In other words, it is the thing preservation is designed to guard against.
To be quite clear, the process of limitation by which interpretations (or potentialities) of a thing are made inaccessible — either intentionally or unintentionally, by human forces or fundamental ones — is called historical decomposition. My experience in the Confluence Area Project has taught me that the primary difficulty of preservation fieldwork is determining what information is recoverable and what information is reconstructable. The primary distinction is when the information was recorded. Typically the process of recovery is partly one of reconstruction, but often there are no extant written or spoken sources regarding a particular thing in history.
My work in the Confluence Project is mostly reconstructive, rather than recovery. I am recording the information in the present, rather than seeking out the primary sources that existed in the past, but are no longer accessible. It is a struggle to reverse historical decomposition, thus reconstructing a past that may no longer have records associated with it. It is the final means we have for combating historic entropy.
