What is memory?
Aleida Assmann describes memory as ‘the faculty that enables us to form an awareness of selfhood (identity), both on the personal and on the collective level’ (2010:109). Its study can be dated back to the time of Plato’s
Theaetetus, circa 369BC, in which he sets out his concept of memory as a wax tablet within our souls, upon which our thoughts and ideas are stamped as images, thus creating perceptions and knowledge. The nature of the stamps that shape the wax – from the make-up of our brain chemistry, to the (traumatic or pleasurable) events experienced in our childhood, and the environment we live in, have been considered by scientists and poets alike for centuries. In the late 19th and early 20th century, memory became a site for psychoanalytical and literary exploration with, perhaps most notably, Sigmund Freud and Marcel Proust examining the psychological sites and triggers for personal memories.
Freud’s psychoanalysis looked to dreams and sites of childhood trauma to unravel memory,([1899] 1997, [1915] 2005) while the sensory pleasure of a madeleine cake provided the memory jolt for Proust’s famous literary meditation À La Recherche du Temps Perdu (1871-1922). As Plato’s wax tablet and Proust’s madeleine illustrate, memories are not objective documents of the past as it happened, but instead are a subjective reflection of how we experience the world. Indeed, in his memoir, Berlin Childhood Circa 1900 (1950) Walter Benjamin describes memory as the theatre of the past, where events and objects are attributed meaning and prominence. Astrid Erll expands on this, arguing that memories are ‘highly selective reconstructions dependent on the situation in which they are recalled’ (2011:8). In an attempt to make sense of how personal and public memories shape - and are shaped by - the situation in which they are recalled, Memory Studies encompasses scholarly debate surrounding memory formation and memory culture. It asks questions about how memories are made, and how they affect our perception of ourselves, our past, and our present.
Collective memory
In dealing with these questions, scholars in the field have focused on the intersection between the past (everything that happened prior to now) and history (what is prioritised from the past to be remembered and given value), analysing the role memory formation plays in facilitating the flow between the past and the historical canon, and seeking to identify the cultural factors at play in deciding what is forgotten and what is remembered about the past. The French sociologist, Maurice Halbwachs, is widely acknowledged as a key theorist in the field of Memory Studies, establishing the term ‘collective memory’
('memoire collective’), which is a key concept in the area. In his seminal text, The Social Frameworks of Memory (1952), Halbwachs considers the way in which our environment and social groups affect our memory of events.
Positing the theory that ‘social frameworks’ (social groups) can influence collective memories of the past, he states that ‘the greatest number of memories come back to us when our parents, our friends or other persons recall them to us’ (1952:38). As Halbwachs describes it,
‘memory depends on the social environment’ (ibid) and through memories ‘a sense of our identity is perpetuated’ (1952:46). In other words, our private and public memories, shaped by the social dynamics of our lives, influence our sense of cultural and national identity.
Lieux de memoire
Pierre Nora reignited debate and interest in the field with his work on national memory in Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past (vols1-7, 1984-1992).
Developing Halbwachs’ notion of the impact of the social environment upon memory, he established the term lieu de mémoire, which can be defined as:
any significant entity, whether material or non-material in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community (1984:xvii)
The term can refer to a place, object, or concept - such as a monument, event, or symbol - vested with historical significance in the public consciousness.
Particularly relevant to this study is Nora’s investigation into the role archive material plays in establishing a memory site. At the time of Nora’s writing in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the increasing availability of home video cameras and recorders meant that personal audiovisual archives were becoming easier to create with photographs and videotapes. Scholars such as Andreas Huyssen (2003) and Andrew Hoskins (2014) have referred to this sudden abundance of audiovisual archival material, brought about by new technology (such as domestic video cameras and recorders, digital photographic cameras, and internet sites) as a ‘memory boom’, with the past becoming ‘part of the present in ways simply unimaginable in earlier centuries’ (Huyssen 2003:1). Certainly, with the advent of the internet in the 1990s, and social media and smart phones in the 2000s, it has never been easier for us to document important cultural and personal events, as well as to record and store the minutiae of our lives for future posterity. Nora put forward the theory that this boom in memory technology affects memory formation in that we become dependent on archive in order to remember. Indeed, his argument that ‘modern memory is, above all, archival… reliant on the exterior scaffolding of archive material’ (1989:13) is key to my hypothesis on the role that television archive material plays in reconstituting the past in the present. This is evidenced in my textual analysis of Scotland’s Smoking Gun in chapter three, and production study of How the Campaign Was Won in chapter four, in which I examine how narratives about the past are constructed around television archive material and how scripting to the picture impacts on those narratives.
Cultural memory
While Nora’s work represents an important milestone in the evolution of the field of Memory Studies, there are limitations to his theories. Although his concept of lieux de memoire provides a fixed, stable reference point for groups to connect to the past, his vision of collective memory focuses on the memorialisation of the state and a fixed sense of nationhood. As Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider remark, ‘the conventional concept of ‘collective memory’ is firmly embedded within the ‘container of the Nation State’ (2002: 88). Current scholarship in the field argues that ‘this container is being slowly cracked’
(Brunow, 2017:7). Erll and Rigney claim that as the field has evolved, a more dynamic concept of memory on the move has developed. In their introduction to Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory (2009) they use the term cultural memory, and define it as
an ongoing process of remembrance and forgetting in which individuals and groups continue to reconfigure their relationship to the past and hence reposition themselves in relation to established and emergent memory sites (2009:2)
Similarly, Myra Macdonald (2006) defines cultural memory as a constantly evolving process in which the past is assessed and re-assessed according to changing personal and cultural circumstances, using the term to testify to
the complexities of disentangling where our memories come from:
whether from direct experience, oft-repeated accounts by friends or family, or from the mediation of the popular media (2006: 329).
Memory, then, is an articulation and iteration of the past; a narrative constructed in a discursive context particular to the rememberer. Our private and public memories are informed and shaped by our current situation and the relationship between past, present, and memory is complicated by the human desire to re-interpret the past to suit our needs in the present. Accordingly, throughout this thesis I use the term ‘cultural memory’ in relation to the impact
on public memory of the reconfiguration of private and public memories mediated through the archive-based programmes under investigation.
Remediation/travelling memory
Erll’s description of remembering as ‘an act of assembling available data that takes place in the present’ (2011:8) is key to this study, as the description provides a fitting analogy for the decisions made in a television edit suite when choosing and assembling archive material to reconstruct the past. It encapsulates the entanglement of memory, media, and the past which this thesis explores, equating the spatial, temporal, and conceptual journey television archive material makes as it moves between archive and programme - its form remediated, its content re-contextualised - with the concept of memory as multidirectional, always travelling, and always evolving.
Erll and Rigney argue that remediation is a vital factor in cultural memory formation, claiming that ‘just as there is no cultural memory prior to mediation, there is no mediation without remediation’ (2009:4). Remediation is an important concept for this study, as I consider how television mediates the public’s engagement with the past by re-using television archive material.
Influenced by Erll’s description of remediation as ‘the fact that memorable events are usually represented again and again, over decades and centuries, in different media’ (2010:392), I consider how television archive material is used and re-used in different television programmes to memorialise specific events, thus creating audiovisual lieux de memoires. This impacts on cultural memory because, as Erll states, ‘remediation tends to solidify cultural memory, creating and stabilising certain narratives and icons of the past’ (2010: 393). There is a tension between travelling and solidified memory which I will explore in this thesis. For example, the erroneous watermark shot mentioned in the
introduction illustrates the ‘travelling’ metaphor, but it also highlights the permanence of the mistake. I will consider how this tension plays out in the programmes under investigation by examining how the archive material in them travels physically and conceptually (in that it is remediated, reconfigured and revitalised), whilst creating a stable, fixed narrative which has the potential to solidify into cultural memory.
Dagmar Brunow’s assessment of the crucial role that remediation plays in establishing cultural memory is also key to this study. In Remediating Transcultural Memory: Documentary Film-making as Archival Intervention (2017) she argues that ‘what is not continuously remediated, will soon be forgotten’ (2017:15). It is this concern with what is forgotten as well as what is remembered which has influenced the study of archival and production practices at BBC Scotland within my thesis. My aim is to understand how subjectivity in the edit room, as well as factors such as access to and availability of archive material, influence what is remediated and what is not, what becomes a lieu de memoire and what is forgotten.
Remembering and forgetting
According to Erll, forgetting is an essential component of remembering (and therefore constructing the past). She claims that ‘in processing our experience of reality, forgetting is the rule and remembering the exception’ (2011:8-9).
Her description of memories as ‘small islands in a sea of forgetting’ (2011:9) is evocative of the huge amount of ‘data’ pertaining to our personal and cultural lives which is either lost or not remembered. However, she asserts that forgetting is ‘necessary for memory to operate economically, for it to be able to recognize patterns’ (2010:8). What we remember then, is precious, forming a canon of memory which shapes the narrative of our personal and collective past.
In this light, theories of the dynamics between forgetting and remembering in the creation of personal and cultural memory - and the ways in which forgetting and remembering can be manipulated - are extremely relevant to my research as I seek to establish that the archive programmes under investigation, and the archival practices which facilitate their content, can operate as a form of institutional forgetting and remembering which in turn shapes public understanding of the past.
Aleida Assmann’s scholarship in this area is crucial to my study and I draw on her theorisation of memory in Canon and Archive (2010:97-107) in my exploration of archival practices at BBC Scotland. I argue that her categorisation of memory as ‘active’ and ‘passive’ – in which ‘active’ memory is equated with deliberate actions such as destroying or deleting, while ‘passive memory’ is equated with losing, forgetting or abandoning, ‘fall(ing) out of the frames of attention, valuation and use… (2010:98) is analogous with the process of eliminating footage in the edit room or discovering ‘lost’ or ‘forgotten’
footage on the shelves of BBC Scotland’s archive.
Further to this, I use Assmann’s conceptualisation of an archival institution as a ‘lost and found office for what is no longer needed or immediately understood’ (2010:105), along with her theory of storage memory and functional memory, as the framework for my analysis in chapter five of the organisational structure of BBC Scotland’s archive and the archival practices of its staff. Assmann defines storage memory as dead or passive while functional memory is living, working memory (2010). I equate this with the work BBC Scotland’s archive team do within the archive, investigating how they prioritise material for preservation and access, and what this means in terms of canon formation and cultural memory. Assmann claims that:
whatever has made it into the active cultural memory has passed rigorous processes of selection, which secure for certain artefacts a lasting place in the cultural working memory of a society’ (2010:101).
In response, I argue that the selection process which happens in the archive creates a canon of audiovisual material to be reused and disseminated across a variety of media thus becoming embedded in cultural memory.
However, while this thesis agrees with Assmann’s argument that the knowledge stored in an archive is inert in that it is ‘potentially available, but it is not interpreted’ (2010:103), and is reliant on human intervention to attribute meaning, it rejects her argument that:
this would exceed the competence of the archivist. It is the task of others such as the academic researcher or the artist to examine the contents of the archive and to reclaim the information by framing it within a new context (2010:103).
Building on my own experience of the archive, as well as Terry Cook’s argument that archivists are curators, gatekeepers, and enablers, ‘the principal actor(s) in defining, choosing and constructing’ the archive (2011:614), and in facilitating access to the past, I seek to foreground the crucial work the archive team carry out in contextualising and curating the contents of the archive. Despite the growing range of scholarship on archives as institutions, the study of the working practices of archivists and the challenges they face in attempting to
‘simultaneously preserve unique program content on this fugitive media and provide access to it’ (Compton, 2007:133) is less well covered. Drawing on current scholarship on archives and archivists (Bryant (1998, 2015), Compton (2007), Cook (2011), Baron (2014), Brunow (2015, 2017) and Koivunen (2016)), the intention of this thesis is to further investigation into this area by presenting an insight into the specific challenges faced by an archive team tasked with facilitating a media institution’s historicization of the past with its own, contentious, material.