The Labour of Memory

Memorial Culture and 7/7

M. Allen

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137341631
• eBook ISBN: 9781137341648
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: Social Sciences

This book presents a study of remembrance practices emerging after the 2005 London bombings. Matthew Allen explores a range of cases that not only illustrate the effects of the organisation of remembrance on its participants, but reveal how people engaged in memorial culture to address difficult and unbearable conditions in the wake of 7/7.

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In Memoria Res: Remembrance and Political Economy

Moses is a minor character that features in David Mitchell’s (2010) novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet set in Japan during the 18th century. He is skilled at crafting fine wooden spoons but he never owns the fruit of his labour, for Moses is a slave. In a compelling passage of the book the slave reflects upon his property rights. It is certain, Moses thinks, that he does not own his fingers and so this extends to the products of his hands: ‘slaves do not own, they are owned’ he is told by his master. However uncertainty about the ownership of his name moves Moses to consider ‘sometimes another thought comes to me: Do I own my memories?’ (ibid.: p.368). It should not be surprising that this nuance of the philosophy of property rights might perplex anyone, slave or otherwise, living through a period of immense coterminosity between the formation of modern memory and commerce. Mary Douglas (1991) pointed out the epistemological proximity between early accounting systems, such as double-entry bookkeeping popularised by merchant traders, and early experimental psychology research on memory notably Ebbinghaus’ famous forgetting curve. David Graeber explains that the origins of our everyday language of manners has its roots in the relation between memory and economic debt:

In English, ‘thank you’ derives from ‘think’, it originally meant, ‘I will remember what you did for me’ – which is usually not true either – but in other languages (the Portuguese obrigado is a good example) the standard term follows the form of the English ‘much obliged’ – it actually does mean ‘I am in your debt’.

(2011: 123)

This chapter places the works of remembrance that followed the 2005 London bombings within a framework that recognises the historical relation between memory and political economy.

Memorial culture is formed by making, moving and maintaining things. These activities do not unfold in abstraction from capitalism. The cultural production of memory depends upon the social organisation of labour and natural resources. To date, memory studies has largely ignored issues relating to political economy. Consequently, the rush to explain the digital turn in memory studies has been dominated by the familiar rhetoric of symbolism and collective memory. Yet the spectre that haunts two twentieth-century ‘memory booms’ and the present boom in connectivity is an insatiable intensification of material, immaterial, precarious and forced labour, economic processing zones, intellectual property, overexploitation and enclosure of common resources. Currently, memory studies lacks a critical framework for discussing the material production of storage devices, memorials, memorabilia and commemorative objects.

The canon of memory studies is littered with analogies to political economy. In his seminal article, Kurwin Lee Klein introduces the reader to the ‘memory industry’ that he explains ‘ranges from the museum trade to the legal battles over repressed memory and on to the market for academic books and articles that invoke memory as a key word’ (2000: 127). Elsewhere, Avishai Margalit has argued that ‘shared memory depends not just on a network of people and organizations to carry out the division of mnemonic labor but also on the remembered items themselves belonging to coherent networks’ (2002: 79). Jay Winter has outlined the ‘crucial defining feature of sites of memory: They cost money and time to construct or preserve. They require specialists’ services – landscapers, cleaners, masons, carpenters, plumbers, and so on’ (2008: 65). Alison Landsberg’s (2004) notion of ‘prosthetic memory’ emphasises what she calls the ‘exchangeability’ of memory after memory became composite in the mass consumption of the culture industry. Despite such remarks, attention to political economy in memory studies has remained at the level of metaphor and analogy.

Political economy is complex, contested, social and shaped by power relations; this is also true of memory. Labour is materially situated, as are the relations required to enact and sustain collective practices of remembrance. This study brings themes from political economy to bear on memory studies topics. Considering remembrance of the London bombings from the perspective of political economy means attending to the organisation of work that goes into a number of original, and at times innovative, memorial projects. This work has ranged from mass public expressions of remembering, such as three-minute silences and formal remembrance services to more localised and informal activities, including community vigils and charity work. For a handful of people, memory work became a part of their formal employment or waged labour – for example, Andy Groarke’s architecture firm was contracted to design the Hyde Park memorial, and music producer Nitin Sawhney released the album London Undersound, which memorialised the bombings through his music. Extant research in this area tends to focus on the sociological and psychological challenges that organisers, rather than participants, of remembrance face (Schwartz, 2003; Sökefeld, 2008). However, this overlooks the kinds of personal compromise, sacrifice and conflict faced by those who actually participate in undertaking the work of remembrance. Therefore taking work as central to this study means investigating the diverse range of activities involved in making lasting memorials, sharing memories and negotiating institutions after the London bombings.

The purpose of this chapter is to outline the conceptual framework that guides this study. The first section discusses the emergence of ritual and symbolic frameworks in studies of collective remembrance. In the second section I return to the theme of political economy. I argue that a specific conception of memory as property is the basis of certain humanist ideals that frame a widespread reverence for remembrance that has often distracted academic research from the underlying work that goes into remembrance. In the final section I introduce a series of critical issues that arise from the coincidence of remembrance and political economy. The aim is to contextualise work in order to frame this empirical study of memorial culture and 7/7.

Ritual, habit and composition

Commemoration has received considerable attention in memory studies. Classical sociology has had a significant role in shaping the conceptual resources for exploring social practices like commemoration. Consequently, academic interests in commemoration often originate from concerns for a range of broader issues, such as social order, historical continuity, solidarity, representation, symbolism, agency and action. A recurring theme involves accounting for how commemoration differs from other everyday activities. Research on commemoration often involves approaching this social practice as exceptional from everyday life, an activity that ‘marks time in a way that ritual becomes an “event” in its own terms: it is detached from ordinary life and transformative of social relations’ (Cossu, 2010: 40). Emile Durkheim’s (1976) distinction between the sacred and profane is an important precursor to this line of inquiry. Studies informed by this view tend to approach commemoration as ritual, and ‘Ritual, as Durkheim stresses, is entirely part of the sacred, and therefore in a complete and irreducible opposition to the sphere of the profane’ (Cossu, 2010: 38). The cornerstone of this view is the idea that ‘Rituals and their symbolism have significance as means of transmitting social memory, seen as the essential condition of the continuity of collective identity and social life’ (Misztal, 2003b: 125). This framework emphasises the symbolic relation between collective action and the past. Social origins, disasters, military campaigns, revolution and so forth are remembered according to a sacred view of commemoration, because they feature in time and practice that unfolds outside of everyday life.

More recently, Edkins (2003) has investigated a temporal order of remembering that is set apart from everyday life that she calls ‘trauma time’, a ‘back-to-front time that occurs when the smooth time of the imagined or symbolic story is interrupted by the Real of “events” ’ (2003: 229–230). For Edkins, commemorations that occur during trauma time have a restorative function insofar as such ‘practices help bereaved relatives to forget the trauma of war undergone by those who served and to come to terms with what happened’ (ibid.: 94). Edkins’ work has a resonance to studies of commemoration that demonstrate ‘how commemoration is pressed into the service of social needs’ (Schwartz, 1982: 379). This reflects a broader view that the social needs, served by commemoration, are ‘pressed’ at the level of a representational order. Durkheim’s work is seminal to this position. In highlighting the representational character of ritual practices, Durkheim argued that the ‘past is here represented for the mere sake of representing it and fixing it more firmly in the mind’ whereas ‘the physical effects sometimes imputed to it are wholly secondary’ (1976: 376). Following Durkheim, Cossu stressed that ‘Putting representations into action is a complex task which involves their translation into available “scripts”, and subsequently the usage of scripts for the enactment of actual performances’ (2010: 37). According to studies that emphasise the representational character of remembrance practices, an important transformative work must be undertaken by participants in order to render culturally specific codes or ‘scripts’ into symbolically representative actions. The role of the individual in this social process is assumed to be twofold. Initially one must do the interpretative work of translating cultural codes. Then the individual enacts suitable actions in concert with others to achieve a ‘collective representation’. For those who follow Durkheim, commemoration is considered to be a ritual enactment that ‘involves most of all the active, half-creative management of ritual symbols’ (Cossu, 2010: 42).

The ritual view of commemoration involves a strong emphasis on the social function of collective practices. Some researchers stress ‘the fulfilment of a social need for communion and mutual recognition of being all part of the same group or society at large’ (Cossu, 2010: 42). Olick has parodied this view: ‘Commemoration of certain historical events is essential, so the argument goes, to our sense of national unity; without substantial consensus on the past, social solidarity is in danger’ (2008: 157). The demarcated and representational terms of the ritual view of commemoration invests these social practices with ‘a register of sacred history’ that ‘Commemoration lifts from an ordinary historical sequence those extraordinary events which embody our deepest and most fundamental values’ (Schwartz, 1982: 377). From this perspective, commemoration is a highly structured performance of a cultural archive whereby collective memory of the past is re-enacted in the present through ritual.

Maurice Halbwachs invited us to consider social practices from a slightly different perspective, as materially situated. More specifically, the idea that place – a site that is endowed with memorial significance – serves as the grounding for collective memory by lending its capacity to persist to that which would otherwise be transient. As Halbwachs described it,

Since places participate in the stability of material things themselves, some similar procedure is a primary condition of memory itself: the collective thought of the group of believers has the best chance of immobilizing itself and enduring when it concentrates on places, sealing itself within their confines and molding its character to theirs.

(1980: 156)

Accordingly, commemoration involves ‘groups of believers’ identifying with a particular place, which they then set about fashioning with material forms that ‘immobilise’ an account of the past in such a way that group members feel that their memories acquire something of the durability and intransigence of the material world around them. In this way, the collective memory of the group ‘imitates the passivity of inert matter’ (ibid.: 134). Halbwachs laid the conceptual grounds for distinguishing between commemorations at the level of the relation between inert matter and living groups. Importantly, he contributed the idea that it is the latter that attempts to emulate the former, that living groups ‘confine’ and ‘mould’ their character such that it resembles the enduring qualities of inert matter. This idea that collective memory has to materialise itself so that it becomes akin to a natural feature of the world, and thereby as durable as inert matter, now passes for common sense in memory studies. For example, Szpunar describes ‘culturally loaded geographies’ which mark out in material forms the ‘historical and cultural discourse for social groups’ (2010: 381). Similarly, Griswold talks of commemoration as a work of ‘shared significance embodied in form’ (Griswold, 1987: 13). Both reiterate Halbwachs’ notion of active commemoration seeking to transform itself into inert matter.

The value of this insight lies in the view that groups actively construct social practices through materiality. For Halbwachs, groups fashion space to create a social geography of memorial significance. Space is treated as a raw material for the meaning-making activities of groups. This reflects a shift from Durkheimian conceptions of commemoration to focus on the work of mediating collective memory through everyday material structures. The emphasis is on the choice and fashioning of space, which is considered to be passively available for the impress of collective memory upon it. However, this view only takes us some way towards understanding how shared remembrance creates more transformative effects at the level of lived experience.

Paul Connerton’s (1989) work is valuable for highlighting the role of embodied practices, notably habitual actions, in the inscription of memory in tradition. His analysis views the body as a carrier of ‘a whole chain of interconnected acts’ and strongly emphasises the habituation of tasks that otherwise ‘cannot be well performed without a diminution of the conscious attention paid to them’ (ibid.: 101). When remembering becomes inscribed into physical acts that do not require conscious attention, then Connerton argues that ‘it is our body that “understands” ’ (ibid.: 95) and conserves memory. Details may slip from consciousness, but the body does not forget. It ‘remembers’ for us with each habitual act. According to this view there is a conservative aspect to commemorative bodily practices, since ‘every group will, then, entrust to bodily automatisms the values and categories which they are anxious to conserve. They will know how well the past can be kept in mind by a habitual memory sedimented in the body’ (ibid.: 102). Connerton’s view is useful here because, unlike other approaches to collective memory, it explicitly requires us to consider the role of the body in remembrance. Moreover, the conclusions that he arrives at are valuable because they do not imply that the body is simply overcoded by symbolism and representation.

The centrality of the body differs between remembrance practices. In more familiar commemorative activities, one might join others in remembering the loss of lives by standing still and observing a silence, by marching together, holding a candle or fixing the gaze. There are occasions when commemoration is disembodied, where a commodity or artefact is charged with doing the remembering, such as a 25th anniversary mug, a centenary stamp or a coronation coin. Connerton’s notion of habit memory, particularly with the emphasis on bodily automatisms, struggles to account for the latter memorial practices. However, even if we treat disembodied remembrance as exceptional and assume that Connerton’s programme addresses only embodied occasions of remembrance, the notion of bodily memory raises some important concerns. Particularly challenging here is his assertion that bodily memory requires the absence of conscious attention. This may hold true for activities such as typing, but the play of attention can undermine the idea that remembrance practices habituate memory, as Steve Brown compellingly pointed out, during a mass silence:

We feel primarily not for the dead, but for the embarrassed parent whose child tugs at their sleeve and cries ‘daddy’ repeatedly. We sense not so much the unbearable sorrow of the bereaved and the living survivors, but the crass insensitivity of the person who allows their mobile phone to continue ringing or who even, shockingly, chooses to answer it. We experience not the torment and pain of memory, but the discomforting sense of our hearts beating, of the sound of our own breathing.

(2012: 247)

Explaining this distracted participant in Connerton’s terms of bodily memory would suggest that remembering has occurred and was achieved by the imperceptible habituation of the body. But this is difficult to maintain. The body, through its attention to life, creates imaginal apertures that resist or undermine habituation. Attention to a heartbeat, for example, subverts the obligation to remember the dead in the present by focusing on the living in the present. Absenting attention from the unfolding event affords possibilities to engage in memory work that is completely unrelated to the remembrance at hand. Alternatively it can give participants time to prepare themselves emotionally to achieve remembrance of the event or person being commemorated at a later time. The difficulty of this aspect of bodily memory is that more intimate labours performed upon the body and consciousness are reduced to the notion of habit, which ignores the wild and free creativity of the imagination.

Conway has recently taken further issue with Connerton’s analysis, questioning whether Connerton’s ‘theoretical claims can be extended to bodily rituals that explicitly contest official collective memory’ (2010: 73). For Conway, local examples of embodied memory can mobilise in ways that official commemoration cannot. Notions of habituation and tradition are then ‘less applicable to acts of bodily memory organised at grassroots civil society level and in resistance to official forms of memory’ (ibid.: 73). The difficulty with Connerton’s notion of bodily memory is that it ignores the ways in which the body itself involves a complex work of negotiating between structure and autonomy. It follows that the subtlest adaptations in the way in which people relate to their bodies can influence the character of a remembrance. Bodies are productive, not merely conservative, features of remembrance, and Sturken argues that ‘the presence of bodies is essential to the production of cultural memory’ (1997: 12). This is of no small consequence for the kinds of grassroots commemorative projects that Conway has in view. Accordingly, if one does not have the political or economic means to resist official forms of remembrance, such as the mass-production of memorial commodities, then we might turn to our own bodies to set in motion the work of remembrance.

Returning to the Durkheimian influence in studies of collective remembrance, recently a number of researchers have argued that Durkheim’s original work resists some of the more familiar criticisms aimed at functionalist sociology, particularly the notion that ritual always necessarily serves some social need. While Durkheim’s work remains seminal for treating commemoration as ritual, closer attention to his original texts, particularly The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, has furnished ‘a new culturally oriented reading of one of the founding fathers of ritual studies’ (Cossu, 2010: 34). A culturally orientated reading of Durkheim’s work on ritual, and consequently commemoration, recognises that rituals ‘consist of large-scale ceremonies but the building blocks often consist of small behaviours, the formal units of performance, the idioms and metaphors of action’ (Goody, 1977: 34). Cossu (2010) has developed a ‘compositional view’ of commemoration on this basis that has departed from functionalist approaches to collective practices by concentrating on the actual performance of ritual rather than the representative ends that they serve.

Reviewing the functionalist and compositional positions, as well as Durkheim’s (1976) seminal text, Cossu argues that Du...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgement
• Introduction
• 1. In Memoria Res: Remembrance and Political Economy
• 2. Memory, Work and Autonomy
• 3. Finance and Futurity
• 4. Making a Memorial Matter
• 5. Reworking the Soul: Remembrance and Care
• 6. Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index