[This was first written on 17 September 2011]
Perception (contd)
When this idea first came to me, it felt revelatory. In a sense, none of us is using methodology that emphasises broad coverage, validity-through-volume, systematicity. (I hope no one feels insulted by that remark – I certainly do not mean it critically. My point is just that a lot of the work is located in the insights produced in attentive interaction with others.) The notion that our walks were a perceptual experiment made sense of them for me in a very exciting way. Walking and taking photos is not a particularly systematic way to gather ‘data’, but it is a very powerful means of watching one’s own perceptions change, and – crucially – to watch those of others in interaction with you.
To articulate this in terms of figure and ground has worked well for me. It provides a way to gather the other ideas presented in this writing into a practical account of what happens when one explores everyday writing in the urban setting. Why do some texts emerge as figures? It may be because they seem charged with a particular political energy, with the pathos of memory, with an uncompromising insistence on identity, with an aesthetic power realised in the materiality of the text or in its nature as discourse. But others may not respond to the writing in the same way. The political charge may not touch them at all. They may not be in interested in the history that is memorialised here. So reading urban writing with another person and noticing what emerges as figure and what recedes into ground is to learn something about the way one understands the politics, history, aesthetics of the landscape oneself, how one’s companion understands them, and how both can be changed through the act of companionable walking.
I would like to build this idea up a little and I believe that there might be useful material in the literature on phenomenology – Merleau-Ponty is a name that has been mentioned in this context.
Appropriation
The last term I want to write about is APPROPRIATION and I feel that it should really have come earlier in the sequence. It does not belong here at the end and PERCEPTION would have been a better place to stop and bring things together. So, with that proviso, let us think about how everyday writing engages in acts of appropriation.
As Mikhail Bakhtin argues, speakers do not invent languages for themselves – we have to use the language we are presented with as a result of where we grow up and live. It is a simple point, but, if we invented our own language, its communicative usefulness would be nil. The result is that every word we say has been uttered before countless times by countless other people in countless contexts.
And it is not only the words themselves. In the section on GENRE, I emphasised that language users do not ‘reinvent the wheel’ every time they speak or write. There is a multiplicity of genres that provide models for language use on a wide range of topics and in a wide range of situations. The same is true of MEMES. Well, no – memes are slightly different. It is difficult to see how one could communicate at all without any reference to the everyday genres of speech and writing. But many of the phenomena described as memes can safely be left alone. No one is obliged to draw Chad on a wall or post another lolcats image online. These memes are more a resource than a necessity, perhaps.
In fact, we also view existing discourse as resource in other ways. It is customary to include a quotation in the inscription on a tomb stone – from poetry or from a religious text. The point made through the quotation varies. Sometimes it expresses a fairly orthodox religious viewpoint – the ‘hope of resurrection’ in Christian cemeteries, for example. But sometimes texts are chosen to convey something about the IDENTITY of the person buried here. Readers can infer something about the deceased through the specific choice of text. Quotations appear in graffiti too and slogans borrowed from elsewhere. (Steve and I were surprised to see ‘black power’ written on a fence post in a playground in East Herringthorpe.) And quotations are a fairly popular choice for tattoos. Leafing through a tattoo magazine in connection another project, I found some very striking ones: ‘no true friends in modern life’, for example. This is from a song by Morrissey called ‘Something is Squeezing my Skull’.
Bakhtin provides useful ways of thinking about these phenomena. A fundamental idea is that, when someone appropriates – or just uses – speech from somewhere else, at least two ‘voices’ are audible in the ‘utterance’. A part of what the utterance means derives from its earlier uses. Although I can ‘understand’ the phrase ‘no true friends in modern life’ to the extent that I am a speaker of English and understand those six words and the syntactic principles that hold them together, I do not really understand its use here unless I know that it comes from a song by Morrissey. (In a way, this has the result of sorting informed readers from uninformed readers. I had to look this quotation up – if I had met the bearer of the tattoo in everyday life, I would not have been among the cognoscenti.) But, if I am an informed reader, I will read the tattoo and hear the original voice speaking in it. At the same time, I will also hear the voice of the person who had this phrase tattooed on his body. (It’s clear from the picture in the magazine that the bearer is male.) That person is uttering the words again – fusing his voice with that of the original writer.
Bakhtin talks about this in terms of DIALOGISM or DOUBLE-VOICING – the idea that many voices can resonate in a particular utterance and that the meaning of the utterance actually lies in the interaction of these voices. I see this time and again in the everyday writing we have looked at in the project and so some consideration of APPROPRIATION and hence DIALOGISM seems essential to me in exploring the way in which that writing works.
Saturday, 17 September 2011
Draft 1, Chunk 8 (Aesthetics/Perception)
[This was first written on 16 September 2011]
Introduction
I am quite keen to bring this first ‘wave’ of writing to a close and take some time to collect feedback, listen to discussion, and prepare to rework it. Before I do that, though, there are still a few points I would like to cover and so I have decided to give myself today and tomorrow to say something about three key terms that I have not explored yet. The first of these is AESTHETICS.
Aesthetics
To be clear about this, I am not suggesting that we should be making aesthetic judgements as a part of our practice. However, aesthetic issues enter the work in other ways.
(1) Writing is Already Aestheticised
In everyday life people do, in fact, make aesthetic judgements about writing. Or, better perhaps, people have an aesthetic awareness of writing, both as a form of language use and in its relationship to materiality. I shall give an example from each strand of the project.
Will and Irna have been looking at medals and there is clearly an aesthetic dimension to these artefacts. They are struck, preserved, and worn for the sake of remembrance. (Is the term remembrance so associated with death as to render it inapplicable to other types of conscious memorialisation? The dictionary definition does not limit it to that context, although it does note that the word is often used in that way.) For that reason, they need to have a ‘look’ that is commensurate with the dignity of what they stand for. And, in fact, fairly well known sculptors have at times been called upon to design medals. (I am quite curious to find out how designs for medals are commissioned and have sent for a second-hand book from Amazon to help me find out!)
In Kate and Zahir’s strand, textiles and sewing have emerged as important topics and this kind of craft activity clearly has a strong aesthetic dimension. Similarly, the texts produced by the young people participating in that strand sometimes signal a relationship with aestheticised literary genres (poetry, for example) and are often decorative at the material level too.
Steve and I have encountered quite a lot of graffiti on our walks and, once again, this is a form of writing that has its own aesthetic conventions. (I am tempted to send off for a book about this too but perhaps we should draw on your friends’ knowledge of this area, Steve?)
These brief examples are meant to illustrate the way in which aesthetic considerations are out there in the practices we are engaging with, whether or not we choose to foreground them.
(2) Aesthetic Judgements and Power
As I noted when writing about genre, aesthetic statements sometimes function ideologically. This is a well known effect and certainly operates in relation to language use. The prestige of Received Pronunciation has often been reinforced through claims that it is more attractive than other accents of English (although other accents have been seen as having their own aesthetic properties). Similarly, while criticism of graffiti has sometimes been couched in legal discourse, it has also been articulated in aesthetic terms – it has been condemned by means of claims that it is ugly.
I want to emphasise that I am not suggesting that the aesthetic is entirely reducible to the political or ideological. This is obviously not the case. People’s responses to commemorative art, to textiles and poetry, and to graffiti do involve a direct response of pleasure or dismay at the way these forms of writing make use of language and at the way they look. The point is that there is a dynamic interweaving of aesthetics and power that needs to be recognised.
(3) Aesthetics and Research
This is perhaps a more knotty issue than the other two. During the course of the project I have become more and more aware that audiences will tend to read the interventions of the researcher in aesthetic terms. Thus, when Kate attended a conference recently and showed a group of photographs taken by participants in her project, her powerpoint presentation was interpreted by her audience as itself an aestheticised object. Of course, we have built arts practice into the project itself and this includes an intervention in a gallery space, so we have – to a significant extent – invited this response. However, I suspect that the tendency to view the materials we have gathered in aesthetic terms would be there, even if audiences were not aware of those elements of the project and I want to say three things about this.
(a) It may be that audiences are right to interpret the material in this way because the use of photography as a means of documentation, for example, makes the aestheticisation of the materials unavoidable in the sense that photography is a practice with an in-built aesthetic. If you want to avoid this effect, then you are perhaps struggling against the medium itself. Photographs of everyday places and objects are a part of the archive of photographic art and so, by making such images in the context of research, one is inevitably making something that, at the very least, resembles an art object.
(b) In a number of fields, there has been a trend to ‘recover’, ‘reclaim’, or ‘celebrate’ the activities – and particularly the craft work – of disenfranchised groups by insisting on their status as art. An example would be recent responses to the quilting traditions of the US. In some ways, this makes it natural for a certain kind of politicised (more cynically, well-meaning) viewer to want to interpret everyday writing in aesthetic terms. The impulse is to find worth in it through the language of art criticism.
(c) It may be that we ourselves cannot help bringing aesthetic categories to visual and linguistic material, and, if this is so, I wonder which aesthetic categories are most relevant here: The picturesque? The sublime? The kitsch (in my inaccurate sense of ironised ‘tackiness’?) The abject? The ‘cool’? The cute?
So aesthetic considerations arise in looking at our own practice and I think these need to be related both to the aesthetics embedded in everyday writing practices themselves (see my point, ‘writing is already aestheticised’) and to the ideological uses of aesthetic discourse (‘aesthetic judgements and power’).
Perception
Another key term that I want to include is PERCEPTION. I started to think about this when I did a walk in Rawmarsh with one of my ex-students who is from the area and has lived there throughout her time at university. Steve and I had already walked in the area and had returned from the walk with a large number of photographs, so we had a strong sense of the kinds of writing that appeared in that part of Rotherham. Walking with someone else, I began to realise that she had barely noticed some of the writing which was very salient to me, and, conversely, that she was aware of writing that I had not registered at all. I began to think of this in terms of the categories of FIGURE and GROUND, which are well established in the psychology of perception. [The work of the early twentieth-century gestalt psychologists is significant here and this is examined in Edwin Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology, 2nd edn (New York: Appleton Century Crofts, 1950).] The idea here is that we cannot give equal emphasis to everything that appears in our field of vision and instead pick out some parts of the field as salient (i.e. as figures) and interpret others as the background against which the figures stand out (i.e. as the ground). This is more than simply deciding what to prioritise. The claim is that we actually make sense of visual input by interpreting it in terms of figure and ground, a process illustrated by the ambiguity of Rubin’s vase and played upon in M.C. Escher’s famous tessellations.
I began to think of ‘writing in the street’ in these terms, certain texts leaping out as figures and some just constituting part of the ground. Indeed, even before walking with my student, I had had a conversation with Steve in which we had touched on this issue. In a park in East Herringthorpe, the graffiti on one of the pieces of play equipment was so dense that nothing leapt out from it as salient. It was, as Steve put it, just a ‘texture’. But I wondered if someone with more knowledge of graffiti might have seen more in it – whether s/he would have located figures against the ground of the texture.
I have come to feel that walking is an interesting mode of enquiry because, to a large extent, it constitutes a perceptual experiment. Walking alone and then walking with someone else, you find your perception of the space you are walking in reordered as the relations of figure and ground shift and change. And this applied to both of us – myself and the other participant. It was not simply that I, as an outsider, was inducted into a richer view of the area by someone who knew it better. She too felt that, as a result of walking with me, she was noticing things that she normally took for granted.
Introduction
I am quite keen to bring this first ‘wave’ of writing to a close and take some time to collect feedback, listen to discussion, and prepare to rework it. Before I do that, though, there are still a few points I would like to cover and so I have decided to give myself today and tomorrow to say something about three key terms that I have not explored yet. The first of these is AESTHETICS.
Aesthetics
To be clear about this, I am not suggesting that we should be making aesthetic judgements as a part of our practice. However, aesthetic issues enter the work in other ways.
(1) Writing is Already Aestheticised
In everyday life people do, in fact, make aesthetic judgements about writing. Or, better perhaps, people have an aesthetic awareness of writing, both as a form of language use and in its relationship to materiality. I shall give an example from each strand of the project.
Will and Irna have been looking at medals and there is clearly an aesthetic dimension to these artefacts. They are struck, preserved, and worn for the sake of remembrance. (Is the term remembrance so associated with death as to render it inapplicable to other types of conscious memorialisation? The dictionary definition does not limit it to that context, although it does note that the word is often used in that way.) For that reason, they need to have a ‘look’ that is commensurate with the dignity of what they stand for. And, in fact, fairly well known sculptors have at times been called upon to design medals. (I am quite curious to find out how designs for medals are commissioned and have sent for a second-hand book from Amazon to help me find out!)
In Kate and Zahir’s strand, textiles and sewing have emerged as important topics and this kind of craft activity clearly has a strong aesthetic dimension. Similarly, the texts produced by the young people participating in that strand sometimes signal a relationship with aestheticised literary genres (poetry, for example) and are often decorative at the material level too.
Steve and I have encountered quite a lot of graffiti on our walks and, once again, this is a form of writing that has its own aesthetic conventions. (I am tempted to send off for a book about this too but perhaps we should draw on your friends’ knowledge of this area, Steve?)
These brief examples are meant to illustrate the way in which aesthetic considerations are out there in the practices we are engaging with, whether or not we choose to foreground them.
(2) Aesthetic Judgements and Power
As I noted when writing about genre, aesthetic statements sometimes function ideologically. This is a well known effect and certainly operates in relation to language use. The prestige of Received Pronunciation has often been reinforced through claims that it is more attractive than other accents of English (although other accents have been seen as having their own aesthetic properties). Similarly, while criticism of graffiti has sometimes been couched in legal discourse, it has also been articulated in aesthetic terms – it has been condemned by means of claims that it is ugly.
I want to emphasise that I am not suggesting that the aesthetic is entirely reducible to the political or ideological. This is obviously not the case. People’s responses to commemorative art, to textiles and poetry, and to graffiti do involve a direct response of pleasure or dismay at the way these forms of writing make use of language and at the way they look. The point is that there is a dynamic interweaving of aesthetics and power that needs to be recognised.
(3) Aesthetics and Research
This is perhaps a more knotty issue than the other two. During the course of the project I have become more and more aware that audiences will tend to read the interventions of the researcher in aesthetic terms. Thus, when Kate attended a conference recently and showed a group of photographs taken by participants in her project, her powerpoint presentation was interpreted by her audience as itself an aestheticised object. Of course, we have built arts practice into the project itself and this includes an intervention in a gallery space, so we have – to a significant extent – invited this response. However, I suspect that the tendency to view the materials we have gathered in aesthetic terms would be there, even if audiences were not aware of those elements of the project and I want to say three things about this.
(a) It may be that audiences are right to interpret the material in this way because the use of photography as a means of documentation, for example, makes the aestheticisation of the materials unavoidable in the sense that photography is a practice with an in-built aesthetic. If you want to avoid this effect, then you are perhaps struggling against the medium itself. Photographs of everyday places and objects are a part of the archive of photographic art and so, by making such images in the context of research, one is inevitably making something that, at the very least, resembles an art object.
(b) In a number of fields, there has been a trend to ‘recover’, ‘reclaim’, or ‘celebrate’ the activities – and particularly the craft work – of disenfranchised groups by insisting on their status as art. An example would be recent responses to the quilting traditions of the US. In some ways, this makes it natural for a certain kind of politicised (more cynically, well-meaning) viewer to want to interpret everyday writing in aesthetic terms. The impulse is to find worth in it through the language of art criticism.
(c) It may be that we ourselves cannot help bringing aesthetic categories to visual and linguistic material, and, if this is so, I wonder which aesthetic categories are most relevant here: The picturesque? The sublime? The kitsch (in my inaccurate sense of ironised ‘tackiness’?) The abject? The ‘cool’? The cute?
So aesthetic considerations arise in looking at our own practice and I think these need to be related both to the aesthetics embedded in everyday writing practices themselves (see my point, ‘writing is already aestheticised’) and to the ideological uses of aesthetic discourse (‘aesthetic judgements and power’).
Perception
Another key term that I want to include is PERCEPTION. I started to think about this when I did a walk in Rawmarsh with one of my ex-students who is from the area and has lived there throughout her time at university. Steve and I had already walked in the area and had returned from the walk with a large number of photographs, so we had a strong sense of the kinds of writing that appeared in that part of Rotherham. Walking with someone else, I began to realise that she had barely noticed some of the writing which was very salient to me, and, conversely, that she was aware of writing that I had not registered at all. I began to think of this in terms of the categories of FIGURE and GROUND, which are well established in the psychology of perception. [The work of the early twentieth-century gestalt psychologists is significant here and this is examined in Edwin Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology, 2nd edn (New York: Appleton Century Crofts, 1950).] The idea here is that we cannot give equal emphasis to everything that appears in our field of vision and instead pick out some parts of the field as salient (i.e. as figures) and interpret others as the background against which the figures stand out (i.e. as the ground). This is more than simply deciding what to prioritise. The claim is that we actually make sense of visual input by interpreting it in terms of figure and ground, a process illustrated by the ambiguity of Rubin’s vase and played upon in M.C. Escher’s famous tessellations.
I began to think of ‘writing in the street’ in these terms, certain texts leaping out as figures and some just constituting part of the ground. Indeed, even before walking with my student, I had had a conversation with Steve in which we had touched on this issue. In a park in East Herringthorpe, the graffiti on one of the pieces of play equipment was so dense that nothing leapt out from it as salient. It was, as Steve put it, just a ‘texture’. But I wondered if someone with more knowledge of graffiti might have seen more in it – whether s/he would have located figures against the ground of the texture.
I have come to feel that walking is an interesting mode of enquiry because, to a large extent, it constitutes a perceptual experiment. Walking alone and then walking with someone else, you find your perception of the space you are walking in reordered as the relations of figure and ground shift and change. And this applied to both of us – myself and the other participant. It was not simply that I, as an outsider, was inducted into a richer view of the area by someone who knew it better. She too felt that, as a result of walking with me, she was noticing things that she normally took for granted.
Draft 1, Chunk 7 (Genre)
[This was first written on 15 September 2011]
Genre and Power
GENRE has an interesting relationship with POWER in the sense that GENRES exist as patterns prior to individual acts of communication, constraining the way in which individuals communicate through language. That is not to say that GENRES cannot be adapted, resisted, subverted, hybridised, parodied, ignored, or replaced. But to do any of these things is to position oneself in relation to an existing framework of expectations – or, to put it another way, in relation to an external authority. The nature of this authority varies a lot from GENRE to GENRE and between times and places.
Some GENRES are the concern of the educational system and are drilled into children along with a kind of ideological account of them. This, it is made clear, is the proper way to write. (Speech has been less of a concern in the British system.) Thinking about how GENRE is embedded in education, it strikes me that the situation is very complex. Earlier generations would have received training in the conventions for writing different kinds of letters and there are textbooks that include samples of many different types of correspondence. I have just used Google books to take a look at one: A Treatise on Commercial Correspondence by Benjamin Bayly of Spitalfields, published in London in 1862 and intended ‘for the use of Schools, Seminaries, and for the Instruction of Youth’. It includes patterns for ‘an order’, ‘a bill of parcels’, ‘an invoice’, ‘a cheque’, ‘a bill of exchange’, ‘a promissory note’, ‘a letter of advice’, ‘a bill of lading’, and so forth. There is no doubt, I think, that this kind of knowledge was important for individuals seeking work in the commercial world and would have been of practical use to those working as clerks in business or industry. But the educational system has traditionally trained children in other, less ‘useful’ genres – the essay, for example, which has never had any place in commercial life and has strongly literary antecedents. (Montaigne and Bacon wrote essays, as did the eighteenth-century philosophes.) Training in writing essays was, in a sense, an induction into higher levels of education, a requirement for entry into the university.
Both these examples have a historical quality – the writing of letters and essays is no longer prioritised in education as it once was and I would like to hear Kate’s thoughts on this. Has educational policy and practice moved away from a focus on these very formally defined generic conventions? Have new genres moved to centre stage? Or are the conventions of writing communicated differently?
At any rate, although the school is one site in which GENRE becomes connected with POWER, it is not the only one. I mentioned earlier that the inscriptions on tomb stones might be seen in terms of GENRE. (And, actually, there is a cluster of GENRES surrounding the event of a person’s death – the eulogy, the obituary, the epitaph – some spoken, some written, and some quite literary in character.) The fact that the owners and administrators of cemeteries, whether religious groups, civil government, or private companies, can regulate what is written on tombstones again results in the private individual encountering external authority in the very moment that he or she begins to write. And the dispute between Dignity and the parents of the children buried in East Herringthorpe cemetery demonstrates the kind of conflict that can arise from this encounter.
Returning to the account of POWER that is emerging in our work, it strikes me that the complex discourse of FREEDOM is relevant here. Children must learn to write well because it will give them more opportunity to take control of their own lives, more opportunity (freedom to do). Parents must be discouraged from putting plastic ornaments on graves because this adversely affects the experience of others (freedom from).
Incidentally, in both the case of education and the authorities that regulate the inscriptions on tomb stones, that authority is often exercised with reference to an AESTHETIC discourse: ‘it looks better laid out like that’, ‘it is clearer like this’, ‘it is more tasteful’, ‘it is more “in keeping”’. People internalise these ideas to a greater or lesser degree.
I would like to end by thinking about whether GENRE can function OPPOSITIONALLY. Resistant and subversive communication may distance itself from modes of writing associated with education and authority, although this distancing is not always total. (The comedy writer John O’Farrell wrote a book with the title Things Can Only Get Better about the experience of being a Labour activist in the long years of Conservative government leading up to 1997. He describes himself as a middle-class student writing political graffiti on the walls of his university town and being mocked next day for introducing a comma into the slogan, ‘coal, not dole’.)
It would be interesting to look more closely at the practice of graffiti here. This seems to me governed by quite an elaborate code of conventions and one has to know about these and abide them in order to be taken seriously as a graffiti artist.
In fact, it occurs to me that some of what I have described as GENRES of graffiti might equally well be described in terms of MEMES: conventionalised texts, images, or combinations of media which are varied a little every time they are used. A present-day example is the online phenomenon of lolcats and a historical one would be the war-time cartoon of ‘Chad’ looking over a wall with the slogan ‘wot no ____?’ under it, originally a comment on rationing and recently revived on a T-shirt:
(http://www.force18.co.uk/chad-wot-no-banksy-p-644.html)
Perhaps GENRES are associated with authority, whereas MEMES are more oppositional?
Genre and Power
GENRE has an interesting relationship with POWER in the sense that GENRES exist as patterns prior to individual acts of communication, constraining the way in which individuals communicate through language. That is not to say that GENRES cannot be adapted, resisted, subverted, hybridised, parodied, ignored, or replaced. But to do any of these things is to position oneself in relation to an existing framework of expectations – or, to put it another way, in relation to an external authority. The nature of this authority varies a lot from GENRE to GENRE and between times and places.
Some GENRES are the concern of the educational system and are drilled into children along with a kind of ideological account of them. This, it is made clear, is the proper way to write. (Speech has been less of a concern in the British system.) Thinking about how GENRE is embedded in education, it strikes me that the situation is very complex. Earlier generations would have received training in the conventions for writing different kinds of letters and there are textbooks that include samples of many different types of correspondence. I have just used Google books to take a look at one: A Treatise on Commercial Correspondence by Benjamin Bayly of Spitalfields, published in London in 1862 and intended ‘for the use of Schools, Seminaries, and for the Instruction of Youth’. It includes patterns for ‘an order’, ‘a bill of parcels’, ‘an invoice’, ‘a cheque’, ‘a bill of exchange’, ‘a promissory note’, ‘a letter of advice’, ‘a bill of lading’, and so forth. There is no doubt, I think, that this kind of knowledge was important for individuals seeking work in the commercial world and would have been of practical use to those working as clerks in business or industry. But the educational system has traditionally trained children in other, less ‘useful’ genres – the essay, for example, which has never had any place in commercial life and has strongly literary antecedents. (Montaigne and Bacon wrote essays, as did the eighteenth-century philosophes.) Training in writing essays was, in a sense, an induction into higher levels of education, a requirement for entry into the university.
Both these examples have a historical quality – the writing of letters and essays is no longer prioritised in education as it once was and I would like to hear Kate’s thoughts on this. Has educational policy and practice moved away from a focus on these very formally defined generic conventions? Have new genres moved to centre stage? Or are the conventions of writing communicated differently?
At any rate, although the school is one site in which GENRE becomes connected with POWER, it is not the only one. I mentioned earlier that the inscriptions on tomb stones might be seen in terms of GENRE. (And, actually, there is a cluster of GENRES surrounding the event of a person’s death – the eulogy, the obituary, the epitaph – some spoken, some written, and some quite literary in character.) The fact that the owners and administrators of cemeteries, whether religious groups, civil government, or private companies, can regulate what is written on tombstones again results in the private individual encountering external authority in the very moment that he or she begins to write. And the dispute between Dignity and the parents of the children buried in East Herringthorpe cemetery demonstrates the kind of conflict that can arise from this encounter.
Returning to the account of POWER that is emerging in our work, it strikes me that the complex discourse of FREEDOM is relevant here. Children must learn to write well because it will give them more opportunity to take control of their own lives, more opportunity (freedom to do). Parents must be discouraged from putting plastic ornaments on graves because this adversely affects the experience of others (freedom from).
Incidentally, in both the case of education and the authorities that regulate the inscriptions on tomb stones, that authority is often exercised with reference to an AESTHETIC discourse: ‘it looks better laid out like that’, ‘it is clearer like this’, ‘it is more tasteful’, ‘it is more “in keeping”’. People internalise these ideas to a greater or lesser degree.
I would like to end by thinking about whether GENRE can function OPPOSITIONALLY. Resistant and subversive communication may distance itself from modes of writing associated with education and authority, although this distancing is not always total. (The comedy writer John O’Farrell wrote a book with the title Things Can Only Get Better about the experience of being a Labour activist in the long years of Conservative government leading up to 1997. He describes himself as a middle-class student writing political graffiti on the walls of his university town and being mocked next day for introducing a comma into the slogan, ‘coal, not dole’.)
It would be interesting to look more closely at the practice of graffiti here. This seems to me governed by quite an elaborate code of conventions and one has to know about these and abide them in order to be taken seriously as a graffiti artist.
In fact, it occurs to me that some of what I have described as GENRES of graffiti might equally well be described in terms of MEMES: conventionalised texts, images, or combinations of media which are varied a little every time they are used. A present-day example is the online phenomenon of lolcats and a historical one would be the war-time cartoon of ‘Chad’ looking over a wall with the slogan ‘wot no ____?’ under it, originally a comment on rationing and recently revived on a T-shirt:
(http://www.force18.co.uk/chad-wot-no-banksy-p-644.html)
Perhaps GENRES are associated with authority, whereas MEMES are more oppositional?
Draft 1, Chunk 6 (Genre)
[This was first written on 14 September 2011]
Introduction
There are just a few more key words that I want to cover and, having written about POWER, MEMORY, IDENTITY, and MATERIALITY, I want to turn now to GENRE. This concept is important to me because of my disciplinary background. It is used both in literature and in certain areas of linguistics to recognise the fact that language users do not ‘reinvent the wheel’ every time they speak or write. They tend to produce utterances and texts that fit broadly into existing categories. The concept of GENRE provides a way of talking about this phenomenon and I shall begin by outlining how it works and why it might be relevant to us.
Genre
In literature, the ‘existing categories’ available to writers include tragic drama, the novel, the short story, the epic poem and so on. But there are plenty of everyday GENRES that may be so familiar to us that we do not always think of them as GENRES. There are conventions for writing letters, recipes, and to do lists, for example. [See Tony Bex, Variety in Written English: Texts in Society, Societies in Text (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), chapter 7, ‘Genre’, on ‘everyday’ written GENRES.] And spoken GENRES might include jokes, prayers, or anecdotes. [See Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, translated by Vern W. McGee, edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1986).]
If a friend likes my food and I offer to jot down some guidelines for making it, I do not ponder the best way to couch these instructions in written language. I resort to an existing model. I have seen plenty of recipes before and I simply adopt the conventions that they use.
These conventions include the overall organisation of the text. Recipes conventionally have two separate sections: an inventory of ingredients, which comes first, and step-by-step instructions for using them, which come second. The ingredients are typically listed. That is, you do not write whole sentences introducing them. You just write the name of the ingredient and the quantity required. And the instructions are usually written with the verb form that grammarians call the ‘imperative’ – the one you use to give orders: ‘Chop the onion finely’, ‘Simmer for ten minutes’. Sometimes you can insert first-, second- and third-person verbs after the imperative: ‘Simmer for ten minutes. I find this is sufficient but you may prefer to give it longer. Some people insist it must be fifteen’. The point here is that certain grammatical patterns are characteristic of certain GENRES. To look at another aspect of the language of recipes, because they are divided into two sections – ingredients and instructions – the distribution of the definite and indefinite article (‘the’ and ‘a’/’an’ respectively) has a certain shape. The instructions are likely to include lots of indefinite articles, which we use when we introduce an object or person into discourse for the first time: ‘a large onion’, ‘a pint of milk’. (Actually, looking at one of the recipe books on my shelf, I find that the author tends to use ‘1’ instead of ‘a’ or ‘an’.) By the time we get to the instructions, though, all the ingredients have been introduced, so we switch to ‘the’, which marks objects already introduced into discourse: ‘chop the onion’, ‘heat the milk gently’. I’ve laboured this discussion a little because I want to emphasise quite how conventional, or conventionally patterned, the language of particular GENRES can be.
If the concept of GENRE, broadly speaking, provides a way of emphasising that speakers and writers do not continually reinvent the wheel but adopt existing conventions for certain types of communicative act, we can begin to see GENRE in terms of a cluster of characteristics including the following.
(1) Topic
Particular GENRES tend to be associated with particular types of content. Recipes deal with the preparation of food. Tragedies deal with the sufferings of great men and women. It is possible to use the conventions of a particular GENRE to write or speak about other topics but this constitutes a type of transformation that is, in itself, meaningful. You sometimes see twee little texts on the internet that use the GENRE of the recipe to talk about something more abstract. Here is an example from the website of a wedding planner in Florida:
Recipe for a Happy Marriage
1 cup consideration
1 cup courtesy
2 cupfuls flattery carefully concealed
1 gallon faith and trust in each other
2 cupfuls praise
1 small pinch of in-laws
1 reasonable budget, a generous dash of cooperation
3 teaspoon pure extract of "I'm sorry"
1 cup contentment
1 cup each confidence and encouragement
1 large or several small hobbies
1 cup blindness to the other's faults
Flavor with frequent portions of recreation and a dash of happy memories. Stir well and remove any specks of jealousy, temper or criticism. Sweeten well with generous portions of love and keep warm with a steady flame of devotion. Never serve with cold shoulder.
(http://www.weddingsbygloria.com)
This is an important aspect of GENRE: it is not deterministic. You can write a text that plays with GENRE in more or less creative ways.
(2) Layout and Language
I’ve already commented on the layout and grammar of the recipe and, to broaden the discussion further, one might think about the conventions for laying out a written letter, which we were drilled in at school. To some extent letters also have a characteristic grammar, often emphasising the present perfect verb form: ‘I have done’, ‘she has gone’, ‘we have seen’. In English, this is the tense that is used to indicate a strong connection between a past event and present state of affairs so it has a ‘newsy’ quality.
(3) Speaker/Writer and Recipient
Letters to friends have a different layout and use different language from business letters (although these may have enough in common to be sub-GENRES rather than entirely distinct.)
(4) Setting
A sermon is a rather formal GENRE that is associated with churches and chapels. A priest might be talking to the same recipients about a religious topic, but, because s/he is not in that particular physical setting and institutional context, would not give a sermon.
Genres in Rotherham
As Steve and I walked around Rotherham, I keep noticing GENRES. For example, there is a type of graffiti where a series of names is listed. They are positioned one above the other (not strung out in a horizontal line) and with a plus sign between each. And there is an old-fashioned GENRE of graffiti, that still seems to be current and that looks like this: ‘NL [heart] DS’. At the same time, the inscriptions on grave stones can be seen as a GENRE (or perhaps a group of sub-GENRES). They typically use formulae such as ‘in loving memory of’; the text is usually centred rather than left aligned; there is a marked use of quotation (an issue that I shall return to under the heading of APPROPRIATION).
Introduction
There are just a few more key words that I want to cover and, having written about POWER, MEMORY, IDENTITY, and MATERIALITY, I want to turn now to GENRE. This concept is important to me because of my disciplinary background. It is used both in literature and in certain areas of linguistics to recognise the fact that language users do not ‘reinvent the wheel’ every time they speak or write. They tend to produce utterances and texts that fit broadly into existing categories. The concept of GENRE provides a way of talking about this phenomenon and I shall begin by outlining how it works and why it might be relevant to us.
Genre
In literature, the ‘existing categories’ available to writers include tragic drama, the novel, the short story, the epic poem and so on. But there are plenty of everyday GENRES that may be so familiar to us that we do not always think of them as GENRES. There are conventions for writing letters, recipes, and to do lists, for example. [See Tony Bex, Variety in Written English: Texts in Society, Societies in Text (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), chapter 7, ‘Genre’, on ‘everyday’ written GENRES.] And spoken GENRES might include jokes, prayers, or anecdotes. [See Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, translated by Vern W. McGee, edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1986).]
If a friend likes my food and I offer to jot down some guidelines for making it, I do not ponder the best way to couch these instructions in written language. I resort to an existing model. I have seen plenty of recipes before and I simply adopt the conventions that they use.
These conventions include the overall organisation of the text. Recipes conventionally have two separate sections: an inventory of ingredients, which comes first, and step-by-step instructions for using them, which come second. The ingredients are typically listed. That is, you do not write whole sentences introducing them. You just write the name of the ingredient and the quantity required. And the instructions are usually written with the verb form that grammarians call the ‘imperative’ – the one you use to give orders: ‘Chop the onion finely’, ‘Simmer for ten minutes’. Sometimes you can insert first-, second- and third-person verbs after the imperative: ‘Simmer for ten minutes. I find this is sufficient but you may prefer to give it longer. Some people insist it must be fifteen’. The point here is that certain grammatical patterns are characteristic of certain GENRES. To look at another aspect of the language of recipes, because they are divided into two sections – ingredients and instructions – the distribution of the definite and indefinite article (‘the’ and ‘a’/’an’ respectively) has a certain shape. The instructions are likely to include lots of indefinite articles, which we use when we introduce an object or person into discourse for the first time: ‘a large onion’, ‘a pint of milk’. (Actually, looking at one of the recipe books on my shelf, I find that the author tends to use ‘1’ instead of ‘a’ or ‘an’.) By the time we get to the instructions, though, all the ingredients have been introduced, so we switch to ‘the’, which marks objects already introduced into discourse: ‘chop the onion’, ‘heat the milk gently’. I’ve laboured this discussion a little because I want to emphasise quite how conventional, or conventionally patterned, the language of particular GENRES can be.
If the concept of GENRE, broadly speaking, provides a way of emphasising that speakers and writers do not continually reinvent the wheel but adopt existing conventions for certain types of communicative act, we can begin to see GENRE in terms of a cluster of characteristics including the following.
(1) Topic
Particular GENRES tend to be associated with particular types of content. Recipes deal with the preparation of food. Tragedies deal with the sufferings of great men and women. It is possible to use the conventions of a particular GENRE to write or speak about other topics but this constitutes a type of transformation that is, in itself, meaningful. You sometimes see twee little texts on the internet that use the GENRE of the recipe to talk about something more abstract. Here is an example from the website of a wedding planner in Florida:
Recipe for a Happy Marriage
1 cup consideration
1 cup courtesy
2 cupfuls flattery carefully concealed
1 gallon faith and trust in each other
2 cupfuls praise
1 small pinch of in-laws
1 reasonable budget, a generous dash of cooperation
3 teaspoon pure extract of "I'm sorry"
1 cup contentment
1 cup each confidence and encouragement
1 large or several small hobbies
1 cup blindness to the other's faults
Flavor with frequent portions of recreation and a dash of happy memories. Stir well and remove any specks of jealousy, temper or criticism. Sweeten well with generous portions of love and keep warm with a steady flame of devotion. Never serve with cold shoulder.
(http://www.weddingsbygloria.com)
This is an important aspect of GENRE: it is not deterministic. You can write a text that plays with GENRE in more or less creative ways.
(2) Layout and Language
I’ve already commented on the layout and grammar of the recipe and, to broaden the discussion further, one might think about the conventions for laying out a written letter, which we were drilled in at school. To some extent letters also have a characteristic grammar, often emphasising the present perfect verb form: ‘I have done’, ‘she has gone’, ‘we have seen’. In English, this is the tense that is used to indicate a strong connection between a past event and present state of affairs so it has a ‘newsy’ quality.
(3) Speaker/Writer and Recipient
Letters to friends have a different layout and use different language from business letters (although these may have enough in common to be sub-GENRES rather than entirely distinct.)
(4) Setting
A sermon is a rather formal GENRE that is associated with churches and chapels. A priest might be talking to the same recipients about a religious topic, but, because s/he is not in that particular physical setting and institutional context, would not give a sermon.
Genres in Rotherham
As Steve and I walked around Rotherham, I keep noticing GENRES. For example, there is a type of graffiti where a series of names is listed. They are positioned one above the other (not strung out in a horizontal line) and with a plus sign between each. And there is an old-fashioned GENRE of graffiti, that still seems to be current and that looks like this: ‘NL [heart] DS’. At the same time, the inscriptions on grave stones can be seen as a GENRE (or perhaps a group of sub-GENRES). They typically use formulae such as ‘in loving memory of’; the text is usually centred rather than left aligned; there is a marked use of quotation (an issue that I shall return to under the heading of APPROPRIATION).
Draft 1, Chunk 5 (Materiality)
[This was first written on 13 September 2011]
Introduction
Today I shall try to weave an account of MATERIALITY into the picture I have been developing. Writing always involves physical materials – something to make marks with and a surface to make marks on. From this, a number of points spring to mind.
Materials and Meaning
The materials used to write a particular text are part of its MEANING. To tattoo someone’s name onto your skin means something different from writing it in the condensation on a window with your index finger and something different again from embroidering it onto a sampler.
If we think of the way MATERIALITY contributes to the MEANING of writing in semiotic terms, the physical nature of the text often works, I think, as a kind of INDEX in the sense developed by Charles Sanders Peirce. [Peirce, Charles Sanders, Collected Writings, 8 Vols, edited by Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss and Arthur W. Burks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931-58).] Peirce defines an INDEX as a sign in which there is a direct connection between the meaning-bearing thing (the signifier) and the meaning to which it points (the signified) – the relationship is not completely conventional (as it would be in a SYMBOL) and it is not one of straightforward resemblance (as it would be in an ICON). The signifier may be an image of something caused by the signified. (For example, the traffic sign meaning ‘high winds’ does not directly depict the wind – how would that be possible? – but shows an image of a wind sock. And, in Christian art, Saint Catherine typically holds a wheel because a wheel was the instrument of her martyrdom). To return to examples from our project, engraving a name into stone as an act of remembrance is significant because the hardness of the material indexes the hope that memory will be preserved for a long time. Interestingly, though, when poppy wreaths are laid on war memorials (like the one in Rawmarsh), they often bear handwritten texts, and, although these are usually inside a protective plastic sleeve, water still tends to get inside and makes the ink run. And as the ink runs, it produces a kind of pathos perhaps because it indexes change and loss. Thus, the handwritten texts on the steps of a war memorial produce a complex interaction of references to longevity and transience as a result of the materials used to write them.
To take another example, tattooing derives some of its meaning from its intimate association with the body coupled with its permanence, which indexes commitment in a very strong fashion. This point is endlessly raised when people talk about tattoos: ‘You may like it now but how will you feel when you’re sixty?’, ‘What if you split up?’ Does some of the significance of henna tattoos derive from their less permanent character and the sense that they will fade over time?
Materials and Aesthetics
In some of the contexts we have looked at the connection between MATERIALITY and AESTHETICS emerges quite strongly. I want to come back to AESTHETICS later but we could mention here the sense that some materials are perceived as having a kind of ‘dignity’ and some a type of ‘authenticity’, whereas others are perceived as ‘cheap’ or ‘tacky’. The use of ‘tacky’ materials may give rise to a sense of what I think of as kitsch. From talking to Steve, I suspect I’m using that term wrongly and what I really mean is a kind of pleasure in the ‘tacky’ that operates ironically – things that are ‘so bad that they are good’. Furthermore, some forms of writing – graffiti, embroidery, tattooing – have their own very developed AESTHETICS. And, while these exceed the specific issue of MATERIALITY – that is, they are go beyond the specific issue of what physical materials the text is made of – they do include it. These AESTHETICS may be associated with the IDENTITIES of specific cultural (and counter-cultural) groups.
Economic Dimensions of Materiality
Materials also have their own economic value and this has important results for textuality. It is expensive to build a large structure from stone and have dozens of names engraved on it. It is relatively cheap to buy a marker pen and write graffiti on painted surfaces.
In a lot of cases, the semiotic, the aesthetic, and the economic are closely intertwined. As an example, we might think about writing paper. The nature of the paper and the ink is important on a semiotic level: its weight in grams per square metre, whether you use a biro or a fountain pen, the colour of both materials. To a certain extent, the ‘meaning’ of a heavy paper arises because it indexes expense. But this is not so true of the colour of ink and paper, where the meaning is more conventional. (Broadcasters talk about being able to recognise letters from ‘cranks’ because they are written in green ink.) For children there may be a pleasure in using pens of many colours, ones that, used by adults, would be seen as inappropriate.
Materiality, Power, and Memory
These considerations may help to nuance the discussion of some specific examples from the project and I’m going to write some fragments about these.
(1) Looking at the dispute in East Herringthorpe cemetery over the decoration of children’s graves, for example, the question arises of what was supposed to be wrong with the objects placed on the graves by the grieving parents. I suspect that the objections raised by the private company, Dignity, may well have included a sense that plastic was not a suitable material in the context of cemetery and one wonders what this is about: is it that plastic, because of its artificiality, is felt to lack the ‘dignity’ – an irony there – of materials like stone or wood?
(2) I’m also thinking of the politics of reading cheap materials in an ironised way. For the affluent, there can be a pleasure in cheap materials, ironically displayed, which presupposes the possibility of choosing other materials.
(3) I’m also reminded of the other cemetery on the East Herringthorpe estate: the small one near the Anglican church. As well as stone grave markers, there are also crosses hand-made from scraps of wood and containers for flowers sunk straight into the earth – markers of REMEMBRANCE that are affordable in comparison with the cost of having a mason set up a stone.
(4) I would like to include examples from Kate’s work in this discussion because of the rich significance of textiles and embroidery for some of the people she has been working with, but I need to talk to Kate before I can really do this.
(5) The economics of MATERIALITY are clearly connected with POWER because expensive materials remain largely the preserve of powerful organisations and people. Does this produce a kind of valorisation of cheaper materials in oppositional groups? Is there an AESTHETIC of the ‘makeshift’ that trades upon the relative values of different materials?
(6) Materials can be APPROPRIATED too. I’m thinking of the practice of walking in wet concrete laid by someone else, or writing in it. By doing this, you almost hi-jack the permanence of the material someone else has chosen – rather like appearing in the background of someone else’s photograph and making a rude gesture. In East Herringthorpe there is graffiti that looks as if it has been written with anti-vandal paint.
(7) Some writing involves literal damage to property because it uses that property as a writing surface. The extent to which this kind of practice really constitutes damage gives rise to debate in particular situations: how much damage is involved in writing with a spray can on a disused building as opposed to scratching something into the paint of someone’s car?
Introduction
Today I shall try to weave an account of MATERIALITY into the picture I have been developing. Writing always involves physical materials – something to make marks with and a surface to make marks on. From this, a number of points spring to mind.
Materials and Meaning
The materials used to write a particular text are part of its MEANING. To tattoo someone’s name onto your skin means something different from writing it in the condensation on a window with your index finger and something different again from embroidering it onto a sampler.
If we think of the way MATERIALITY contributes to the MEANING of writing in semiotic terms, the physical nature of the text often works, I think, as a kind of INDEX in the sense developed by Charles Sanders Peirce. [Peirce, Charles Sanders, Collected Writings, 8 Vols, edited by Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss and Arthur W. Burks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931-58).] Peirce defines an INDEX as a sign in which there is a direct connection between the meaning-bearing thing (the signifier) and the meaning to which it points (the signified) – the relationship is not completely conventional (as it would be in a SYMBOL) and it is not one of straightforward resemblance (as it would be in an ICON). The signifier may be an image of something caused by the signified. (For example, the traffic sign meaning ‘high winds’ does not directly depict the wind – how would that be possible? – but shows an image of a wind sock. And, in Christian art, Saint Catherine typically holds a wheel because a wheel was the instrument of her martyrdom). To return to examples from our project, engraving a name into stone as an act of remembrance is significant because the hardness of the material indexes the hope that memory will be preserved for a long time. Interestingly, though, when poppy wreaths are laid on war memorials (like the one in Rawmarsh), they often bear handwritten texts, and, although these are usually inside a protective plastic sleeve, water still tends to get inside and makes the ink run. And as the ink runs, it produces a kind of pathos perhaps because it indexes change and loss. Thus, the handwritten texts on the steps of a war memorial produce a complex interaction of references to longevity and transience as a result of the materials used to write them.
To take another example, tattooing derives some of its meaning from its intimate association with the body coupled with its permanence, which indexes commitment in a very strong fashion. This point is endlessly raised when people talk about tattoos: ‘You may like it now but how will you feel when you’re sixty?’, ‘What if you split up?’ Does some of the significance of henna tattoos derive from their less permanent character and the sense that they will fade over time?
Materials and Aesthetics
In some of the contexts we have looked at the connection between MATERIALITY and AESTHETICS emerges quite strongly. I want to come back to AESTHETICS later but we could mention here the sense that some materials are perceived as having a kind of ‘dignity’ and some a type of ‘authenticity’, whereas others are perceived as ‘cheap’ or ‘tacky’. The use of ‘tacky’ materials may give rise to a sense of what I think of as kitsch. From talking to Steve, I suspect I’m using that term wrongly and what I really mean is a kind of pleasure in the ‘tacky’ that operates ironically – things that are ‘so bad that they are good’. Furthermore, some forms of writing – graffiti, embroidery, tattooing – have their own very developed AESTHETICS. And, while these exceed the specific issue of MATERIALITY – that is, they are go beyond the specific issue of what physical materials the text is made of – they do include it. These AESTHETICS may be associated with the IDENTITIES of specific cultural (and counter-cultural) groups.
Economic Dimensions of Materiality
Materials also have their own economic value and this has important results for textuality. It is expensive to build a large structure from stone and have dozens of names engraved on it. It is relatively cheap to buy a marker pen and write graffiti on painted surfaces.
In a lot of cases, the semiotic, the aesthetic, and the economic are closely intertwined. As an example, we might think about writing paper. The nature of the paper and the ink is important on a semiotic level: its weight in grams per square metre, whether you use a biro or a fountain pen, the colour of both materials. To a certain extent, the ‘meaning’ of a heavy paper arises because it indexes expense. But this is not so true of the colour of ink and paper, where the meaning is more conventional. (Broadcasters talk about being able to recognise letters from ‘cranks’ because they are written in green ink.) For children there may be a pleasure in using pens of many colours, ones that, used by adults, would be seen as inappropriate.
Materiality, Power, and Memory
These considerations may help to nuance the discussion of some specific examples from the project and I’m going to write some fragments about these.
(1) Looking at the dispute in East Herringthorpe cemetery over the decoration of children’s graves, for example, the question arises of what was supposed to be wrong with the objects placed on the graves by the grieving parents. I suspect that the objections raised by the private company, Dignity, may well have included a sense that plastic was not a suitable material in the context of cemetery and one wonders what this is about: is it that plastic, because of its artificiality, is felt to lack the ‘dignity’ – an irony there – of materials like stone or wood?
(2) I’m also thinking of the politics of reading cheap materials in an ironised way. For the affluent, there can be a pleasure in cheap materials, ironically displayed, which presupposes the possibility of choosing other materials.
(3) I’m also reminded of the other cemetery on the East Herringthorpe estate: the small one near the Anglican church. As well as stone grave markers, there are also crosses hand-made from scraps of wood and containers for flowers sunk straight into the earth – markers of REMEMBRANCE that are affordable in comparison with the cost of having a mason set up a stone.
(4) I would like to include examples from Kate’s work in this discussion because of the rich significance of textiles and embroidery for some of the people she has been working with, but I need to talk to Kate before I can really do this.
(5) The economics of MATERIALITY are clearly connected with POWER because expensive materials remain largely the preserve of powerful organisations and people. Does this produce a kind of valorisation of cheaper materials in oppositional groups? Is there an AESTHETIC of the ‘makeshift’ that trades upon the relative values of different materials?
(6) Materials can be APPROPRIATED too. I’m thinking of the practice of walking in wet concrete laid by someone else, or writing in it. By doing this, you almost hi-jack the permanence of the material someone else has chosen – rather like appearing in the background of someone else’s photograph and making a rude gesture. In East Herringthorpe there is graffiti that looks as if it has been written with anti-vandal paint.
(7) Some writing involves literal damage to property because it uses that property as a writing surface. The extent to which this kind of practice really constitutes damage gives rise to debate in particular situations: how much damage is involved in writing with a spray can on a disused building as opposed to scratching something into the paint of someone’s car?
Draft 1, Chunk 4 (Identity)
[This was first written on 12 September 2011]
Introduction
So far I have focused on the keywords POWER and MEMORY. Now I want to look at two more, IDENTITY and MATERIALITY. My account of IDENTITY is likely to be very sketchy but I want to start thinking about it and put something in place that can form the basis for further discussion.
Identity
In all the strands of the project we have, I think, assumed the importance of IDENTITY. I shall define this very informally as ‘one’s sense of who one is’. Straight away I think it is necessary to modify – or complicate – this definition in recognition of the fact that identities are not stable and straightforward.
First, an individual’s identity has many components. A particular person can simultaneously be a woman, a mother, a teacher, a British citizen, a person with cultural and personal connections to another country, and so forth. Different aspects of an individual’s identity may be at the forefront in different moments and some may even conflict. During the session at Bank Street, Will and Irna wrote up a pair of terms: ‘British’ and ‘Pakistani’, the implication being, as I understand it, that both these terms might be reasonable self-descriptions for one individual. Thus, the negotiation of that individual’s identity will take place in relation to these two terms and each may be more or less relevant at different times and in different contexts.
Second, a person’s ‘sense of who he or she is’ interacts with how others see him or her, both in an ‘official’ sense and in everyday life. Writing about POWER, I noted that the texts which emerge from government agencies and other institutions frequently CLASSIFY people according to certain categories of IDENTITY and this process will have an important impact on the way in which one forms and maintains a sense of self. This takes us back to DOCUMENTS like the passport Will and Irna have been working on and to Kate’s work on school and home literacy, where the lack of ‘fit’ between the identity categories projected by institutions and the individual’s own experience cause problems and may effectively function to silence the individual. However, it is not only government and institutions that produce this effect. The racism experienced by several of the participants in the project is realised within the community itself and represents a refusal to see any part of a person’s IDENTITY except one and that one in a crudely simplistic way.
The connections between IDENTITY and POWER are already emerging here and there is also an important relationship between IDENTITY and MEMORY because IDENTITY is formed in relation to the past and one’s sense of one’s own past is significant in determining who one now is.
Identity, Power, and Writing
We have already touched upon the way in which ‘OFFICIAL’ writing, whether produced by an institution or written by an independent person under external pressure, tends to push the writer into some particular category of IDENTITY. Once again, writing on the census form is the extreme example of this process. And the corollary is that writing can be used as a way to articulate an IDENTITY counter to that projected by government, by institutions or – indeed – by one’s own neighbours. Because of my experience reading critical material within the discipline of English Literature, I want to be careful about this idea of producing ‘OPPOSITIONAL’ texts. Sometimes the writing of an OPPOSITIONAL work has been characterised as a powerful act of resistance. But the question arises of how powerful an act can be if it is not witnessed. A book that remains unread is not, presumably, ‘POWERFUL’ in the normal sense of producing tangible effects in the real world. To recognise this problem, we may need to develop a more complex vocabulary for talking about ‘OPPOSITIONAL’ writing. (Or perhaps there already is one and I need, with everyone else’s help, to find it.) Here are a few thoughts as a starting point.
(1) Writing an IDENTITY for oneself may constitute a kind of CONSOLATION. Keeping a diary that no one else reads may not have much impact on the external world but may be a means of reminding yourself of the truth of your situation as you see it.
(2) Writing may be a way to remain in touch with aspects of your IDENTITY that it is important to PRESERVE or RETAIN. I’m thinking of the importance of textiles and sewing for some of Kate’s participants. Kate: does that seem an appropriate way to talk about this?
(3) Writing may also be a way to form COMMUNITY with others whose situation is similar to one’s own – to be in touch and find support. Online communities may be important here and computer-mediated communication.
(4) And, finally, writing may enter the public domain in a fuller sense and speak in a more overtly OPPOSITIONAL way to others.
I am hoping that this brief list of different forms of OPPOSITIONAL writing might help to create a richer sense of how writing interacts with POWER and IDENTITY.
Identity, Memory, and Writing
Since the past is preserved and made sense of in part through writing, our relationship with writing is important for the way in which we negotiate IDENTITY in the present. It is important to emphasise that this is more than simply ‘reading off’ who one is from a historical document or, indeed, from something one wrote oneself in the past. Irna and Will’s work on the family FABLE is a good example here. The family’s sense of the past is formed partly in relation to an ARCHIVE of documents including passports containing the stamps that record specific stages of a history of mobility. But it also includes the materials of an ORAL TRADITION that may be in tension with the evidence of the DOCUMENTS in certain ways.
As a second example, I have a friend who has kept a diary throughout her life from – I think – early adolescence up to the present. I have talked to her about her experience of reading the diary and how what she reads relates to her sense of who she now is. The relationship is complex. As she tells it, there is a certain kind of pleasure in having such a rich document of her past life and she has talked to me about her delight at giving a speech at her father’s birthday party and being able to describe in detail what had happened on his birthday in previous years. But at the same time, she describes a kind of frustration at – and even dislike of – her adolescent self, whom she regards as ‘prissy’ and sometimes ‘smug’. For example, her diary describes an event when her younger sister was caught doing something transgressive (smoking? drinking?) and it does so in rather patronising terms, suggesting that the family need to be ‘thankful’ that she hasn’t done something ‘even more stupid’. This self-conscious ‘piety’ shocks her a little in retrospect and is perhaps an example of the complex way in which our past and present selves are connected in writing.
Introduction
So far I have focused on the keywords POWER and MEMORY. Now I want to look at two more, IDENTITY and MATERIALITY. My account of IDENTITY is likely to be very sketchy but I want to start thinking about it and put something in place that can form the basis for further discussion.
Identity
In all the strands of the project we have, I think, assumed the importance of IDENTITY. I shall define this very informally as ‘one’s sense of who one is’. Straight away I think it is necessary to modify – or complicate – this definition in recognition of the fact that identities are not stable and straightforward.
First, an individual’s identity has many components. A particular person can simultaneously be a woman, a mother, a teacher, a British citizen, a person with cultural and personal connections to another country, and so forth. Different aspects of an individual’s identity may be at the forefront in different moments and some may even conflict. During the session at Bank Street, Will and Irna wrote up a pair of terms: ‘British’ and ‘Pakistani’, the implication being, as I understand it, that both these terms might be reasonable self-descriptions for one individual. Thus, the negotiation of that individual’s identity will take place in relation to these two terms and each may be more or less relevant at different times and in different contexts.
Second, a person’s ‘sense of who he or she is’ interacts with how others see him or her, both in an ‘official’ sense and in everyday life. Writing about POWER, I noted that the texts which emerge from government agencies and other institutions frequently CLASSIFY people according to certain categories of IDENTITY and this process will have an important impact on the way in which one forms and maintains a sense of self. This takes us back to DOCUMENTS like the passport Will and Irna have been working on and to Kate’s work on school and home literacy, where the lack of ‘fit’ between the identity categories projected by institutions and the individual’s own experience cause problems and may effectively function to silence the individual. However, it is not only government and institutions that produce this effect. The racism experienced by several of the participants in the project is realised within the community itself and represents a refusal to see any part of a person’s IDENTITY except one and that one in a crudely simplistic way.
The connections between IDENTITY and POWER are already emerging here and there is also an important relationship between IDENTITY and MEMORY because IDENTITY is formed in relation to the past and one’s sense of one’s own past is significant in determining who one now is.
Identity, Power, and Writing
We have already touched upon the way in which ‘OFFICIAL’ writing, whether produced by an institution or written by an independent person under external pressure, tends to push the writer into some particular category of IDENTITY. Once again, writing on the census form is the extreme example of this process. And the corollary is that writing can be used as a way to articulate an IDENTITY counter to that projected by government, by institutions or – indeed – by one’s own neighbours. Because of my experience reading critical material within the discipline of English Literature, I want to be careful about this idea of producing ‘OPPOSITIONAL’ texts. Sometimes the writing of an OPPOSITIONAL work has been characterised as a powerful act of resistance. But the question arises of how powerful an act can be if it is not witnessed. A book that remains unread is not, presumably, ‘POWERFUL’ in the normal sense of producing tangible effects in the real world. To recognise this problem, we may need to develop a more complex vocabulary for talking about ‘OPPOSITIONAL’ writing. (Or perhaps there already is one and I need, with everyone else’s help, to find it.) Here are a few thoughts as a starting point.
(1) Writing an IDENTITY for oneself may constitute a kind of CONSOLATION. Keeping a diary that no one else reads may not have much impact on the external world but may be a means of reminding yourself of the truth of your situation as you see it.
(2) Writing may be a way to remain in touch with aspects of your IDENTITY that it is important to PRESERVE or RETAIN. I’m thinking of the importance of textiles and sewing for some of Kate’s participants. Kate: does that seem an appropriate way to talk about this?
(3) Writing may also be a way to form COMMUNITY with others whose situation is similar to one’s own – to be in touch and find support. Online communities may be important here and computer-mediated communication.
(4) And, finally, writing may enter the public domain in a fuller sense and speak in a more overtly OPPOSITIONAL way to others.
I am hoping that this brief list of different forms of OPPOSITIONAL writing might help to create a richer sense of how writing interacts with POWER and IDENTITY.
Identity, Memory, and Writing
Since the past is preserved and made sense of in part through writing, our relationship with writing is important for the way in which we negotiate IDENTITY in the present. It is important to emphasise that this is more than simply ‘reading off’ who one is from a historical document or, indeed, from something one wrote oneself in the past. Irna and Will’s work on the family FABLE is a good example here. The family’s sense of the past is formed partly in relation to an ARCHIVE of documents including passports containing the stamps that record specific stages of a history of mobility. But it also includes the materials of an ORAL TRADITION that may be in tension with the evidence of the DOCUMENTS in certain ways.
As a second example, I have a friend who has kept a diary throughout her life from – I think – early adolescence up to the present. I have talked to her about her experience of reading the diary and how what she reads relates to her sense of who she now is. The relationship is complex. As she tells it, there is a certain kind of pleasure in having such a rich document of her past life and she has talked to me about her delight at giving a speech at her father’s birthday party and being able to describe in detail what had happened on his birthday in previous years. But at the same time, she describes a kind of frustration at – and even dislike of – her adolescent self, whom she regards as ‘prissy’ and sometimes ‘smug’. For example, her diary describes an event when her younger sister was caught doing something transgressive (smoking? drinking?) and it does so in rather patronising terms, suggesting that the family need to be ‘thankful’ that she hasn’t done something ‘even more stupid’. This self-conscious ‘piety’ shocks her a little in retrospect and is perhaps an example of the complex way in which our past and present selves are connected in writing.
Draft 1, Chunk 3 (Memory)
[This was first written on 11 September 2011]
Power and Rembrance (contd)
Another example of the way that OFFICIAL pressures intervene in supposedly private acts of REMEMBRANCE would be a dispute that arose between the private company that runs East Herringthorpe cemetery and the parents of children who had died in infancy and were buried there. The following article in the South Yorkshire paper, The Star, explains what happened.
http://www.thestar.co.uk/news/grieving_parents_fury_at_untidy_graves_row_1_290228
The parents had decorated the graves with windmills, toys, and images of fairies, butterflies, and flowers, but the company, Dignity, objected on the grounds that it made the site look ‘untidy and cluttered’. The dispute led to the creation of a facebook site in opposition to Dignity’s policy and so computer-mediated communication became relevant as a way to present oppositional views about REMEMBRANCE and the practices surrounding it.
Acts of REMEMBRANCE are not always so closely intertwined with OFFICIAL or INSTITUTIONAL practices and a possible example is the impromptu ‘shrine’ that often appears at the site of road accidents. There is one in Rotherham, at the bottom of Rawmarsh Hill, below the border between Parkgate and Rawmarsh itself. The shrine consists of flowers and texts attached to a tree and it marks the place where a young local man, Rob ‘Bean’ Crook, died in a road accident. Steve and I saw the ‘shrine’ on our first walk in Rawmarsh and I learned more about it when I did another walk with an ex-student of mine who has always lived in the area. She told me that Crook’s friends started a music festival in his memory and that there is a facebook page to provide information about it, computer-mediated communication again emerging as a resource for local people to take collective action. The festival, Beanfest, also has a website here:
http://www.beanfest.co.uk/
Hearing about this project raised certain questions about POWER in my mind because I suspect that it is exactly the sort of initiative that would appeal to advocates of the ‘Big Society’ and I wonder how the organisers would respond if they found that their work was being appropriated in that way. At any rate, acts of REMEMBRANCE can be initiated from many different points – from national government at one end of the scale to autonomous local groups at the other.
Power and Archiving
Turning now to ARCHIVING, I think it is also clear that ARCHIVES can be collected at many different levels of organsiation. There are, of course, national archives and collections as well as ones funded by local government. (Digressing for a moment, in 2009 I spent two weeks in the archives of the Minnesota Historical Society in St Paul. The state of Minnesota has spent an enormous amount of money building a museum and library for the society’s collections and so the display of the collection has emerged as an act of REMEMBRANCE shaped by the state itself.) However, individuals and families also collect materials as a way way of preserving the past and the interaction between the narratives emerging from OFFICIAL and INSTUTITIONAL contexts and the ones preserved within the family is of crucial importance here. Will and Irna have talked about this in terms of FABLES, which relate both to the DOCUMENTS that have been preserved – passports, medals, and so forth – and also to an ORAL TRADITION about the events to which the DOCUMENTS relate. Looking at the relationships between DOCUMENTS and ORAL TRADITIONS is a technique that has been used in a number of historical projects, including the one cited by Will and Irna relating to the DOCUMENTS such as sterilisation certificates issued during the Emergency [Will: can you let me have a reference for this?] and work I know of by the Italian oral historian, Alessandro Portelli. [See Alessandro Portelli, Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (State University of New York Press, 1991), The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue (University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), The Order Has Been Carried Out: History, Memory and Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).] Significantly, the work in Rotherham locates this type of research within a family setting to look at the way in which collected DOCUMENTS and ORAL TRADITIONS relate in the FABLES produced in family narratives.
At this point I think it is worth noting that our own research also leads us into the process of archiving. On one level, when Steve and I return from a walk with a memory card full of digital photographs, we have created an archive of texts and the same is true when the participants in Kate’s research take photographs of material that might otherwise be ephemeral. I think I want to postpone reflection on these processes until later because they relate to some of the other key words that I want to think about. I just include this comment as a place holder because, if we are talking about ARCHIVING, I think we need to bear in mind that this something is something that we do ourselves in the course of our own interventions.
One last point about the relationship between ARCHIVING and POWER: I have talked about the distinction between ARCHIVING by institutions and ARCHIVING by independent people, groups, or families (in line with the distinction I made when I was writing about POWER). It is important to recognise that institutions such as national and local archives, museums, and libraries, while they do tend to project an ‘OFFICIAL’ account of history, also have a brief to do work that is relevant to users, who may well have their own, independent reasons for engaging with history. This policy is no doubt connected to the rise in importance of social history in comparison with political and other kinds of ‘elite’ history. So, again, we have a space in which institutions and independent people come into contact over questions of MEMORY and how those questions are handled. Within our team, there is plenty of experience of this because of the projects we have been involved in that mediate between university, museum, and individuals – ‘Writing British Asian Cities’, for example, and ‘Every Object Tells A Story’. It is, of course, difficult to develop, house, and exhibit a collection without funding and so this kind of interaction has a particular significance because, without it, it is difficult for independent individuals to project their own MEMORY practices into the public domain.
Power and Rembrance (contd)
Another example of the way that OFFICIAL pressures intervene in supposedly private acts of REMEMBRANCE would be a dispute that arose between the private company that runs East Herringthorpe cemetery and the parents of children who had died in infancy and were buried there. The following article in the South Yorkshire paper, The Star, explains what happened.
http://www.thestar.co.uk/news/grieving_parents_fury_at_untidy_graves_row_1_290228
The parents had decorated the graves with windmills, toys, and images of fairies, butterflies, and flowers, but the company, Dignity, objected on the grounds that it made the site look ‘untidy and cluttered’. The dispute led to the creation of a facebook site in opposition to Dignity’s policy and so computer-mediated communication became relevant as a way to present oppositional views about REMEMBRANCE and the practices surrounding it.
Acts of REMEMBRANCE are not always so closely intertwined with OFFICIAL or INSTITUTIONAL practices and a possible example is the impromptu ‘shrine’ that often appears at the site of road accidents. There is one in Rotherham, at the bottom of Rawmarsh Hill, below the border between Parkgate and Rawmarsh itself. The shrine consists of flowers and texts attached to a tree and it marks the place where a young local man, Rob ‘Bean’ Crook, died in a road accident. Steve and I saw the ‘shrine’ on our first walk in Rawmarsh and I learned more about it when I did another walk with an ex-student of mine who has always lived in the area. She told me that Crook’s friends started a music festival in his memory and that there is a facebook page to provide information about it, computer-mediated communication again emerging as a resource for local people to take collective action. The festival, Beanfest, also has a website here:
http://www.beanfest.co.uk/
Hearing about this project raised certain questions about POWER in my mind because I suspect that it is exactly the sort of initiative that would appeal to advocates of the ‘Big Society’ and I wonder how the organisers would respond if they found that their work was being appropriated in that way. At any rate, acts of REMEMBRANCE can be initiated from many different points – from national government at one end of the scale to autonomous local groups at the other.
Power and Archiving
Turning now to ARCHIVING, I think it is also clear that ARCHIVES can be collected at many different levels of organsiation. There are, of course, national archives and collections as well as ones funded by local government. (Digressing for a moment, in 2009 I spent two weeks in the archives of the Minnesota Historical Society in St Paul. The state of Minnesota has spent an enormous amount of money building a museum and library for the society’s collections and so the display of the collection has emerged as an act of REMEMBRANCE shaped by the state itself.) However, individuals and families also collect materials as a way way of preserving the past and the interaction between the narratives emerging from OFFICIAL and INSTUTITIONAL contexts and the ones preserved within the family is of crucial importance here. Will and Irna have talked about this in terms of FABLES, which relate both to the DOCUMENTS that have been preserved – passports, medals, and so forth – and also to an ORAL TRADITION about the events to which the DOCUMENTS relate. Looking at the relationships between DOCUMENTS and ORAL TRADITIONS is a technique that has been used in a number of historical projects, including the one cited by Will and Irna relating to the DOCUMENTS such as sterilisation certificates issued during the Emergency [Will: can you let me have a reference for this?] and work I know of by the Italian oral historian, Alessandro Portelli. [See Alessandro Portelli, Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (State University of New York Press, 1991), The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue (University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), The Order Has Been Carried Out: History, Memory and Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).] Significantly, the work in Rotherham locates this type of research within a family setting to look at the way in which collected DOCUMENTS and ORAL TRADITIONS relate in the FABLES produced in family narratives.
At this point I think it is worth noting that our own research also leads us into the process of archiving. On one level, when Steve and I return from a walk with a memory card full of digital photographs, we have created an archive of texts and the same is true when the participants in Kate’s research take photographs of material that might otherwise be ephemeral. I think I want to postpone reflection on these processes until later because they relate to some of the other key words that I want to think about. I just include this comment as a place holder because, if we are talking about ARCHIVING, I think we need to bear in mind that this something is something that we do ourselves in the course of our own interventions.
One last point about the relationship between ARCHIVING and POWER: I have talked about the distinction between ARCHIVING by institutions and ARCHIVING by independent people, groups, or families (in line with the distinction I made when I was writing about POWER). It is important to recognise that institutions such as national and local archives, museums, and libraries, while they do tend to project an ‘OFFICIAL’ account of history, also have a brief to do work that is relevant to users, who may well have their own, independent reasons for engaging with history. This policy is no doubt connected to the rise in importance of social history in comparison with political and other kinds of ‘elite’ history. So, again, we have a space in which institutions and independent people come into contact over questions of MEMORY and how those questions are handled. Within our team, there is plenty of experience of this because of the projects we have been involved in that mediate between university, museum, and individuals – ‘Writing British Asian Cities’, for example, and ‘Every Object Tells A Story’. It is, of course, difficult to develop, house, and exhibit a collection without funding and so this kind of interaction has a particular significance because, without it, it is difficult for independent individuals to project their own MEMORY practices into the public domain.
Draft 1, Chunk 2 (Power/Memory)
[This was first written on 10 September 2011]
Introduction
Yesterday I wrote about the significance of POWER in our project and I intended to sketch in the relationship between POWER and MATERIALITY, as I see it. However, I think I shall leave MATERIALITY for the moment and do two things here: (1) revisit one or two of the points I made regarding POWER, and (2) start to draw some connections between POWER and MEMORY.
Power (contd)
I set up a couple of oppositions in yesterday’s piece, not – I hope – falling into the trap of relying too heavily on ‘false binaries’ but with the aim of providing a starting point for thinking through the area. One of these was between FREEDOM and CONTROL, not necessarily the best terms but, as I say, a starting point, and the other was between OFFICIAL and OPPOSITIONAL writing.
The second pair is problematic because writing can have an ‘OFFICIAL’ quality in a number of different senses. Some writing is ‘OFFICIAL’ because it comes directly from departments of national government, local councils, or institutions such as schools. However, the writing of private individuals can also have an ‘OFFICIAL’ quality if it is shaped, controlled, or somehow determined by government or powerful institutions. An extreme example would be the process of filling in the census form, something we all did earlier in the year. When I did that, my writing was highly determined by the nature of the form, not to mention all the warnings that we received about filling in the form being a legal requirement. When filling in the form, one can make some decisions about one's self-representation. For example, there is some scope to decide how to describe your relationship with other people mentioned on the form – unmarried people have the choice of whether to describe another person as their ‘partner’ or not – but these choices are very limited. To mention other examples, the writing children do at school is, of course, controlled by the institution, and the signage that small businesses can place in the street is regulated by by-laws (although, in Rawmarsh, I think these may be respected more in the breach than in the act).
So, rather than seeing the ‘OFFICIAL’ as a water-tight category into which some texts can be placed, perhaps it is better to see it in terms of a kind of institutional or political pressure that operates on the production of texts but that may compete with other types of pressure in the specific act of writing. (Even filling in the census form may involve some kind of struggle to represent oneself as one wants to in the face of the controlling power of the form.)
The more I think about it, the more I am interested in how this pressure is presented in terms of a rhetoric of FREEDOM and CONTROL, or – better, perhaps – OPPORTUNITY and CONTROL. So, for example, children’s writing is carefully patrolled on the grounds that learning the recognised conventions of writing will give them OPPORTUNITY in future and the incentive for filling in the census form (the ‘carrot’ as opposed to the ‘stick’ of legal obligation) is that knowledge of the population enables government to plan in the interests of the population.
One last point, before I move on to MEMORY: we need to include BUSINESS in this account of power more overtly. With its economic power and political influence big business is able to exercise considerable control over the writing that appears in public places – to insert itself textually into the environment in a very dominant fashion. But in places like Rawmarsh, small business is very visible and much of the signage relates to independent local concerns rather than big corporations – there is a huge contrast between the shops at Parkgate and the shops on Rawmarsh hill, just five minutes’ walk away.
Memory
MEMORY is an important category for our project, I think, and is connected with writing in a number of ways, of which I shall mention two here. Writing can be used as a mode of REMEMBRANCE. For example, tombstones are erected to commemorate the lives of individuals and specific types are of text are associated with them: formulae such as ‘in loving memory’ or ‘rest in peace’, quotations from poetry or religious texts, certain images that operate semiotically to communicate religious ideas or information about the deceased. In crematoria, a similar function is fulfilled by the book of remembrance. In fact, this is a relatively recent development, since cremation only became accepted in the UK in the twentieth century. The first book of remembrance was supplied to Woking Crematorium – the first in Britain, set up by the Cremation Society in the late nineteenth century – by a small company, F.G. Marshall. War memorials also have their own conventions and are ‘retextualised’ each year when new wreaths are laid upon them, often with handwritten labels. Medals are commemorative objects – the individual counterpart of the collective war memorial. One that Will and Irna have been looking at includes an inscription in Latin emphasising the status of the sovereign as Emperor of India. And events such as Black History Month result in the production of texts that aim to call the past to mind, to mark it, mourn it, and celebrate it in certain ways. In all these examples, writing of one kind or another is integral to the act of REMEMBRANCE.
But writing can also be connected with MEMORY in another sense in that written texts can be incorporated into an ARCHIVE, which serves the purpose of documenting the past: the old passports kept in a drawer at home, birth certificates, love letters, things the children wrote when they were small, photographs with dates and place names on the back, marks on the wall showing how tall the children were on a particular dates, diaries, newspaper cuttings.
I suppose the process of collecting and preserving material like this might be seen as itself an act of REMEMBRANCE but I think it’s helpful to identify two different, if closely intertwined phenomena here. In one case, something is written specially for the purpose of commemoration. (In some cases, the text is not newly written but freshly appropriated – a quotation from a poem, for example.) In the other, texts that were written for other purposes are archived so that they can contribute to the process of remembering.
There is undoubtedly a rich and complex relationship between the issues of POWER that I tried to outline yesterday and the issues of MEMORY that I’m covering here. Let’s look first at POWER and REMEMRANCE.
Power and Remembrance
Quite obviously, many acts of REMEMBRANCE are initiated by government, whether at the national or local level – the striking of medals and the construction of war memorials, for example. And events like Black History Month are now quite institutionalised (although I’d like to know more about how it originated). Others are initiated by private or independent individuals and groups. Grave stones are usually privately purchased by families, for example. But here that OFFICIAL pressure can operate on the writing produced in private acts of REMEMBRANCE. Churches often place quite extensive restrictions on what can be engraved onto a tombstone. I think Kate also has interesting insights into children’s motives in becoming involved in Black History Month that are also relevant here. At any rate, REMEMBRANCE is very much intertwined with these questions of how the OFFICIAL or INSTITUTIONAL interacts with the PERSONAL in the production of writing.
Furthermore, acts of REMEMBRANCE that have OFFICIAL or INSTITUTIONAL origins tend to develop an OFFICIAL or INSTITUTIONAL view of history, of experience, and of the meaning of people’s lives. Think here of all the individual names cut into the country’s war memorials.
Introduction
Yesterday I wrote about the significance of POWER in our project and I intended to sketch in the relationship between POWER and MATERIALITY, as I see it. However, I think I shall leave MATERIALITY for the moment and do two things here: (1) revisit one or two of the points I made regarding POWER, and (2) start to draw some connections between POWER and MEMORY.
Power (contd)
I set up a couple of oppositions in yesterday’s piece, not – I hope – falling into the trap of relying too heavily on ‘false binaries’ but with the aim of providing a starting point for thinking through the area. One of these was between FREEDOM and CONTROL, not necessarily the best terms but, as I say, a starting point, and the other was between OFFICIAL and OPPOSITIONAL writing.
The second pair is problematic because writing can have an ‘OFFICIAL’ quality in a number of different senses. Some writing is ‘OFFICIAL’ because it comes directly from departments of national government, local councils, or institutions such as schools. However, the writing of private individuals can also have an ‘OFFICIAL’ quality if it is shaped, controlled, or somehow determined by government or powerful institutions. An extreme example would be the process of filling in the census form, something we all did earlier in the year. When I did that, my writing was highly determined by the nature of the form, not to mention all the warnings that we received about filling in the form being a legal requirement. When filling in the form, one can make some decisions about one's self-representation. For example, there is some scope to decide how to describe your relationship with other people mentioned on the form – unmarried people have the choice of whether to describe another person as their ‘partner’ or not – but these choices are very limited. To mention other examples, the writing children do at school is, of course, controlled by the institution, and the signage that small businesses can place in the street is regulated by by-laws (although, in Rawmarsh, I think these may be respected more in the breach than in the act).
So, rather than seeing the ‘OFFICIAL’ as a water-tight category into which some texts can be placed, perhaps it is better to see it in terms of a kind of institutional or political pressure that operates on the production of texts but that may compete with other types of pressure in the specific act of writing. (Even filling in the census form may involve some kind of struggle to represent oneself as one wants to in the face of the controlling power of the form.)
The more I think about it, the more I am interested in how this pressure is presented in terms of a rhetoric of FREEDOM and CONTROL, or – better, perhaps – OPPORTUNITY and CONTROL. So, for example, children’s writing is carefully patrolled on the grounds that learning the recognised conventions of writing will give them OPPORTUNITY in future and the incentive for filling in the census form (the ‘carrot’ as opposed to the ‘stick’ of legal obligation) is that knowledge of the population enables government to plan in the interests of the population.
One last point, before I move on to MEMORY: we need to include BUSINESS in this account of power more overtly. With its economic power and political influence big business is able to exercise considerable control over the writing that appears in public places – to insert itself textually into the environment in a very dominant fashion. But in places like Rawmarsh, small business is very visible and much of the signage relates to independent local concerns rather than big corporations – there is a huge contrast between the shops at Parkgate and the shops on Rawmarsh hill, just five minutes’ walk away.
Memory
MEMORY is an important category for our project, I think, and is connected with writing in a number of ways, of which I shall mention two here. Writing can be used as a mode of REMEMBRANCE. For example, tombstones are erected to commemorate the lives of individuals and specific types are of text are associated with them: formulae such as ‘in loving memory’ or ‘rest in peace’, quotations from poetry or religious texts, certain images that operate semiotically to communicate religious ideas or information about the deceased. In crematoria, a similar function is fulfilled by the book of remembrance. In fact, this is a relatively recent development, since cremation only became accepted in the UK in the twentieth century. The first book of remembrance was supplied to Woking Crematorium – the first in Britain, set up by the Cremation Society in the late nineteenth century – by a small company, F.G. Marshall. War memorials also have their own conventions and are ‘retextualised’ each year when new wreaths are laid upon them, often with handwritten labels. Medals are commemorative objects – the individual counterpart of the collective war memorial. One that Will and Irna have been looking at includes an inscription in Latin emphasising the status of the sovereign as Emperor of India. And events such as Black History Month result in the production of texts that aim to call the past to mind, to mark it, mourn it, and celebrate it in certain ways. In all these examples, writing of one kind or another is integral to the act of REMEMBRANCE.
But writing can also be connected with MEMORY in another sense in that written texts can be incorporated into an ARCHIVE, which serves the purpose of documenting the past: the old passports kept in a drawer at home, birth certificates, love letters, things the children wrote when they were small, photographs with dates and place names on the back, marks on the wall showing how tall the children were on a particular dates, diaries, newspaper cuttings.
I suppose the process of collecting and preserving material like this might be seen as itself an act of REMEMBRANCE but I think it’s helpful to identify two different, if closely intertwined phenomena here. In one case, something is written specially for the purpose of commemoration. (In some cases, the text is not newly written but freshly appropriated – a quotation from a poem, for example.) In the other, texts that were written for other purposes are archived so that they can contribute to the process of remembering.
There is undoubtedly a rich and complex relationship between the issues of POWER that I tried to outline yesterday and the issues of MEMORY that I’m covering here. Let’s look first at POWER and REMEMRANCE.
Power and Remembrance
Quite obviously, many acts of REMEMBRANCE are initiated by government, whether at the national or local level – the striking of medals and the construction of war memorials, for example. And events like Black History Month are now quite institutionalised (although I’d like to know more about how it originated). Others are initiated by private or independent individuals and groups. Grave stones are usually privately purchased by families, for example. But here that OFFICIAL pressure can operate on the writing produced in private acts of REMEMBRANCE. Churches often place quite extensive restrictions on what can be engraved onto a tombstone. I think Kate also has interesting insights into children’s motives in becoming involved in Black History Month that are also relevant here. At any rate, REMEMBRANCE is very much intertwined with these questions of how the OFFICIAL or INSTITUTIONAL interacts with the PERSONAL in the production of writing.
Furthermore, acts of REMEMBRANCE that have OFFICIAL or INSTITUTIONAL origins tend to develop an OFFICIAL or INSTITUTIONAL view of history, of experience, and of the meaning of people’s lives. Think here of all the individual names cut into the country’s war memorials.
Draft 1, Chunk 1 (Power)
[This was first written on 9 September 2011]
Introduction
After our session at Bank Street, I feel that I want to develop an account of the project as a whole – an account that resists the temptation to describe each strand (‘home’, ‘street’, ‘documents’) separately and instead tries to find the commonalities among them by working at a higher level of abstraction. For example, questions of POWER are clearly important in all three strands and so any account of the project as a whole needs to include POWER in some way. But all three strands also touch in one way or other upon the MATERIALITY of writing – the fact that one can write with a wide variety of instruments on a wide variety of surfaces, some robust and enduring (like inscriptions carved in stone), others entirely ephemeral (‘clean me’ in dust on the back of a van). I’m keen to develop a kind of mind-map in which POWER, MATERIALITY, and some of the other keywords we’ve identified GENRE, AESTHETICS, PERCEPTION, MEMORY and so forth) are positioned in a nework, not as isolated concepts but as part of a rich and complex description of how writing functions in everyday life, a description that arises directly from our multidisciplinary, multimodal project. How are POWER and MATERIALITY connected, for example, and what does their relationship have to do with MEMORY? These are the kinds of connections I would like to explore.
Just to emphasise the point, I want this map to transcend the specific argument of each individual strand and present the commonalities that we can identify. That is not to say that we have to ignore any tensions that have arisen as a result of contrasts between different academic disciplines, between academic research and arts practice, or between different approaches to arts practice. However, I think there is enough commonality for it to be worth starting with what is shared. If one starts with the tensions, there’s a risk that the writing degenerates into moaning about how difficulty it is to be cross-disciplinary and collaborative – not very interesting to my mind.
So, to get going, I’m going to write here about the first two terms that I identified earlier: POWER and MATERIALITY. The writing is provisional. It is a sketch rather than a finished work.
Power
One idea that emerged very strongly for me yesterday is that, in the ‘everyday’ settings we have been exploring, POWER can often be talked about in terms of an interaction – or struggle? – between FREEDOM and CONTROL. For me this was beautifully exemplified in in the texts printed in one of the passports that Irna and Will have been working on. On the one hand, the passport promises the bearer FREEDOM of movement. In fact, it demands that the border officials of other states grant the bearer passage. (Looking at my own passport, I read: ‘Her Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State requests and requires in the Name of Her Majesty all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance, and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary’.) On the other hand, it incorporates the bearer into a state organised system of classification and definition by describing him or her with reference to a series of official categories, foremost among them nationality.
This interaction of FREEDOM and CONTROL within a single document is interesting and is actually more complex than I have so far suggested. The FREEDOM offered here is certainly over-stated. The border officials of other states do not, in fact, allow bearers to ‘pass freely without let or hindrance’ (although, in fact, holders of some passports are more likely to be allowed to ‘pass freely’ than holders of others). But there is a kind of rhetorical force to this text: it promises a kind of FREEDOM in excess of what it can really offer. And, conversely, the incorporation of the bearer into official categories of nationality and so forth, while certainly subjecting him or her to a form of control, also offers possibilities – a position from which to speak and, perhaps, be heard. In short, FREEDOM and CONTROL interact in complex ways within the document. It is not that some parts of the text are related straightforwardly to one of this pair of opposites and different parts to the other.
It occurs to me that one could look at some of our ‘street’ material in similar ways. Official signs – the ‘street’ equivalent of official documents? – also offer FREEDOM and exercise CONTROL. I’m thinking here about urban parks, which promise a kind of FREEDOM – the possibility of pursuing leisure in your own way. But this is leisure hemmed in by CONTROL. (There is a sign in the park at Ferham that simply says ‘no golf’.) To look at another example, East Herringthorpe is covered with signs that say ‘no ball games’ as well as warnings about anti-vandal paint. But, again, there is something double-edged about these. When Steve and I did our first walk in East Herringthorpe, we were photographing an ‘anti-vandal paint’ sign positioned on a row of lock-up garages. A woman came out of her house and began to talk to us – it seemed that she thought we were from the council – and she expressed a lot of anger. She felt that the garages should be pulled down because only one of them was in use and they constantly attracted vandals. More than anti-vandal paint was needed, she said: ‘An anti-vandal flame-thrower’. Her words were confirmed by the fact that one of the garages had been broken into and the interior was covered in graffiti. My point is that the CONTROL represented by the signs is welcomed by some residents and, in fact, does not extend far enough.
This story introduces the possibility of asserting FREEDOM by producing oppositional writing – the graffiti inside the garage – and I think the contrast between OFFICIAL WRITING and OPPOSITIONAL WRITING may need to be introduced. The ‘anti-vandal paint’ signs are OFFICIAL and the graffiti is OPPOSITIONAL. Does this happen with documents like passports? It’s not that people annotate their passports with OPPOSITIONAL WRITING in the way that people write on the walls but perhaps they do produce their own texts that cut against the categories encoded in the passport?
It seems to me that these issues emerge very clearly in the ‘home’ strand. The school represents a kind of CONTROL in that it directs children to produce certain kinds of writing themselves (following certain OFFICIAL models). But, if I’ve understood what Kate told me about this, education in literacy also proceeds from certain assumptions about children’s identities, and, if the projected IDENTITY does not fit the child well, it is disempowering. Again, education promises FREEDOM – or, at least, opportunity – but this promise may need to be treated with scepticism. Furthermore, home writing may have an OPPOSITIONAL character – or maybe that term is too strong? – in that it moves away from what is required by the school and articulates a different voice, although one that may, in fact, go unheard.
Introduction
After our session at Bank Street, I feel that I want to develop an account of the project as a whole – an account that resists the temptation to describe each strand (‘home’, ‘street’, ‘documents’) separately and instead tries to find the commonalities among them by working at a higher level of abstraction. For example, questions of POWER are clearly important in all three strands and so any account of the project as a whole needs to include POWER in some way. But all three strands also touch in one way or other upon the MATERIALITY of writing – the fact that one can write with a wide variety of instruments on a wide variety of surfaces, some robust and enduring (like inscriptions carved in stone), others entirely ephemeral (‘clean me’ in dust on the back of a van). I’m keen to develop a kind of mind-map in which POWER, MATERIALITY, and some of the other keywords we’ve identified GENRE, AESTHETICS, PERCEPTION, MEMORY and so forth) are positioned in a nework, not as isolated concepts but as part of a rich and complex description of how writing functions in everyday life, a description that arises directly from our multidisciplinary, multimodal project. How are POWER and MATERIALITY connected, for example, and what does their relationship have to do with MEMORY? These are the kinds of connections I would like to explore.
Just to emphasise the point, I want this map to transcend the specific argument of each individual strand and present the commonalities that we can identify. That is not to say that we have to ignore any tensions that have arisen as a result of contrasts between different academic disciplines, between academic research and arts practice, or between different approaches to arts practice. However, I think there is enough commonality for it to be worth starting with what is shared. If one starts with the tensions, there’s a risk that the writing degenerates into moaning about how difficulty it is to be cross-disciplinary and collaborative – not very interesting to my mind.
So, to get going, I’m going to write here about the first two terms that I identified earlier: POWER and MATERIALITY. The writing is provisional. It is a sketch rather than a finished work.
Power
One idea that emerged very strongly for me yesterday is that, in the ‘everyday’ settings we have been exploring, POWER can often be talked about in terms of an interaction – or struggle? – between FREEDOM and CONTROL. For me this was beautifully exemplified in in the texts printed in one of the passports that Irna and Will have been working on. On the one hand, the passport promises the bearer FREEDOM of movement. In fact, it demands that the border officials of other states grant the bearer passage. (Looking at my own passport, I read: ‘Her Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State requests and requires in the Name of Her Majesty all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance, and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary’.) On the other hand, it incorporates the bearer into a state organised system of classification and definition by describing him or her with reference to a series of official categories, foremost among them nationality.
This interaction of FREEDOM and CONTROL within a single document is interesting and is actually more complex than I have so far suggested. The FREEDOM offered here is certainly over-stated. The border officials of other states do not, in fact, allow bearers to ‘pass freely without let or hindrance’ (although, in fact, holders of some passports are more likely to be allowed to ‘pass freely’ than holders of others). But there is a kind of rhetorical force to this text: it promises a kind of FREEDOM in excess of what it can really offer. And, conversely, the incorporation of the bearer into official categories of nationality and so forth, while certainly subjecting him or her to a form of control, also offers possibilities – a position from which to speak and, perhaps, be heard. In short, FREEDOM and CONTROL interact in complex ways within the document. It is not that some parts of the text are related straightforwardly to one of this pair of opposites and different parts to the other.
It occurs to me that one could look at some of our ‘street’ material in similar ways. Official signs – the ‘street’ equivalent of official documents? – also offer FREEDOM and exercise CONTROL. I’m thinking here about urban parks, which promise a kind of FREEDOM – the possibility of pursuing leisure in your own way. But this is leisure hemmed in by CONTROL. (There is a sign in the park at Ferham that simply says ‘no golf’.) To look at another example, East Herringthorpe is covered with signs that say ‘no ball games’ as well as warnings about anti-vandal paint. But, again, there is something double-edged about these. When Steve and I did our first walk in East Herringthorpe, we were photographing an ‘anti-vandal paint’ sign positioned on a row of lock-up garages. A woman came out of her house and began to talk to us – it seemed that she thought we were from the council – and she expressed a lot of anger. She felt that the garages should be pulled down because only one of them was in use and they constantly attracted vandals. More than anti-vandal paint was needed, she said: ‘An anti-vandal flame-thrower’. Her words were confirmed by the fact that one of the garages had been broken into and the interior was covered in graffiti. My point is that the CONTROL represented by the signs is welcomed by some residents and, in fact, does not extend far enough.
This story introduces the possibility of asserting FREEDOM by producing oppositional writing – the graffiti inside the garage – and I think the contrast between OFFICIAL WRITING and OPPOSITIONAL WRITING may need to be introduced. The ‘anti-vandal paint’ signs are OFFICIAL and the graffiti is OPPOSITIONAL. Does this happen with documents like passports? It’s not that people annotate their passports with OPPOSITIONAL WRITING in the way that people write on the walls but perhaps they do produce their own texts that cut against the categories encoded in the passport?
It seems to me that these issues emerge very clearly in the ‘home’ strand. The school represents a kind of CONTROL in that it directs children to produce certain kinds of writing themselves (following certain OFFICIAL models). But, if I’ve understood what Kate told me about this, education in literacy also proceeds from certain assumptions about children’s identities, and, if the projected IDENTITY does not fit the child well, it is disempowering. Again, education promises FREEDOM – or, at least, opportunity – but this promise may need to be treated with scepticism. Furthermore, home writing may have an OPPOSITIONAL character – or maybe that term is too strong? – in that it moves away from what is required by the school and articulates a different voice, although one that may, in fact, go unheard.
Thursday, 15 September 2011
getting going
This blog is intended to be a place to post drafts of writing that I've done for the 'Writing in the Home and in the Street' project and to collect feedback and comment. You can either post comments here yourself or you can send it to me in some other form and, when I have time, I'll post what I receive in the relevant place(unless, for any reason, you indicate that a particular comment is only aimed at me, not at the rest of the group).
Thanks everyone for a great start - as I've said elsewhere, I really appreciate the constructive and generous way in which you've responded to my first stumbling attempts to get something on paper.
Richard.
Thanks everyone for a great start - as I've said elsewhere, I really appreciate the constructive and generous way in which you've responded to my first stumbling attempts to get something on paper.
Richard.
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