Transcript memorials

Memory, trauma
“The past is a different country. They do
things differently there.” (L. P. Hartley)
► “Only
that which never ceases to hurt will
stay in the memory” (Nietzsche: The
Genealogy of Morals)
“The horror of that moment,” the king went
on, “I shall never, never forget!”
“You will though”, the Queen said, “if you
don’t make a memorandum of it”. (Through
the Looking-Glass)
Memory and philosophy: Plato
: “what we call learning is really
just recollection” (Phaedo)
► MNEME
► ANAMNESIS:
conscious effort to remember
Plato: storage/retrieval models
► (1)
block of wax in the mind
► We hold this wax under the perceptions or
ideas and “imprint them on it as we might
stamp the impression of a seal ring.
Whatever is so imprinted we remember and
know so long as the image remains,
whatever is rubbed out or has not
succeeded in leaving an impression we have
forgotten and do not know”
► (2) aviary stocked with birds
Modernity and memory
memory as the key to identity (Locke, Hume)
Precursor: St. Augustine (4th-5th cent.)
‘the fields and vast palaces of memory’; ‘a
spreading limitless room within me’
‘Who can reach memory’s utmost depth? Yet
it is a faculty of my soul and belongs to my
nature. In fact, I cannot totally grasp all that I
am. The mind is not large enough to contain
itself.’
Locke: memory as identity
► The
self knows itself through its capacity to
“repeat the idea of any past action with the
same consciousness it had of it at first...; so
far it is the same personal self.” (An Essay
Concerning Human Understanding , 1689)
► sich erinnern, se souvenir/rappeler,
recordar(se)
Erinnerung vs Gedächtnis (Hegel)
► Memory
as interiorisation, accumulation of
experience
► vs
► Memory as a mechanical filing system, an
archive, sg artificial, prosthetic
► Writing
as a memory (Gedächtnis) machine “will
produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who
have learned it because they will not need to
exercise their memories, being able to rely on
what is written, using the stimulus of external
marks that are alien to themselves rather than,
from within, their unaided powers to call things to
mind. So it’s not a remedy for memory, but for
reminding” (Plato)
► Montaigne: ‘what you know by heart you don’t
know’
Proust: A la recherche du temps perdu
► „petites
madeleines”
► “this old, dead moment which the
magnetism of an identical moment has
travelled so far to importune, to disturb, to
raise up out of the very depths of my being”
► his
childhood “taking shape and solidity,
sprang into being, town and garden alike,
from my cup of tea”
► the mystique of memory: like the Eucharist
20th century: obsession with memory
►(1)
Modernity itself seen as a memory
crisis
►(2) pervades politics, everyday life,
popular culture
►(3) emphasis on malfunctionings,
memory disorders (amnesia, trauma,
nostalgia)
►(4) the idea of collective/cultural
memory
WW1 and modern memory
mourning; testing traditional
languages of loss
►(2) testimony: trying to account for,
record, archivise, testify to the
slaughter
►(3) the contrary desire to forget the
savagery (the price of resuming
civilised existence)
►(1)
WW1 and modern memory
a catastrophe, a disaster → absolute
separation from the past
► (5) nostalgia for prelapsarian world
(Edwardian England)
► (6) trauma, amnesia: emblem: returning
(shell-shocked) soldiers: ghosts
► (7) politics of memory: memories and
countermemories – spate of memorials
► (4)
Hódmezővásárhely, Hungary
Sacrario di Montegrappa
Käthe Kollwitz: Grieving Parents
(Vladslo, Belgium)
Psychoanalysis as a discourse of memory
► Hysteria:
“patients suffer from
reminiscences”
► Symptoms=
memory symbols
(Erinnerungssymbole)
► The
body as the site of displaced (repressed)
memories
Psychoanalysis as a discourse of memory
► Psychoanalysis
and the memory crisis
► (1) Conscious and unconscious memory
► (2)
remembering as archaeological work;
the sheer difficulty of remembering;
► alien internal images (dreams, symptoms)
► (3)
the construction of the past (ongoing
revision; the past is changing)
Psychoanalysis as a discourse of memory
trauma: the past invades the present
(remembering vs repetition)
► (4)
(5) the reinterpretation of forgetting
Harald Weinrich: “With Freud, forgetting
lost its innocence”
Cui prodest?
Slips of the tongue, déja vu
COLLECTIVE MEMORY
► The
validity of the metaphor – who
remembers?
► ‘Culture of amnesia’
► ‘(Post-)traumatic culture’
Maurice Halbwachs: On Collective Memory
► It
is (only) as members of a community that
we remember
► All memories are individual and collective at
the same time
► the individual mind: saturated with
frameworks common to the community
► It is in the community that we acquire,
recall, recognize and localize our memories
Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four
► No
context, framework:
► Historical past/memory: collective
hallucination
► Family memory: nonexistent
► ‘Nothing remained of his childhood except a
series of bright-lit tableaux occurring against
no background and mostly unintelligible’
► buying a diary, visit to the proles
► ‘The old man’s memory was nothing but a
rubbish-heap of details’
Ritual as collective memory
Athens: birth of Athene’s half-human child
Erichthonius
► Daughters of Cecrops / disobedience
► Ceremony: 2 little girls: Hersephoroi
(bearers of dew) Arrhephoroi (bearers of
the unspeakable)
► Enactment of a mystery /of collective guilt
Ritual as collective memory
► Jan
Assmann - rituals: repetition and
representation
► appearance
of writing: shift to
representation
► Imitation, performance → interpretation
Memorial places
► ‘This
pillar knows things that I don’t
remember’ (W. G. Sebald)
► sacred places → places of the (national)
past (making the past transcendent)
► Mary
Douglas: the home as a ‘memory
machine’
Postmodern memory/1
► Ethics
and politics:
► (1) Holocaust memory as the prototype of
historical memory – imperative to testify, to
remember; historical memory as trauma
► (2)
the reconstructed memory of silenced
(ethnic, colonial etc) groups
Postmodern memory/2
► Michael
Rothberg: multidirectional memory
► Holocaust memory: global – articulating
other erased memories (Porajmos, Gulag,
Holodomor, genocides)
► Anne
Michaels: Fugitive Pieces
► Caryl Phillips: The Nature of Blood
Postmodern memory/3
Postmemory (Marianne Hirsch)
► Familial memory
► Art Spiegelman: Maus
► Postmemory: mediated not through
recollection but through imaginative
investment