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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 Generalogy of Morals ) “The horror of that moment,” the king went on, “I shall never, never forget!”
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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 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)
Memory and philosophy: Plato • MNEME • “what we call learning is really just recollection” (Phaedo) • ANAMNESIS: conscious effort to retrieve
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
Aristotle • How is sg absent (the past) still present? • Do we recall the thing or its image? • Perception and memory (Benjy in The Sound and the Fury)
Enlightenment, modernity memory as the key to identity(Locke, Hume) 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”
Romanticism • Memory: key to selfhood - sich erinnern, se souvenir/rappeler, recordar(se) • Wordsworth: ‘Tintern Abbey’ – the sheer difficulty of evoking, of rejoining my past self • Memory disturbances (grief, nostalgia, split minds)
Erinnerung vs Gedächtnis • Memory as interiorisation, accumulation of experience • vs • Memory as a mechanical filing system, an archive, sg artificial, prosthetic
“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.” (Plato)
Two kinds of memory • Henri Bergson:habit-memory • Maurice Merleau-Ponty: “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)
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
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
WW1 and modern memory • (1) mourning; testing traditional languages of loss • (2) trying to account for, record, archivise, testify to the slaughter • (3) the contrary desire to forget the savagery (the price of resuming civilised existence) • (4) a catastrophe, a disaster → absolute separation from the past • (5) nostalgia for prelapsarian Edwardian England, • (6) emblem: returning (shell-shocked) soldiers: figures of amnesia, ghosts
Psychoanalysis and memory • Hysteria: “patients suffer from reminiscences” • Symptoms: memory symbols Erinnerungssymbole • (1) Construction of the past • (2) archaeological work; alien internal images (dreams, symptoms) • (3) trauma: the past invades the present (remembering vs repetition) (4)reinterpretation of forgetting Harald Weinrich: “With Freud, forgetting lost its innocence” Cui prodest? screen memories
Maurice Halbwachs: Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (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: imbued with frameworks common to the community It is in the community that we acquire, recall, recognize and localize our memories
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’
Ritual as collective memory Athens: birth of 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 • Halbwachs: sacred places • Aleida Assmann: Gedänk(en)ort • ‘This pillar knows things that I don’t remember’ (W. Sebald) • Connection not with the sacred but with the past (making the past transcendent) • Four types: tomb, ruin, monument, traumatic place • Mary Douglas: the home as a ‘memory machine’
Politics and ethics of (collective) memory • ‘transformation of memory into catastrophe’ (Terdiman) • The sheer horror of history (Holocaust memory as prototype) • Remembering+testifying witnessing • Official memory - counter-memory (Foucault) • Silenced, erased histories, memories • Political and ethical stake of remembering
Postmodern memory/1 • Ethics and politics • Michael Rothberg: multidirectional memory • Holocaust memory – articulating other erased memories • Anne Michaels: Fugitive Pieces • Caryl Phillips: The Nature of Blood
Postmodern memory/1 Postmemory (Marianne Hirsch) Familial memory Art Spiegelman: Maus “Photographs offer a prism through which to study the postmodern space of cultural memory composed of leftovers, debris, single items that are left to be collected and assembled in many ways, to tell a variety of stories, from a variety of often competing perspectives” (Hirsch)
Eperjesi Fredric Jameson: past flattened into a collection of styles Heritage: salvaging the past and staging it as a visitable experience. (Bella Dicks)
