Memory and History

In chapter 1 I briefly mentioned the concept of cultural memory. This concept developed simultaneously via different disciplines, such as literature studies, which have examined the cultural memories of, for instance, apartheid in South Africa (Buikema 2006), and how it is represented in fictional and national narratives.

Medical researchers and psychologists have explored how the brain functions when it remembers and have questioned the psychological reverberations of past events.

Historian Eric Hobsbawn has convincingly shown how traditions are invented and remembered as being ancient (Hobsbawn 1983) and sociology has developed a field of social memory studies or collective memory (Olick 2008). It is this strand of memory studies with which José van Dijck is working when she develops her theories of the mediated memories (van Dijck 2007) of cultural importance. By way of example of these mediated cultural memories, I return briefly to the example of US presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama’s speech about a more perfect union, which, he argues, is in need of a continuation of the work done by the founding fathers. Evoking the collective American historical event of the founding fathers signing a treaty and constitution securing ‘liberty and justice for all’ triggers a collective feeling of belonging due to the common cultural understanding of what this constitutional memory means. There is a point in using the terminology of memory rather than history when analysing Senator Obama’s speech(act). Senator Obama’s speech is, in public debates (see, for instance, on YouTube), linked to the Rev. Martin Luther King’s speeches about mutual respect between ‘white’ and ‘black’ North Americans some forty years ago and his fight for equal civil rights (see also introduction to chapter 1). Senator Obama’s speeches of national unification and the founding fathers, coupled with the public memory linking Martin Luther King to Senator Obama allows the US public to embrace the Civil Rights Movement as a continuation of the Constitution and as such as a struggle common to all US citizens.

The demonstrations, sit-ins and happenings that created the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and forced American society to change through reformation of the racist systems of public segregation, was however necessary because US society was not then united in the decision to respect and acknowledge all citizens as equal. It is then a reformulation of the historical memory of the struggles for civil rights, which is arguably the goal of Senator Obama’s campaign, however, it simultaneously runs the risk of glossing over the violent and racist history of the United States as a nation.

Cultural memories are not historical lists of the events and political decisions that make up a current society, but a narrated and experienced structure which creates a sensory and productive sense of belonging. They may draw on cultural myths and legends as well³⁰ in their function of establishing a feeling of social belonging and cohesion.

The concept of memory is often connected entirely to the personal function, but though personal and collective memory may seem to function via two different mechanisms, both personal memory and collective memory are triggered by external elements (Poole 2008). Moreover personal and collective memory cannot be separated but mutually shape each other. José van Dijck (2007) develops the concept of

‘personal cultural memory’ and defines it as: ‘the acts and products of remembering in which individuals engage to make sense of their lives in relation to the lives of others and to their surroundings, situating themselves in time and place’ (van Dijck 2007:6. Italics in original). Because of the interdependence of personal and collective memory (van Dijck 2007) I want to suggest that journalism is the ‘acts and products of remembering’ in which all – journalists and non-journalists – ‘engage to make [sensory and experimental] sense of [our] lives in relation to the lives of others…’

The interaction makes the missing rupture between personal and collective memory even more pertinent in the recent developments of civic journalism and blogging, which spread the power of editing journalism among more journalist and non-journalist actors and allow non-non-journalistic subjectivities to interact and produce journalistic products. I will return to this subject matter shortly and in chapter 3.

It makes sense to speak of cultural or collective memory, because like personal memory it is a form of recollection which is common to a given culture. Moreover, memory – rather than history – calls upon morality. That is, one can be held responsible for forgetting certain things that one should have remembered, and in the same vein cultural memory makes moral claims of accountability possible (Poole 2008). Cultural memories form a coherent representation of a common culture and identity, but they need to be repeated in order to continue having an effect and so a

30 The importance of myths and legends to the construction of cultural memory and a feeling of social belonging will become clear in the case study of the US Virgin Islands, the former colonies of Denmark.

concept, which paraphrases the work of van Dijck (2007), may be coined and termed

‘journalistic cultural memory’. My approach is in keeping with some of the key tenets of phenomenological accounts of the subject and thus results in foregrounding the concept of journalistic cultural memory and in stressing the importance of the politics of perception, in terms of sensory and embodied experience of an other that is structurally necessary to the self. That is, I am arguing for an embodied and embedded journalistic cultural memory.

In the hands of the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, memory is further exploded into a creative and singular concept. Instead of employing the fixating concept of History, Deleuze and Guattari suggest using memory as a tool of re-creating the past in lines of flight, deterritorialised and singular. Reading Deleuze and Guattari, Adrian Parr (2006) divides memory into two. First there is memory as reterritorialisation, a fixing of an event in which History ‘monumentalize[es] the past’, when history is stated as an inherent not created value (such as the case of psychoanalysis). The event of, for instance, the re-enactment of a historical event in order to commemorate the event and its social and political consequences is one of many ways of repeating the cultural memories. It is also a part of a punctual system of History – that is, a majoritarian reterritorialisation. Secondly, Parr draws from readings of Deleuze and Guattari a notion of ‘singular memory’ (Parr 2006: 130).

What becomes important in ‘singular memory’ or memory as ahistorical force (minoritarian) is its concern with ‘history of desire-production’ (Parr 2006: 135).

Deleuze and Guattari emphasise the creative and productive notion of desire. This notion presupposes a future because it deals with the creative force of production in repetition in terms of difference (producing difference in repetition). The creative productive dimension of desire in repetition ‘contains within a seed for a creative dimension to memory’, Parr writes. In this way the Deleuzian conceptualisation moreover links memory to imagination.³¹ Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of historical deterritorialisation and creative production of memory allow me to think of journalism as simultaneously production (Williams) and poetics (Glissant) – that is, as sensuous and sensory relation. Journalism thus holds a privileged position in the (re)formation of the social imaginary as a site of belonging.

31 The uses of Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas of history will be discussed in case study 1

My project is, then, to show on the following pages how journalism, particularly in the Danish context, operationalises the connections between the social imaginary, journalistic cultural memory, and potential dynamics of creativity in terms of epistemological, ethical and political claims. I will define journalism through theorisation of journalistic production starting with the trade’s underpinning concepts of objectivity and freedom of expression, and go on to present research conducted on journalism as object in order to position my own contribution. My contribution will be based in moving from object-based to production-focused analyses and to see production as a creative force which it is possible to activate in journalistic practice and theory. This will lay the groundwork for chapter 3, in which I broaden the scope of journalistic relations into a globalised context, theorising it with the usages of the idea of cosmopolitanism.