Like the material it preserves (the draft), the talahardin being an archive, follows the qualities of fragmentation, partiality, and incompletion. If a draft is never complete (art is never finished), working on the talahardin archive is also never finished. Therefore, both the draft and the archive are more process than thing (talahardin emphasizes process). The talahardin is a perpetual draft.
References
Scandura, Jani. “The Matter of Drafts.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, edited by Paula Rabinowitz, Oxford University Press, 2020. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.205
The rules of the archive, like that of the drafts it contains, are fragmentation, partiality, and incompletion.
considering the archive not as a place or a “thing,” but as a “process”
The archive is, in short, a kind of perpetual draft—ever evolving, ever unfixed.
“One cannot overstate how slow work in the archives is,” explains Farge, “and how this slowness of hands and thought can be the source of creativity. But more than inspirational, it is inescapable. The consultation of these bundles, one after another, is never finished.” Even if, slowly, an archivist could find some sort of closure, still there would be a gap.