42 Perversity.

When we read a musical score, we look for the time signature—the way the rhythm will be distributed across notes. I wonder if an archive has a time signature. Most archives have a time stamp, or a moment when the material was produced. But, sometimes, the time stamps ask for further reading. Which interpretation is final? Which take is the definitive one?

Andre Gide wanted his novel, The Counterfeiters, to be “a crossroads—a rendezvous of problems.” He wrote this in his journal. The novel is a place where problems encounter each other in various kinks and positions. How perverse can we get before losing the reader’s willingness to invest in the reading? Perversity feels like home to me.

Surveillance files are physically perverse: each one poses a human in an untenable position and then remarks on the response. Each archive converses with an abject subject. Each signed confessional gestures towards the subject’s nudity. There is the “still present” in this.