‘Lyric Essay, Unseen Spaces and the Possibility of the Imagination: Dr Craig Jordan-Baker’s ‘Dead Letter Office’, with a response from Zara Arshad (May 2023)’, by Cara Gathern

Cara Gathern was a Senior Research Support Assistant for the Centre for Design History’s Making Visible the Storeroom International Conference held on May 12 2023. In this blog post, she reflects on two of the presentations and the ideas they raised for her about the people who work in museum and archival spaces.

When I first heard the term ‘lyric essay,’ I was intrigued. I had not come across this form before and somewhere in my mind I had a slightly naïve notion that this kind of talk would be a long lyrical piece: criticism in couplet form. Hearing Dr Craig Jordan-Baker’s lyric essay ‘Dead Letter Office: The Oneiric Appeal of the Unseen,’ given at the Making Visible the Storeroom International Symposium (May 2023), I learned that a lyric essay is a different thing entirely. It is a relatively new essay form, first used by Deborah Tall in 1993, which has gained popularity over the subsequent two decades. Though critics disagree on what specifically defines a lyric essay, it can broadly be understood as a form of criticism which combines traditional written critique with elements such as poetry, song, and memoir. Nonetheless, a lyric essay aims to follow the same responsibilities of a traditional essay in critiquing and conveying concepts and arguments.

Certainly ‘Dead Letter Office’ was both engaging and unexpected. Academic language and firm critical sources were combined with colloquial language (‘spirally foodstuffs’, used to describe a spiraliser’s function, for example), as well as music and image. Building upon the conference theme of the physical, virtual and metaphorical ‘opening up’ of museum and archival storeroom spaces, Jordan-Baker’s talk explored the oneiric – that which relates to dreams and dreaming – in the context of artefact storage. The ‘small auld fella with a tired blue postal cap’ functioned throughout as a metaphor for the unseen, imagined space and people of the titular dead letter office: in reality, the unseen place in which variously undeliverable letters are held. Presenting this process as representing workflow failure, the essay examined such unseen spaces and practices of failure as holding oneiric possibility. Building on this, Jordan-Baker explored the theme of openness and transparency of museum storage and archive spaces to present such practices not as ‘a destroyer of the unseen’ and oneiric potential but as a chance for viewers to acknowledge and perceive the extent of such spaces.

In the wider context of the conference, both Jordan-Baker’s essay and Arshad’s response prompted us to think about the lack of transparency of certain storage practices in museums and archives as spaces for possibility and subsequently increased inclusion, both in opened and private form.

Jordan-Baker’s talk was accompanied by a wonderful response by Zara Arshad, which drew on ideas surrounding diversity and inclusion to succinctly conclude that dreaming ‘becomes a critical tool for imagining different – hopefully, more transparent and inclusive – ways of doing and being’ in museums and archive spaces. Arshad highlighted how similar ideas have already been put in place by those working ‘against the grain’ to explore gaps and silences in archival spaces. There was also a welcome focus on those moments silenced by such methods of collecting, storing and presenting information, such as violence and certain histories of racism and silence. Arshad’s response also referenced Saidiya Hartman’s recent work on the history and afterlives of slavery, which has involved using archival material and the silences it presents to reconstruct stories, suggesting that in this context we can view archival materials and subsequent ‘gaps’ as oneiric ingredients for imagining both ‘what was, but also what could be.’ In the wider context of the conference, both Jordan-Baker’s essay and Arshad’s response prompted us to think about the lack of transparency of certain storage practices in museums and archives as spaces for possibility and subsequently increased inclusion, both in opened and private form.

The response concluded with an important question: who, or what, is involved in the imagining? Oneiric potential is limited by the scope of the imaginer, as imagination is distinctly shaped by one’s own experiences and prejudices, which can also threaten to cloud new possibilities. I return once again to Jordan-Baker’s ‘tired auld fella in a blue cap,’ presented as the product of a 1990’s child’s imagination and justifiably based on a social framework which, particularly in the nineties, stereotypes the postal worker as male. However, based on the dialogue between Jordan-Baker and Arshad, I conducted further research and found a photograph that tells a different story about a 1926 dead letter office: many of the workers are distinctly female. Workers and users of museum and archival spaces was a wider theme of the conference in general. This was particularly picked up during Dr Gus Casely-Hayford’s talk on the new V&A East Open Storage facility later in the day when delegates questioned the usable nature of these types of workspaces for staff. The idea of these spaces as ‘unseen’ often invites a perception of them as empty or only lightly staffed, but the image that I have chosen challenges this concept; this is a busy, working space. It offers a response to Arshad’s question; the same ‘gaps’ we may use to imagine moments of gender and diversity may, depending on the imaginer, shield equally inclusive possibilities and realities. Perhaps most importantly, it reminds us these spaces are not truly ‘unseen’ or hidden at all.

For more information on the conference, including speakers and wider themes, see this post.