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Memory Studies Handbook

notes

an international and interdisciplinary handbook

Astrid Erll

*memory studies - 20th century, Maurice Halbwachs, mémoire collective

*culture vs memory - cultural memory / providing a theoretical backbone, interdisciplinary and international

INTRODUCTION

*cultural memory since cca 1980s - margin together various disciplines of humanities / history, sociology, psychology, anthropology, arts, literature, media, neurosciences etc.

*how art emerges in the field of memory?

*cultural | social | collective // myth, monument, ritual, historiography vs knowledge

*Maurice Halbwachs (1925) / individual vs collective; memory as a dialogue between different disciplines (ex. myth vs psychology); “interplay of socio-cultural contexts” / individual - family - nationality - transnational level

*narratives vs construction of identity

*cultural remembering / narrational vs non narrational memory

*mémoire collective - cultural memory / Halbwachs vs cultural memory - memory + social context

*difference between “culture” as a term — Kulturwissenshaft vs anthropology / products of culture vs community’s specific way of life

*culture as 3d — social, material, mental

*cultural memory = social and material / medial + cognitive / mental

*meaning contained in reappearing symbols - cognitive + pattern of symbols - social and material

*biologically inheritable memory; symbolically constructed shared past

*memory presented in the media - actualised individuality — giving meaning to representations

*John Locke - identity constantly reconstructed via memory - past self in relation to the present self

*trauma - individual vs materialisation of trauma

*Halbwachs - history as dead, abstract, totalising vs memory as living, particular and meaningful

*modes of remembering - past being reconstructed

how is it remembered ?

*Halbwachs - “social frameworks of memory” shaping individual memory

lieux de mémoire - topography, planes of memory

*Aby Worburg — mediality of memory; pathos formulae — symbols with emotional intensity on the level of material objects

*intergenerational transmission of memory - media of memory / trauma and witnessing / Holocaust, gender, post-colonialism

*transitional justice

*places of memory - actual sites + media representation, ritual, belief

*cultural vs communicative; canon vs archive

I LIEUX DE MÉMOIRE

Pim den Boer

*loci memoriae - Cicero 1st cent bc — the myth of Simonides and mnemonic technique

*localisation of memory - planes

*orderly arrangement - images combined with loci — effective and memorable

*natural vs artificial memory — naturally embedded through thought vs system of training

*Pierre Nera - Lieux mémoire and national identity — places as ideological, never neutral — set by the state / memorials, monuments, museums etc

*national vs transnational (ex. Newton’s apple, theory of relativity etc)

2. Mario Isnenghi

*luoghi dalla memoria — past vs present, unification vs division

*seeking “us” — context of italy’s adopting and then repressing the memory of fascism

3. Jacques le Rider

*Central Europe as a lieu de mémoire; 20th cent happenings; nationalism and imperialism; intersection of north and south, “occident and orient”

*term “homo balkanicus” - primitivism, lack of cultural development (lol)

*Prague spring - 1968 / Kundera — expansion of the eastern Europe

4. Udo J. Hebel

*sites of memory in the US

*premise of universal redemption

*precolonial colonial postcolonial

*the multiplicity of identities — ethnic empowerment

*verbal memory of indigenous peoples

*collective commemoration of common historical happenings — vital for the serving of the collective memory

*the US Holocaust memorial — appropriation of international memory

5. Jay Winter

*sites of memory and war — places of engagement and atrocities - “shared knowledge of the past” — meaning attached to the event

*meaning tied to those who acknowledge the memory

*memorial — institutionalisation and routinisation — materialisation of message / memory

*collective mental consensus — who marks the event // the aggressor does not commemorate the end of the war

*second order memories — remembering memories of others

*sites — directly for the national identity vs unofficial sites — gathering

*the cost of memorial sites - a. capital b. continual / pilgrimage vs tourism / aesthetics vs semiotics

*transition from human form — warriors, heroes, combat of the individual — to abstract — second half of the 20th cent - commemorating names

*Holocaust - new language to be devised — no christian symbolics or representation + no meaning in the death or purpose —— representing nothingness / void, emptiness

*family remembering — emotional connection, narrative — turned into a public commemoration through connection with other families

*will be replaced by other needs in the future — forgetting of the past

II Memory and Cultural History

Alon Confino

*memory and history of mentalities — interpretative, narrative

*mental tools - outillage mental — system of beliefs and collective emotions for understating the past

*collective ideas and representations — myths / patterns of thinking

*collective memory — unifying a social group

*past as motivating - steering emotion — being a socio-cultural call for action

how memory structures behaviours and thoughts ?

registers of memory - Halbwachs - determining the importance for the social group or individual

2. Dietrich Harth

remembering - memory - remembrance

internalising vs the cognitive of internalised

net metaphor - external / social + internal / neural

epistemology of relations - path to knowledge of relations - connections — understanding how it is to be in a certain socio-cultural context

Barthes - throwing an argumentative net — understanding the text

3. Aleida Assmann

dynamics of remembering and forgetting

culture transcending the individual - connecting the past and the present

remembering something = forgetting something else

personal belongings — dispersed after death / active vs passive forgetting // a. destroying, censoring, trashing ; b. losing, displacing, neglecting

remembering as precaution of institutions

active memory - past as present — canon vs passive memory - past as post - achieve

what is exhibited vs what is stored vs what is thrown away

messages — writer by the power ; traces — testimonials

disconnection from original frame of meaning

active remembering — working memory vs passive — referential memory

collective identity — shortage of space = presentation of the cannon and the essential - cultural capital, sancitification

history - weapons of mass instruction

archive — reference for the institution of power — what can be said and what cannot / knowledge stored as inert, not interpreted

digitalisation — gap between inferring and knowing

Plato — tragedy of culture - beginning with writing — separation of the knower and the known; knowledge nominated, memory ersatz

oral cultures — intangible cultural herritage

4. Jan Assmann

communicative and cultural memory

memory as enabling selfhood - identity on personal and collective level

human = diachronic identity — build from “stuff of time” — stretched between the past and the present

levels - inner, social, cultural / memories - individual communicative cultural

memory — allowing social life — social life — allowing memory

Freud, Jung — collective memory as subconscious, not social but universal human psyche

Aby Worburg - social memory as cultural memory

communicative vs collective vs cultural memory / cultural - form of collective, shared by people, conveying identity, translating and transmitting

collective - social and cultural (institutionalised, symbolic forms, transituated)

external objects - carriers of memory / interacting with others and objects / Marcel Proust’s madeleine // trigger of remembrance

metaphor vs metonym - contact between the human and the object

social — communicative memory — non institutionalised, everyday interactions // span of 80 years — three generations; “communication genres”

durability of memory = durability of social interaction

oral societies — recent past or the origins of the people

cultural — myth — fixed past in the past

memory vs knowledge about the past / forgetting what is beyond the horizons of relevance

Nietzsche - plastic power, identity function

overlapping memory and identity . identity as multifaceted — multiple collective memories

no relation - knowledge / knowledge + identity index - memory

Halbwachs - affection as a facilitator or association or dissociation

remembering as social obligation = belonging (Nietzsche — genealogy of memory)

assimilation — forgetting previous memories / identities

dynamic of memory — transformation and transmission

5. Jürgen Reulecke

generation - sequence of parents and children / the pulse rate - gap between

cohort — those in the same birth year, or a decade etc

contemporary term - group of people that had the same formative years — sharing a habitus of same adolescence

generationality - identity / a. common experience and the consequences b. what is forming form outside

zeitgeist dependence

generational location — historical context of youth

having a certain mental baggage — transmission not he next generation / Freud - felt in the next three to four generations, traumatic event

generational rejection — phase before determine own historical awareness of the time and space

selection of memories — what is passed on, what is forgotten

a generation - a bridge between the past and the future — accumulation and the open horizon

6. Vita Fortunati and Elena Lamberti

european perspective - relationship of memory and nation forming

memory abused by the hegemony of the state

what disappears, what remains, what re-emerges

establishing one’s identity — critical distance + continuity

strata of memory — individual to collective. memory as fluid — juxtaposed with new contexts / reshaped to the present

the truth as a fictional paradigm

memory as revisionist — concept of the battlefield — nothing is neutral

memory as awareness of the past — critically deconstruct the stereotypes

counter-memory — the micro narratives fo the oppressed vs the hegemonic truth

Walter Benjamin — the dangers of fossilisation of the past and falsifying

discourse of trauma - ethics of witnessing and repressing

medial deconstruction of trauma �� re-assembling and re-interpreting

Dominick LaCapra — writing about trauma vs writing trauma

ACUME network

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