Memory, trauma
► “The
past is a different country. They do
things differently there.” (L. P. Hartley)
► “You
have to begin to lose your memory, if
only in bits and pieces, to realize that
memory is what makes our lives. Life
without memory is no life at all... Our
memory is our coherence, our reason, our
feeling, even our action. Without it, we are
nothing. (Luis Buñuel)
► “Memory
is the irruption of other things in
us” (Maurice Merleau-Ponty)
► “Only
that which never ceases to hurt will
stay in the memory” (Nietzsche: The
Generalogy 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)
► Richard
Terdiman: memory is the past
made present
► Assmann:
The study of memory is
interested not in the past as such, but in the
past as it is remembered. It is concerned
with the paths of handing down, the
diachronic continuities of the reading of the
past” (Moses)
mythology
► Mnemosyne
► Mother
of the nine Muses
(memory and art)
Memory and philosophy
► Epistemological
► Plato:
problem
MNEME
► “what we call learning is really just
recollection” (Phaedo)
► ANAMNESIS: conscious effort to retrieve
Plato’s Theaetetus: two 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”
Plato’s Theaetetus: two models
► (2)
aviary stocked with birds
Aristotle
► We
think only in images
► Time: a linear series of similar presents
► Do we recall the thing or its image?
► Perception and memory (Benjy in The
Sound and the Fury)
Enlightenment
► Locke,
Hume
► storage/retrieval model of memory
► „The power to revive again in our minds
those ideas which, after imprinting, have
disappeared, or have been as it were laid
aside out of sight. ... This is memory, which
is as it were the storehouse of our ideas”
► memory
as the key to identity
Modernity
► Memory
becomes a problem for the self
► Wordsworth: ‘Tintern Abbey’ – the sheer
difficulty of evoking orf rejoining my past
self
► Romanticism: Memory disturbances (grief,
nostalgia, split minds)
► Revolution
Erinnerung vs Gedächtnis
► Memory
as interiorisation, accumulation of
experience
► Memory as a mechanical filing system, an
archive
(José Arcadio Buendía’s ingenious “memory
machine” in One Hundred Years of Solitude)
► “Theuth
came to the king (Tamus) and exhibited
his arts... when it came to writing, Theuth said:
‘This discipline, my King, will make the Egyptians
wiser and will improve their memories: my
invention is a recipe for both memory and
wisdom’. But the king said: ‘...The fact is that this
invention 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, that you have discovered. And as for
wisdom, you’re equipping your pupils with only a
semblance of it, not with truth. They will be men
filled with the conceit of wisdom, not men of
wisdom.” (Plato)
Phenomenology and memory
► Henri
Bergson: motoric memory and
image-memory
► Repetition vs representation
► Motor memory becomes HABIT
► Image-memory: intrudes into the present:
► if there is some discontinuity, „immediately
these darkened images come forward into
the full light”
Phenomenology and memory
► Maurice
Merleau-Ponty
► “I am never quite at one with myself” “My hold on
the past and the future is precarious, and my
possession of my own time is always postponed
until a stage when I may fully understand it, yet
this stage can never be reached, since it would be
one more moment, bounded by the horizon of its
future, and requiring in turn further developments
in order to be understood.”
► Activity
and passivity of the past
► “Time arises from my relation to things”
► the present, an „I can”
► “Memory is the irruption of other things in us”
► the arc of memory, of experience
► “It is through the body that we have access to the
past” – earlier moments of bodily experience
become the history of my current being in the
world; time is sedimented on my body (the lived
body is a hollow in being, a hollow where time is
made)
► „A past that has never been present”
Proust: A la recherche du temps perdu
► “It
is a labour in vain to attempt to evoke
our past: all the efforts of our intellect must
prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere
outside the realm, beyond the reach of the
intellect, in some material object (in the
sensation which that material object will
give us) of which we have no inkling. And it
depends on chance whether or not we come
upon this object before we die.”
Proust/2
► „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”
► “And suddenly, my memory revealed itself”
► the entire forgotten chapter of his childhood
miraculously reemerges, “taking shape and
solidity, sprang into being, town and
gardesn alike, from my cup of tea”
► the mystique of memory
Jean-Paul Sartre
► there
has to be a perspective, a subject for
a past to exist (objects have no past); the
past is produced as the past of this present
► One cannot ʻhave’ a past in the sense in
which I have a car: the past is me
► “The past is what I have to be”
► Sich erinnern, se souvenir, se recordar
Psychoanalysis and memory
► Hysteria:
“patients suffer from
remininscences”
► Symptoms: memory symbols
Erinnerungssymbole
► The past invades the present
► Hypnosis vs. talking cure
Psychoanalysis and memory problems
► (1)
Construction of the past –
► (2) archaeological work; alien internal
images (dreams, symptoms)
► (3) remembering is dialogic
► (4) transference: remembering/repetition
► (5) the finding of an object is always a
refinding (emotional template)
► (6) The temporality of trauma –
Nachträglichkeit
Psychoanalysis and memory problems
► (7)
reinterpretation of forgetting
► Harald Weinrich: “With Freud, forgetting
lost its innocence”
► Cui prodest?
► screen memory (Deckerinnerung)
20th century
► Memory:
an obsession
► (1) Modernity 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
Pierre Nora: Lieux de mémoire (Sites of memory)
►
“The acceleration of history: let us try to gauge the
significance, beyond metaphor, of this phrase. An
increasingly rapid slippage of the present into a historical
past that is gone for good, a general perception that
anything and everthing may disappear – these indicate a
rupture of equilibrium. The remnants of experience still
lived in the warm tradition, in the silence of custom, in the
repetition of the ancestral, have been displaced under a
fundamentally historical sensibility. ... We speak so much of
memory because there is so little of it. Our interest in lieux
de mémoire where memory crystallizes and secretes itself
has occurred at a particular historical moment, a turning
point where consciousness of a break with the past is
bound up with the sense that memory has been torn – but
torn in such a way as to pose the problem of the
embodiment of memory in certain sites where a sense of
historical continuity exists. There are lieux de mémoire,
sites of memory, because there are no longer milieux de
mémoire, real enviroments of memory”
Memory vs history
Nora: “real memory – social and unviolated,
exemplified in but also retained as the secret of
so-called primitive or archaic societies”
contrasted to HISTORY: the way „our
hopelessly forgetful modern societries,
propelled by change, organise the past”
“History is suspicious of memory and its true
mission is to suppress and destroy it”
Malfunctionings of memory
► the
imperative to remember (an ethics of
remembering) and the disinclination to remember
► Richard Terdiman:
► FORGETTTING: things slip away
► HYPERMNESIA: too much to remember + a
perverse persistence of recollection
► Too little memory – too much memory
► Baudelaire: ‘I have more memories than if I were
a thousand years old’
‘too much memory’
► Modern
passion for souvenirs
► “The souvenir [Andenken], the withered
form of experience, is the complement of
the Erlebnis [fully realized experience]. In it
is deposited the increasing self-alienation of
the person who inventories his past as dead
possessions” (Walter Benjamin)
WW1 and modern memory
► mourning
► Jay Winter:
search for an appropriate language of
loss; testing traditional languages of loss (eg.
Christian vocabularies and images)
► the attempt to account for, to record, archivise,
testify to the slaughter of unprecedented scale,
► the contrary desire to forget
► nostalgia for the prelapsarian war of Edwardian
England,
► amnesia, the inability or refusal to remember (the
price of resuming civilised existence).
► a catastrophe, a disaster that is also a mnemonic
catastrophe, causing an absolute separation from
the past
► the
cultural and mnemonic emblem of the
Great War: the shell-shocked soldier
► Amnesiac yet a memory figure
► Mr Squirrel in W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of
Saturn
► Great
War and Holocaust memory
Memory disorders as cultural
metaphors
► mourning
: mourning the death or absence
(Pascal) of God, and of the Greek gods (Nietzsche:
our churches are tombs, monuments of God)
► melancholia (Ross Chambers, Wendy Wheeler,
Walter Benjamin: secularisation came too early
► amnesia (Andreas Huyssen: culture of amnesia)
► nostalgia (for the lost age of innocence)
► spectrality (J-M Rabaté, P. Osborne)
► trauma (confronted with an experience that we
cannot comprehend)
Collective memory
► Ritual
► Athens
birth of Erichthonius
► Daughters of Cecrops / disobedience
► 2 little girls: Hersephoroi (bearers of dew)
Arrhephoroi (bearers of the unspeakable
► Enactment of a mystery
Ritual as collective memory
► Jan
Assmann
► repetition and representation
► writing: shifts to representation, from “ritual
coherence” to “textual coherence”
► Repetition – representation
► Imitation – interpretation
► Liturgy – hermeneutics
Collective memory
Margalit:The Ethics of Memory
common memory vs shared memory
► Common memory: simply an aggregate
► Shared memory: shared, discussed; comes
into existence through communication;
► built of the division of the labour of memory
► Avishai
Maurice Halbwachs: Les cadres sociaux de la
mémoire (On Collective Memory)
► All
memories are individual and collective at
the same time
► the individual mind is necessarily imbued
with frameworks common to their
community.
► It is in the community that we acquire,
recall, recognize and localize our memories
Memorial places
► Halbwachs:
sacred places
► Aleida Assmann: Gedänk(en)ort
► Connection not with god but with the past
(making the past transcendent)
► Four types: tomb, ruin, monument,
traumatic place
Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four
► Winston
Smith buying a diary
► ‘Nothing remained of his childhood except a
series of bright-lit tableaux occurring
against no background and mostly
unintelligible’
► Visit to the proles
► ‘The old man’s memory was nothing but a
rubbish-heap of details’
‘transformation of memory into
catastrophe’ (Terdiman)
Holocaust memory as prototype
Difficulties of remembering + political and
ethical stakes (witnessing, testimony)
Psychoanalytic analogies:
- the past is always reconstructed
Halbwachs: “the past is not preserved but is
reconstructed on the basis of the present”
- Internal politics of remembering (censorship,
repression, disguise etc)
Politics and ethics of memory
► counter-memory
(Foucault) resistance against the
official versions of historical continuity
► Public spaces, monuments, rituals of
commemoration (creation of collective identity)
► Aleida Assmann
► This pillar knows things that I don’t remember (W.
Sebald 237)
► Our duty to remember
► Silenced, erased histories, memories
Memory, catastrophe, trauma
► Authenticity:
► HISTORY
► MEMORY
► TRAUMA
Postmemory (Marianna Hirsch)
► Familial
memory
► Art Spiegelman: Maus
Eperjesi Ágnes: Family Album
Eperjesi
Eperjesi
Postmodern memory, heritage, retro
► Fredric
Jameson: past flattened into a
collection of styles
► Heritage: salvaging the past and staging it
as a visitable experience. (Bella Dicks)