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Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present
Acts of Memory presents 15 tightly integrated essays that illustrate the active role of individual and cultural memory in tying the past to the present. Memory, or memorialization, is a cultural activity occurring in the present that offers history another kind of source or document; one that provides insights into the past as it lives on today. The authors, in fields ranging from philosophy and history through literature and media studies, illustrate how memory serves many purposes, between conscious recall and unreflected re-emergence, between nostalgic longing for what is lost to polemical use of the past to reshape the present. Their essays coalesce around three the need for memory and testimonial facilitation of memory, primarily in the case of historical and individual trauma; the site-specific nature of acts of memory, especially in geopolitically conflicted situations; and the potential contributions of acts of memory when facing the difficulties and needs of the present. "Neither remnant, document, nor relic of the past, nor floating in a present cut off from the past, cultural memory, for better or worse, binds the past to the present and future. It is that process of binding that we explore in this volume" writes Mieke Bal. Carol B. Bardenstein, Susan J. Brison, Ann Burlein, Katharine Conley, Lessie Jo Frazier, Gerd Gemuenden, Marianne Hirsch, Andreas Huyssen, Irene Kacandes, Mary Kelley, Marita Sturken, Ernst van Alphen, and the editors
268 pages, Kindle Edition
First published December 1, 1998
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About the author
Mieke Bal
118 books56 followersMieke Bal is a Dutch literary theorist, cultural and art historian.
Areas of interest range from biblical and classical antiquity to 17th century and contemporary art and modern literature, feminism and migratory culture. Her many publications include A Mieke Bal Reader (2006), Travelling Concepts in the Humanities (2002) and Narratology (4th edition 2017). Her view of interdisciplinary analysis in the Humanities and Social Sciences is expressed in the profile of what she has termed “cultural analysis”, the basis of ASCA. See the video clip on the right side of this page, where I explain the approach.
Mieke is also a video artist, her internationally exhibited documentaries on migration include Separations, State of Suspension, Becoming Vera and the installation Nothing is Missing and are part of the Cinema Suitcase collective. With Michelle Williams Gamaker she made the feature film A Long History of Madness, a theoretical fiction about madness, and related exhibitions (2012). Her following project Madame B: Explorations in Emotional Capitalism, also with Michelle, is exhibited worldwide. She just finished a feature film and 5-screen installation on René Descartes and his infelicitously ending friendship with Queen Kristina of Sweden.
Occasionally she acts as an independent curator. Her co-curated exhibition 2MOVE travelled to four countries. She is currently preparing an exhibition for the Munch museum in Oslo.
Areas of interest range from biblical and classical antiquity to 17th century and contemporary art and modern literature, feminism and migratory culture. Her many publications include A Mieke Bal Reader (2006), Travelling Concepts in the Humanities (2002) and Narratology (4th edition 2017). Her view of interdisciplinary analysis in the Humanities and Social Sciences is expressed in the profile of what she has termed “cultural analysis”, the basis of ASCA. See the video clip on the right side of this page, where I explain the approach.
Mieke is also a video artist, her internationally exhibited documentaries on migration include Separations, State of Suspension, Becoming Vera and the installation Nothing is Missing and are part of the Cinema Suitcase collective. With Michelle Williams Gamaker she made the feature film A Long History of Madness, a theoretical fiction about madness, and related exhibitions (2012). Her following project Madame B: Explorations in Emotional Capitalism, also with Michelle, is exhibited worldwide. She just finished a feature film and 5-screen installation on René Descartes and his infelicitously ending friendship with Queen Kristina of Sweden.
Occasionally she acts as an independent curator. Her co-curated exhibition 2MOVE travelled to four countries. She is currently preparing an exhibition for the Munch museum in Oslo.
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November 4, 2023
ntroduction- Bal
o the term cultural memory signifies that memory can be understood as a cultural phenomenon as well as an individual or social one.
o We also view cultural memorization as an activity occurring in the present, in which the past is continuously modified and redescribed even as it continues to shape the future.
o Three types of memories
o 1. Unreflective habitual memories
o 2. Narrative memories
A social construction
o 3. Traumatic recall
Inflexible, invariable, tragically solitary
o Thematically, the essays in the book have been divided into the following parts: (I) Helpful Memories, (II) Dispersed Memories, and (III) Memories for the Present.
Projected Memory: Holocaust Photographs in Personal and Public Fantasy by Marianne Hirsch
o Begins with three narrative accounts of remembering 3 famous holocaust photographs
o It will allow me to explore how camera images mediate the private and the public memory of the Holocaust, how they generate a memorial aesthetic for the second and even for subsequent generations, and what happens when they become overly familiar and iconic.
o “Past Lives” art piece: By allowing her own childhood picture literally to be overshadowed by two public images, Novak stages an uneasy confrontation of personal memory with public history. Visually representing, in the 1980s, the memory of growing up in the United States in the 1950s, Novak includes not only family images but also those figures that might have populated her own or her mother's daydreams and nightmares: Ethel Rosenberg, the mother executed by the state, who, in Novak's terms, looks "hauntingly maternal" but who is incapable of protecting her children or herself, and the children of Izieu, unprotected child victims of Nazi genocide.
o In "Past Lives," space and time are conflated to reveal memory's material presence
o born after World War II, as a Jew, she represents herself as branded by the harrowing memory of Nazi genocide, a memory that gets reinterpreted, repeatedly, throughout the subsequent half-century. Her text, shaped by identification with the victims, invites her viewers to participate with her in a cultural act of remembrance.
o In "Past Lives" Novak begins to articulate the aesthetic strategies of tragic identification, projection, and mourning that specifically characterize the second-generation memory of the Holocaust what I have called postmemory.
o I use the term postmemory to describe the relationship of children of survivors of cultural or collective trauma to the experiences of their parents, experiences that they "remember" only as the stories and images with which they grew up, but that are so powerful, so monumental, as to constitute memories in their own right.
o The term is meant to convey its temporal and qualitative difference from survivor memory, its secondary or second-generation memory quality, its basis in displacement, its belatedness. Postmemory is a powerful form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through projection, investment, and creation.
o In her recent Threshold of the Visible World, Kaja Silverman (borrowing the term from Max Scheler [The Nature of Sympathy, 1923]) has termed this process "heteropathic memory" and "identification"a way of aligning the "not-me'' with the "me" without interiorizing it, or, in her terms, "introduc[ing] the 'not-me' into my memory reserve."
“Subverted Memories: Countermourning as Political action in Chile” by Frazier
o Rather than politics as mourning, by allowing themselves to be haunted, these orphans of regime transition effect a countermourning that refuses to relinquish the past and gropes toward a politics that might alloy their memories' integrity with a vision for the future.
o A REFUSAL OF DECATHECTING
o Guillermo stored, in his secret archive and personal diary, the obstinate components of a recuperative and potentially transformative countermemory.
o For Guillermo, the words he chose for his poem needed to confront official lexical fields directly if they were to compose a subversion of memory
o In mourning, the crypt or grave localizes and contains loss. Until her son's body was located, Ximena had refused to join the pilgrimages to the former prison camp in the desert port. She explained that with each step she might have been crossing Pablo's grave. Having no marker for his grave, he inhabited the entire terrain.
o "the repetition compulsion that is melancholy emerges . . . out of the struggle to engage in the labor of mourning in the absence of a supportive social space." Lacking such a space, "Melancholy is a sort of chronic liminality." Yet it remains unclear what an adequate space for the labor of mourning would look like, or even if such a space is possible in the midst of the history of state violence.
o "museums, archives, and ruins may not house our memory-work so much as displace it with claims of material evidence and proof."
o In countermourning, political subjects are defined by loss but not subjugated to it. Like the poet's subversion of memory, countermourning is a perpetually oppositional dialogue with the dead for the pursuit of justice.
The Myth of the “Dernier poeme”: Robert Desnos and French Cultural Memory by Katharine Conley
• Robert Desnos, member of resistance, died after living in camp.
• Myth persists that a poem was found on Desnos when he died: the Dernier poeme.
• Today it is clear that the supposed "Dernier poème" is a rewritten version of the last paragraph of Desnos's 1926 poem "I have dreamt so much of you,"
• I believe that the myth of the "Dernier poème" relates to the nature of the French cultural memory of World War II, especially as that memory manifested itself in the 1960s. The ambivalence of the French regarding their role during the German Occupation in World War II has provided fertile ground for mythmaking.
• The "Dernier poème," like the other inscriptions in the Monument to the Martyrs of the Deportation, permits French visitors not to see what France has periodically sought to erase from memory about its participation in that war; namely, that so many French citizens collaborated with the Nazis in persecuting their own people,
Trees, Forests, and the Shaping of Palestinian and Israeli Collective Memory by Bardenstein
• Collective memory is understood here as, and will be shown to be (like other forms of memory), both a response to and a symptom of a rupture, a lack, an absence, and "a substitute, surrogate, or consolation for something that is missing"
• It is at or around points of perceived and experienced breaks, ruptures, and loss that acts of memory proliferate, that active "memory-work" is done. Apparently inert or "purely material" sites (such as an archive, or a forest) become lieux de mémoire "only if the imagination invests [them] with a symbolic aura" (Nora 1989, 19), only when they become the objects of active "commemorative vigilance"
• Trees figure significantly in Palestinian contexts predating the conflict with Zionism and Israel, in the form of popular songs for olive and orange tree harvests, for example, or in the form of "holy trees" associated with tombs of saints
• Nature is portrayed as being in sympathy with Palestinians, with trees embodying the experience of the Palestinian collective: thriving when it thrives (or being remembered as having thrived
• Nature is not inert; the olive tree is not "just" a tree. It is presumed to have a longevity sufficiently extensive for it to survive both the tragedy and its protagonists, and has thus been designated as a proxy Palestinian witness, aligned with and testifying to Palestinian collective memory.
• Trees have also figured prominently in Palestinian attempts to reconstruct memory maps of the hundreds of villages that were depopulated and destroyed between 1947 and 1949.
• leaving the Palestinian pilgrim or "underground tourist" to these sites of loss with little else but trees and vegetation with which to do memory- work.
o WHAT REMAINS ARE THE TREES: WE WORK FROM THERE
o MEMORY-BEARINGS
Bal Memories in the Museum: Preposterous Histories for Today
• The occasion for this paper is this artistic project. For me, it is an exemplary act of memory: an intervention in the museum that both contributes and solicits acts of memory, on a number of different levels.
• Gradually my sense of intrusion gives way to mounting excitement. I am not a voyeur; I have been invited in; I know this child; I love literature!
• The work's intimacy seems important, and it is, because of the autobiography that overwrites the image. It challenges everything we always thought we
• It wasn't my brother who shot the rabbi to death before a packed synagogue in a wealthy suburb of Detroit. The killer was some other kid's mentally ill older brother. He strode up to the front of the sanctuary on a spring day in 1966, and announced over the mike,
•
• "This synagogue is an abomination and a travesty," then faced Rabbi Morris Adler and pulled out his gun. The beloved rabbi fell to the floor, his prayer shawl still draped around him. The boy turned the gun on himself, and a family secret became a public tragedy.
• "His prayer shawl still draped around him": irresistibly, the Indian blanket draped around the man in the picture becomes the prayer shawl, the touching detail that connects the private person who was killed with the public function
• In slowing down both the reading and the looking, the interface between the words and the images enhances both processes, deepens the experience of processing signs in a world of fleeting images and hasty movement.
o the term cultural memory signifies that memory can be understood as a cultural phenomenon as well as an individual or social one.
o We also view cultural memorization as an activity occurring in the present, in which the past is continuously modified and redescribed even as it continues to shape the future.
o Three types of memories
o 1. Unreflective habitual memories
o 2. Narrative memories
A social construction
o 3. Traumatic recall
Inflexible, invariable, tragically solitary
o Thematically, the essays in the book have been divided into the following parts: (I) Helpful Memories, (II) Dispersed Memories, and (III) Memories for the Present.
Projected Memory: Holocaust Photographs in Personal and Public Fantasy by Marianne Hirsch
o Begins with three narrative accounts of remembering 3 famous holocaust photographs
o It will allow me to explore how camera images mediate the private and the public memory of the Holocaust, how they generate a memorial aesthetic for the second and even for subsequent generations, and what happens when they become overly familiar and iconic.
o “Past Lives” art piece: By allowing her own childhood picture literally to be overshadowed by two public images, Novak stages an uneasy confrontation of personal memory with public history. Visually representing, in the 1980s, the memory of growing up in the United States in the 1950s, Novak includes not only family images but also those figures that might have populated her own or her mother's daydreams and nightmares: Ethel Rosenberg, the mother executed by the state, who, in Novak's terms, looks "hauntingly maternal" but who is incapable of protecting her children or herself, and the children of Izieu, unprotected child victims of Nazi genocide.
o In "Past Lives," space and time are conflated to reveal memory's material presence
o born after World War II, as a Jew, she represents herself as branded by the harrowing memory of Nazi genocide, a memory that gets reinterpreted, repeatedly, throughout the subsequent half-century. Her text, shaped by identification with the victims, invites her viewers to participate with her in a cultural act of remembrance.
o In "Past Lives" Novak begins to articulate the aesthetic strategies of tragic identification, projection, and mourning that specifically characterize the second-generation memory of the Holocaust what I have called postmemory.
o I use the term postmemory to describe the relationship of children of survivors of cultural or collective trauma to the experiences of their parents, experiences that they "remember" only as the stories and images with which they grew up, but that are so powerful, so monumental, as to constitute memories in their own right.
o The term is meant to convey its temporal and qualitative difference from survivor memory, its secondary or second-generation memory quality, its basis in displacement, its belatedness. Postmemory is a powerful form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through projection, investment, and creation.
o In her recent Threshold of the Visible World, Kaja Silverman (borrowing the term from Max Scheler [The Nature of Sympathy, 1923]) has termed this process "heteropathic memory" and "identification"a way of aligning the "not-me'' with the "me" without interiorizing it, or, in her terms, "introduc[ing] the 'not-me' into my memory reserve."
“Subverted Memories: Countermourning as Political action in Chile” by Frazier
o Rather than politics as mourning, by allowing themselves to be haunted, these orphans of regime transition effect a countermourning that refuses to relinquish the past and gropes toward a politics that might alloy their memories' integrity with a vision for the future.
o A REFUSAL OF DECATHECTING
o Guillermo stored, in his secret archive and personal diary, the obstinate components of a recuperative and potentially transformative countermemory.
o For Guillermo, the words he chose for his poem needed to confront official lexical fields directly if they were to compose a subversion of memory
o In mourning, the crypt or grave localizes and contains loss. Until her son's body was located, Ximena had refused to join the pilgrimages to the former prison camp in the desert port. She explained that with each step she might have been crossing Pablo's grave. Having no marker for his grave, he inhabited the entire terrain.
o "the repetition compulsion that is melancholy emerges . . . out of the struggle to engage in the labor of mourning in the absence of a supportive social space." Lacking such a space, "Melancholy is a sort of chronic liminality." Yet it remains unclear what an adequate space for the labor of mourning would look like, or even if such a space is possible in the midst of the history of state violence.
o "museums, archives, and ruins may not house our memory-work so much as displace it with claims of material evidence and proof."
o In countermourning, political subjects are defined by loss but not subjugated to it. Like the poet's subversion of memory, countermourning is a perpetually oppositional dialogue with the dead for the pursuit of justice.
The Myth of the “Dernier poeme”: Robert Desnos and French Cultural Memory by Katharine Conley
• Robert Desnos, member of resistance, died after living in camp.
• Myth persists that a poem was found on Desnos when he died: the Dernier poeme.
• Today it is clear that the supposed "Dernier poème" is a rewritten version of the last paragraph of Desnos's 1926 poem "I have dreamt so much of you,"
• I believe that the myth of the "Dernier poème" relates to the nature of the French cultural memory of World War II, especially as that memory manifested itself in the 1960s. The ambivalence of the French regarding their role during the German Occupation in World War II has provided fertile ground for mythmaking.
• The "Dernier poème," like the other inscriptions in the Monument to the Martyrs of the Deportation, permits French visitors not to see what France has periodically sought to erase from memory about its participation in that war; namely, that so many French citizens collaborated with the Nazis in persecuting their own people,
Trees, Forests, and the Shaping of Palestinian and Israeli Collective Memory by Bardenstein
• Collective memory is understood here as, and will be shown to be (like other forms of memory), both a response to and a symptom of a rupture, a lack, an absence, and "a substitute, surrogate, or consolation for something that is missing"
• It is at or around points of perceived and experienced breaks, ruptures, and loss that acts of memory proliferate, that active "memory-work" is done. Apparently inert or "purely material" sites (such as an archive, or a forest) become lieux de mémoire "only if the imagination invests [them] with a symbolic aura" (Nora 1989, 19), only when they become the objects of active "commemorative vigilance"
• Trees figure significantly in Palestinian contexts predating the conflict with Zionism and Israel, in the form of popular songs for olive and orange tree harvests, for example, or in the form of "holy trees" associated with tombs of saints
• Nature is portrayed as being in sympathy with Palestinians, with trees embodying the experience of the Palestinian collective: thriving when it thrives (or being remembered as having thrived
• Nature is not inert; the olive tree is not "just" a tree. It is presumed to have a longevity sufficiently extensive for it to survive both the tragedy and its protagonists, and has thus been designated as a proxy Palestinian witness, aligned with and testifying to Palestinian collective memory.
• Trees have also figured prominently in Palestinian attempts to reconstruct memory maps of the hundreds of villages that were depopulated and destroyed between 1947 and 1949.
• leaving the Palestinian pilgrim or "underground tourist" to these sites of loss with little else but trees and vegetation with which to do memory- work.
o WHAT REMAINS ARE THE TREES: WE WORK FROM THERE
o MEMORY-BEARINGS
Bal Memories in the Museum: Preposterous Histories for Today
• The occasion for this paper is this artistic project. For me, it is an exemplary act of memory: an intervention in the museum that both contributes and solicits acts of memory, on a number of different levels.
• Gradually my sense of intrusion gives way to mounting excitement. I am not a voyeur; I have been invited in; I know this child; I love literature!
• The work's intimacy seems important, and it is, because of the autobiography that overwrites the image. It challenges everything we always thought we
• It wasn't my brother who shot the rabbi to death before a packed synagogue in a wealthy suburb of Detroit. The killer was some other kid's mentally ill older brother. He strode up to the front of the sanctuary on a spring day in 1966, and announced over the mike,
•
• "This synagogue is an abomination and a travesty," then faced Rabbi Morris Adler and pulled out his gun. The beloved rabbi fell to the floor, his prayer shawl still draped around him. The boy turned the gun on himself, and a family secret became a public tragedy.
• "His prayer shawl still draped around him": irresistibly, the Indian blanket draped around the man in the picture becomes the prayer shawl, the touching detail that connects the private person who was killed with the public function
• In slowing down both the reading and the looking, the interface between the words and the images enhances both processes, deepens the experience of processing signs in a world of fleeting images and hasty movement.
July 18, 2008
A contemporary collection of essays on the challenges of cultural collectivity through memory, especially in contested historical moments of competing narrativizing, especially at the level of the nation-state; essays on collective memory regarding the Holocaust, Israel/Palestine, and South American dictatorships (Chile) are especially well-done.
May 22, 2010
great anthology with many big names in memory and culture studies. the geographical, historical, and artistic reach of the collection makes for engaging reading.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews