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Taylor Irish
ENG 413
Reflective Essay
December 18th, 2015
Commencement of My Archive
When I first started compiling pieces for my portfolio it was hard for me to decide what
to keep in and what to keep out. Looking over my past works brought about memories of staying
up late to finish the end product, receiving a grade of my liking, or creating something that I was
truly proud of. These different memories were prompted by very different assignments and I
think that because of these memories my portfolio is very diverse in what works I decided to
include in it.
One of the most influential pieces that have helped me to reflect on my portfolio was one
of the very first readings by Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever. Derrida states:
It should above all remind us that said archival technology no longer determines, will
never have determined, merely the moment of the conversation recording, but rather the
very institution of the archival event. It conditions not only the form of the structure that
prints, but the printed content of the printing: the pressure of the printing, the impression,
before the division between the printed and the printer. (18)
This quote encompasses the idea that once something is written down the way it that thing is
remembered will be forever changed. The same way that oral memories change each time they
are remembered and retold. It also says something about what can be archived. Derrida gives us
the impression that once an event or story or anything is archived the way we remember that
thing is forever changed as well. In this case the medium in which the archive, my portfolio, is

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produced and presented is a reflection on how I, the printer in this case, prints the impression, i.e.
the works in my portfolio. Although the pieces do not change for me, the interpretation the reader
has can change the meaning depending on the location the person is reading it at, the time of day,
among many other variables. The work is never completed and is able to be interpreted each time
it is being seen or read.
My selected works for this archive are pieces of artificial memory. They are a way of
looking at the past, but not being able to actually see the past. How I chose to write the works in
my portfolio depend on the context of the situation I was in at the time. There are many factors
that contribute to how and when and what we decide to type onto a document that the only way
to fully interpret the works would be to understand them completely would be to be the one that
had written the texts. That being said a text can change being for the person who wrote it as well.
This is just another way that the archive stays alive and changing even if actual documents or
texts do not.
Another point that Derrida makes in his article is that of the idea of forgetfulness. Besides
the very simple explanation that professors do not have time to have conversations with students
and grade them solely on their understanding of a subject, there is another reason to have written
documents that are needed for gradesforgetfulnessnot to the point that the professor
shouldnt be forgetful in what they hear from students, but that there may just be too much input
to give the appropriate amount of output. That being said, students write papers, they take exams,
and have discussion posts. Why? Professors are able to go back over the material and see if they
met the requirements, take time to reflect on what a student has said, and allow time for feedback
as well. Bringing this back to Derrida, in his article he claims There would be indeed be no
archive desire without the radical finitude, without the possibility of a forgetfulness which does

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not limit itself to repression (19). This radical finitude that we are discussing would be the limits
of the human mind. While creating this portfolio I found myself struggling to remember what
certain essays were about. Tying this in with technology, now that almost everything we write or
create is saved electronically there is an abundance of materials to reflect upon. Derrida saw this
as a potential blip as well in the idea of an archive as I quoted from him earlier archival
technology no longer determines [] the moment of the conversation recording, but rather the
very institution of the archival event (18). Technology makes it easier than ever to save
everything we have ever created if we so desire, this also gives us many materials to reflect
upon.
One last concept that Derrida discusses in his article that helped me reflect on my
portfolio is the idea of the future. The reason that humans feel the need to write stuff down, save
to their hard drive, and possibly revisit it later is that there is some hope that the future will call
for the work they created. That they will have an impact maybe in the near future if they are
turning a work in for a grade or the distant future where they may use a work to showcase a
portfolio to show a potential employer. The fact that there is always a future even if it is a week
away shows that Derridas words ring true:
It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a
response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow. The archive: if we
want to know what that will have meant, we will only know in times to come.
Perhaps. Not tomorrow but in times to come, later on or perhaps never. A spectral
messianicity is at work in the concept of the archive and ties it, like religion, like
history, like science itself, to a very singular experience of the promise. (36)

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This quote sums up much of how I felt about my portfolio as I was compiling pieces for it. As of
right now, I do not have a professional motivation behind the portfolio, and maybe I never will
need to use it in a professional sense, but I do have it. The pieces exist so that they do have
potential to be useful in the future, even if they never are they still exist and the shear fact they
were created holds a promise, as Derrida would say, that they could have a use someday.
The next author that influenced the shaping of my portfolio was Eric Hobsbawm in his
article Introduction: Inventing Traditions. The way I have viewed my entire education thus far
is based on an idea of tradition. How classrooms should or should not be set up, when a school
year starts, when it ends. This type or repetitive behavior is something that Hobsbawn would
consider an invented tradition which is taken to mean a set of practices, normally governed by
overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate
certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with
the past (271). These repetition behaviors that he is describing are the daily routines that we all
have at this university. We wake up, we either go to class or dont, and depending on our
professor we have various kinds of homework.
The idea of tradition is different than the concept of custom. Hobsbawm claims thats
customs do not preclude innovation and change up to a point, though evidently the requirement
that it must appear compatible or even identical with precedent imposes substantial limitations
on it (272). These limitations that Hobsbawm is talking about are our own limitations we put on
customs, and the traditions that represent them. I couldnt have said it better than when he puts
custom as what judges do and tradition as the wig, robe, and other paraphernalia (272). We
shape traditions to meet our customs. Just like we shape papers and assignments to meet the

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requirements gartered by the idea of a paper or assignment. What the teacher tells us to and
includes in their directions will shape the tradition of the essay, for example.
So, how does this idea of tradition help to shape my portfolio? The way I chose to lay out
my portfolio is a reflection of a tradition. I separated my works by genre, something that I have
learned over and over again in my schooling. I divided the works in my portfolio into two
categories: academic/professional/technical and creative/artistic. The reason I chose only two
genres was that many of the pieces could and do cross over into different genres. Writing in itself
is creative, so I could have essentially included all the words under creative as they are my own
works of writing, hence I created them. This would complicate my portfolio, so I decided to on
the two genres. My academic section of the portfolio focuses more on works of writing that
follows specific requirements or guidelines. These types of writings tend to include a lot of
research behind them and many revisions, although not all revisions are included in my final
portfolio. The creative works are pieces that I created that had no guidelines besides to be
something I create. I did not have to do any prior research, include any quotes, or have a set page
length requirement in post cases.
The way that Hobsbawm would describe the implications of me separating genres would
be that new traditions simply resulted from the inability to use or adapt old onesMore
interesting, from our point of view, is the use of ancient materials to construct invented traditions
of a novel type for quite novel purposes (273). My portfolio is not something I would
necessarily consider of novel length, but it does have novel purposes. It seeks to explain and
show how I, as a writer, am able to write to a plethora of topics and genres and speak to these
assignments in some way. As I write in a specified genre based on the assignment and/or

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requirements I am inventing a new tradition in my own words. I am interpreting the customs of
those traditions and shaping them to fit my needs.
Putting these two authors together, Derrida and Hobsbawn I am able to create my own
archive through the concepts of remembering and tradition. These two ideas go hand in hand and
it is hard-if not impossible-to have one without the other. The idea of a tradition is based on the
fact that we have to remember the customs of a said event to construct a new tradition. In this
case for me, it is a new piece of a writing based on the genre that I am writing in. For me, the
genre is the custom and my piece of writing is the new tradition. The simple act of remembering
how these genres operate in a given field demonstrates that they are in fact traditions.
A key element I will take away from this portfolio process is that I learned more about
myself while doing it. Looking through my past works that I may have never read again, I am
able to see their value in a personal, and potentially professional, way. When I began this
assignment I was compiling my portfolio based on a purely personal sense, but after reflecting on
the assignment and the implications it could hold I can see how in the future I might be able to
use some of these works if not the complete portfolio in some way or another to represent my
corpus of writing. It is this aspect of future that Derrida kept referring to that leads me to think
that I will use the process of creating this portfolio in some way or another in my professional
sense. It may not come directly from the works presented in my portfolio, but the way I thought
about it and reinterpreted my pieces will effect how I see all my future writings.

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Works Cited
Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowits. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1996. Print.
Hobsbawm, Eric. "From "Introduction: Inventing Traditions"" Comp. Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered
Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy. The Collective Memory Reader. New York: Oxford
UP, 2011. 271-74. Print.