The emotions of archives, their “affect” – presumably someone’s done an autoethnography of that? (Yes – see further reading!) Of the joy of handling papers that haven’t been looked at for decades/centuries? Of the rituals of the getting of the entrance card, furtling around in archives, of visiting, of becoming adept at the various rituals (when to show your card, how to hold your laptop open upon exit without being prompted etc etc).
I guess, on some level, you can think of these places as oases of so much that capitalism/neoliberalism/various other powerisms have swept away, chewed up – of memory, of remembrance, of calm, of order. And you know it won’t last (there’s that scene early in John Christopher’s “The World in Winter” where someone is in the British Library, well aware that everything will be burned for warmth soon…
This is brought about by a few days I had in London – three visits to the British Library and one to the Wellcome Collection…
Cifor, M., Gilliland, A.J. Affect and the archive, archives and their affects: an introduction to the special issue. Arch Sci 16, 1–6 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-015-9263-3
Cifor, M. Affecting relations: introducing affect theory to archival discourse. Arch Sci 16, 7–31 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-015-9261-5
marchudson.net 
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