[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.
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