Not for the first time I am a bit out of sequence, addressing this exercise before looking at the earlier, wider, topic of “Photography, memory and place”. However I want to get my thoughts on Bate’s article down first while they are fresh in my mind, and from what I have already looked at for the wider topic I am not sure that going out of sequence affects my views from either perspective. It has to be accepted from the outset though that these are initial thoughts and reactions to the article. They are not polished, not necessarily fully considered, nor do they necessarily amount to a coherent whole.
Although the article is indeed quite densely argued I nevertheless think that it can be distilled down to a small number of points. The first, primary point, taking Freud and his Mystic Writing-pad, as a starting point, is that the photograph (along with the gramophone record, or whatever contemporary incarnation of it one might like to choose) has become a memory device, an aid to recall of memory, indeed an artificial memory in its own right.
(The first of two asides on Freud in this context: whilst I agree with the heart of Freud’s argument, the way it is set out, or at least quoted in Bate’s article, is a little confused and confusing in the sense that he he dealing with two distinct phenomena, without the distinction necessarily being drawn very clearly, at least by Bate. In dealing with “auxiliary apparatus” he does not really draw a distinction between those that ‘augment’ the natural sense – spectacles that aid eyesight, ear-trumpets that aid hearing – and those that act a memory devices – writing, photographs, recordings.)
The next point, drawing on Derrida (note the difference in the clarity of Freud’s and Derrida’s writing – I sometimes have the feeling that, in common with a number of cultural theorists, he is almost deliberately obscurantist, or at least addressing a particular audience of cognoscenti), suggests that the technology of memory support is itself changing the way we remember, even whether we remember. I do not feel this is a controversial point at all. As Bate argues throughout his essay, the advent of various technologies has had an impact on the way we remember. Before the advent of widespread literacy, indeed before the invention of writing itself, things were ‘remembered’, learned by heart and retransmitted orally. Writing made that largely unnecessary. It is though interesting that Bate withholds judgment on Derrida’s argument, simply describing it as “an interesting thesis”, neither agreeing nor disagreeing (page 245). Yet he does seem to approve of the similar point made by Walter Benjamin (presumably a reference to The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction) and Kracauer (with whom I am afraid I am not at all familiar.
In support of the general idea of thinking about photography as a form of memory there is very clear historical evidence of and precedence for “memory devices”, “instruments of collective cultural memory”, going right back to the earliest examples of cultural production, arguably right back to the very earliest pre-historic cave paintings.
In the next section on Collective Memory, bearing the point above in mind, I have a problem Le Goff’s analysis. Photography, “which revolutionises memory”, (a bold and I cannot but help think a somewhat hyperbolic assertion) is certainly new. But the “erection of public monuments” most certainly is not new. What about the monuments raised by the Babylonians and Assyrians, for example? They were all about creating a collective, officially created and manipulated, memory of the exploits of their kings: the people were being instructed in exactly what to “remember”.
This is though the point in the essay at which I start to get really interested: “We may certainly be sceptical here about the ‘truth’ of such archives…”, that is the nature of the ‘memory’ that is being recorded.
This is something that I looked at in I&P in particular when considering Marianne Hirsch’s book (2012). (https://markrobinsonocablog3ip.wordpress.com/2019/03/05/part-4-project-2-memories-and-speech-and-a-glance-back-to-assignment-3/) (https://markrobinsonocablog3ip.wordpress.com/2019/04/08/family-frames-book/) The message that I got very strongly from considering that book is precisely the unreliability, in the absence of corroboration and reliable context, is about the unreliability of the photograph. Hirsch particularly explores the difference, and the distance, between reality and an idealised notion of “family” as recorded in family albums and archives.
From a personal point of view, by coincidence I have recently rediscovered my grandfather’s papers that I mentioned in the first of those two posts. Of all places I found them in the filing cabinet in which I keep all my important papers and discovered them when looking for something else and came across a folder that was not labelled! I have no memory of putting them there. What is particularly interesting looking at them again is how faulty my memory of them is, and indeed the collective, family memory, that was passed on after his death. The story that they tell is very different from what turns out to have been constructed, and somewhat half-baked, “official” family story. What is all the more intriguing is how I can now see that my grandfather was to an extent himself complicit in the creation of this false memory while he was still alive, at least as a result of his own taciturnity and unwillingness to open up. Quite where I am going to go with these papers yet remains to be seen but I am at least glad I have found them again.
After that little digression, the next principal point relates to the various uses of archives, and therefore of memory, and how, not necessarily just in the hands of officialdom, control of memory is an excerise of power, particularly as they relate not just to the past but also to the future. This is something touched on by Alan Moore in his Blake article (2019) in the sentence following the quotation I cited in my post on the book:
“Might it be, however, that some places have not only an embedded past, but an embedded future also? Could some work of art be already contained within their state of origin, immanent and waiting for discovery, for realisation?”
In more political terms I think of what George Orwell wrote in “1984” about whoever controls the past controls the future.
Bate takes the point a little further so far as photography is concerned and argues that it goes beyond what other forms of archive are capable of, in so far as it has the capacity to store and reproduce other things, objects, in visual form. He describes photography as a “meta-archive” and gives as an example the work of Fox-Talbot.
This leads on to what I see as the final principal point, and in a way, one of the most important when considering photography, as a medium in its own right, and as a form of archive, a tool of memory, and that is how it might affect the working of memory itself. The key point here is that it can act as a trigger for other memories, that are not necessarily otherwise contained within or directly associated with the particular image. At some length he discusses Frued’s concept of the “screen memory” and his explanation of how memory can be distorted or modified, how they can ultimately e fluid and unreliable.
This brings me to my second aside on Freud. Years ago, I read quite a lot of Freud simply out of interest, He is such an important figure in the development psychoanalytic thought that he is unavoidable. However, it quickly became apparent, as I learned more, is that Freud’s theories are not necessarily always correct, or are at least open to challenge and question, that they need to be taken on board with a degree of critical thought. What strikes me about Bate’s argument is that he seems to accept Freud’s ideas wholly uncritically. I do not know enough about the psychology of the development and operation of memory functions to be able to form a view of my own. Freud might be right. He might not. Whilst I do not necessarily disagree with the general thrust of his, and therefore also of Bate’s argument, I do not necessarily take it as a given, as something that is not open to further critical enquiry. It therefore troubles me somewhat to see such an uncritical, unquestioning approach.
Leaving that aside, I am in general agreement with Bate’s analysis and I think his final paragraph (pages 255-6) is perhaps the most useful, not to mention succinct, summary of his central thesis, and worth quoting in full:
“With photographs, memory is both fixed and fluid: social and personal. There is nothing neutral here. As sites of memory, photographic images (whether digital or analogue) offer not a view on history but, as mnemonic devices, are perceptual phenomena upon which a historical interpretation may be constructed. Social memory is interfered with by photography precisely because of it affective and subjective status. So in the demand for an intellectual response to pictures or for the priority of their subjective affect, the concept of “screen memories” offers an alternative framework. As composite formations, photographs, like childhood memories, have a sharpness and innocence that belie meanings that have far more potential significance than is often attributed to the,, which means that in terms of history and memory, photographs demand analysis rather than hypnotic reverie.”
The photograph is an unreliable thing, something that should not, and cannot safely, be taken at face value.
Bate, D, (2010). The Memory of Photography, Photographies, 3:2, 243-257
Hirsch, M. (2012) Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press
Myrone, M, & Concannon, A, (2019). William Blake. London: Tate Publishing
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17540763.2010.499609#.U_3kzcVdXTp
Mark Robinson's OCA Landscape, Place & Environment Blog 