“Politics proposes to make us better, but we were good already in the mutual debt that can never be made good. We owe it to each other to falsify the institution, to make politics incorrect, to give the lie to our own determination. We owe each other the indeterminate. We owe each other everything.”¹

(Stefano Harney & Fred Moten)

Speaking about his decision to acquire the archives of the Johnson Publishing Company, Theaster Gates is clear that he doesn’t think of himself as an archivist in the conventional sense: “My collections are still active raw material, I’m still messing with them. … The set isn’t finite, it’s not retrievable always—it’s a bunch of stuff.”² What interests him is “the power of organising everyday things so that people understand the preciousness isn’t always in the thing—the preciousness is that a society, a nation, a people or a person cares enough to organise it.”³

What gets placed in an archive or institution and why? What has value and futurity and what ends up devalued, displaced, submerged in the basement? These questions are deeply bound up with power, authority and a lineage of command, as Derrida showed when tracing...