What do you think?
Rate this book
Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture
Instead of compartmentalizing American experience, the technologies of mass culture make it possible for anyone, regardless of race, ethnicity, or gender to share collective memories―to assimilate as personal experience historical events through which they themselves did not live. That's the provocative argument of this book, which examines the formation and potential of privately felt public memories. Alison Landsberg argues that mass cultural forms such as cinema and television in fact contain the still-unrealized potential for a progressive politics based on empathy for the historical experiences of others. The result is a new form of public cultural memory―"prosthetic" memory―that awakens the potential in American society for increased social responsibility and political alliances that transcend the essentialism and ethnic particularism of contemporary identity politics.
240 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2004
7 people are currently reading
208 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
December 21, 2021
Can we take on memories that are not our own? And are such memories really memories once divorced from those whose lived experiences they refer to and derive from? These are the central questions of Prosthetic Memory, and Alison Landsberg answers both in the affirmative. Landsberg claims that “modernity makes possible and necessary a new form of public cultural memory,” which she terms “prosthetic memory.” Prosthetic memory manifests at experiential sites such as movie theaters or museums and in relation to objects or texts. Importantly, prosthetic memories derive from experiences by which an individual “sutures” herself into a broader historical narrative and concomitantly “takes on a more personal, deeply felt memory of a past event” that transcends her lived experience (2). For example, visitors to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, via interaction with audio-visual testimonies, objects like piles of victims’ shoes, and identification cards that narrate victims’ stories, can mimetically experience the kind of dehumanization endured by Holocaust victims, and thereby “put on” prosthetic memories of the Holocaust indexed to their experiences with exhibits in the museum. Due to the intimate relationship between memory and identity, when such a visitor takes on prosthetic memories in this way, they transform, however subtly, the kind of person she is, and because prosthetic memory has this capacity to shape an individual’s subjectivity, Landsberg insists on a normative dimension to prosthetic memory that demands careful attention and criticism.
While Landsberg concedes that memory has almost always operated in conjunction with external mnemonic forms—she briefly mentions medieval Christian art, Christian rituals, the Jewish Passover Seder, and nineteenth century monuments erected by nation-states—she claims that prosthetic memory is a unique and unprecedented modern phenomenon due to the development of a commodified mass culture. Mass culture, she maintains, allows individuals who do not share the same race, culture, or ethnicity to nevertheless share memories and incorporate them into their own archive of experience even when they have no “natural” claim on them. So, while the Christian Eucharist, for example, invites participants to remember Christ’s crucifixion, an event which stands outside their lived experience, Christian participants have a kind of “natural” claim to this memory by virtue of their baptism and Christian self-identification. Similarly, Jews have a kind of “natural” claim to the memory of the Exodus which the Passover Seder commemorates. Commodified mass culture, in contrast, has made what was once considered a collective’s private memory—comparable to the crucifixion or the Exodus—widely available to “a diverse and varied populace” (11). Memories made accessible to the broader public by mass culture and mediated by mass cultural forms like films, television shows, and museums do not necessarily reinscribe “essentialist” collective identities; rather, such “prosthetic” memories can “produce empathy and social responsibility” and therefore make possible political alliances that cut across essentialist identities. While prosthetic memories can, of course, be wielded for nationalist and identitarian purposes, their power can also be directed toward a more empathic politics that respects difference and promotes social justice. In this sense, prosthetic memories may serve as “a powerful corrective to identity politics” (21).
Why are memories disseminated by mass cultural forms “prosthetic”? Landsberg offers four reasons: first, “they are not natural, not the product of lived experience . . . but are derived from engagement with a mediated representation”; second, “these memories, like an artificial limb, are worn on the body” in that they “are sensuous memories produced by an experience of mass-mediated representations”; third, they are manufactured, transferable, and commodified; and fourth, they are useful—i.e. they can promote and articulate “an ethical relation to the other” (20-21).
It is in relation to this fourth reason that the concept of prosthetic memory is somewhat opaque. On the one hand, Landsberg indicates at various points that the idea of prosthetic memory is both descriptive and normative: because prosthetic memories are “transportable” and “commodified”, they are not susceptible to “ethnic claims of ownership” (19). Per this interpretation of the concept, prosthetic memory is distorted when commodified memories are used to reinforce essentialist collective identities, since this (mis)use of prosthetic memories contradicts their commodified nature. In other words, this first interpretation of prosthetic memory embeds within it the proper use of memories mediated by mass cultural forms—on account of what they are (transportable, commodified), prosthetic memories should not be mobilized to reinscribe essentialist identities. On the other hand, Landsberg writes that “this book is not meant as a celebration of prosthetic memory,” especially since “prosthetic memory appears more radical in some cases than in others” (21). Per this interpretation, prosthetic memory is entirely descriptive and morally neutral; as a phenomenon, prosthetic memory can be more or less salutary in different circumstances and forms. In Prosthetic Memory, Landsberg is more interested in the salutary forms of prosthetic memory; in fact, she rebuts theorists who view mass culture as primarily or inherently a site of domination, deception, exploitation, and manipulation (20-21). Consequently, she frequently elides the normative and purely descriptive interpretations of prosthetic memory: sometimes, prosthetic memory is not just morally problematic, as the “culture industry” theorists would have it; at other times, it is, by definition, anti-essentialist and uniquely promotes empathy and social responsibility.
Whether prosthetic memory has an inherently normative dimension is important because Landsberg identifies in prosthetic memory considerable ethical potential. With David Harvey, she maintains that successful social justice efforts are only possible within existent socioeconomic systems and necessitate coalitional political alliances; because prosthetic memories offer substantive if not essentialist identities in which individuals from different races, cultures, and ethnicities can participate via mass cultural forms, they are especially useful in the creation of such diverse political coalitions (148). More specifically, social justice-oriented political alliances presuppose empathetic relations between members and, as noted earlier, Landsberg claims that prosthetic memories uniquely foster empathy: they allow people to “put on”—like a prosthetic limb—the lived experiences of others, which in turn rearticulates their own fluid identities.
Landsberg draws on Emmanuel Levinas to explain how individual selves can “put on” the memories of others without domination, colonization, or the abolition of difference between self and other—perils typically associated with cross-cultural transaction. For Levinas, the self is constituted in a relation of radical alterity to the other, whom it neither subsumes nor absorbs; moreover, the self for Levinas is specifically constituted as responsible for the other to whom it owes its constitution as a subject. Levinas is useful for Landsberg because he describes an ethical sociality that “arises out of proximity and yet is premised on alterity”; on her interpretation of Levinas, individuals can therefore have empathetic relations premised not on their essential sameness to others but rather on the real differences between them (151). Prosthetic memory fosters empathy in this Levinasian vein: “In its most progressive versions, prosthetic memory creates a feeling for, while feeling different from, the other, thereby permitting ethical thinking.” Relatedly, prosthetic memory also “makes possible a grounded, nonessentialist, nonidentity based politics based on a recognition of difference and achieved through ‘strategic remembering’” (152).
Where Landsberg falls short in her analysis of prosthetic memory and its ethical potential concerns her underdeveloped conception of ethics and, more specifically, “ethical thinking.” Landsberg claims that “thinking ethically means thinking beyond the immediacy of one’s own wants and desires,” and that “prosthetic memory teaches ethical thinking by fostering empathy” in the manner described above (149). And while she develops a relatively precise concept of empathy as distinct from sympathy and premised on difference, she never expands on her notion of “ethical thinking” beyond this bland allusion to altruism. By way of empathy, does prosthetic memory remind us of our duties of beneficence? When we “put on” the memories of others, does this help us cultivate the virtue of benevolence? How do our own needs and desires relate to the imperative to “think ethically,” if this is even an imperative in the first place? More fundamentally, do we have a responsibility to “put on” prosthetic memories, and if so, does this entail a second-order responsibility to expose ourselves to certain kinds of mass media? These are central questions that remain unanswered. While Landsberg makes a persuasive case for the ethical potential of prosthetic memory, she only superficially explains what this ethical potential entails and never addresses what it may require of us.
Similarly, Landsberg undertheorizes the relation of ethics to politics, which is crucial to her analysis. Recall that because prosthetic memory has a unique ability to foster empathy, it may be an especially useful tool in the creation of social justice-oriented political alliances. Landsberg, however, leaves it at that: she never expands on how individuals’ experience of empathy leads to political mobilization and collective action nor even what “social justice” entails (154). It almost seems as if Landsberg presumes that she and her readers are the same kind of leftists who thereby share more or less similar conceptions of “social justice” and “progressive politics,” which also remains undefined (146). Given how, in recent years in the United States, anti-democratic political operatives have so effectively wielded mass cultural forms to promote xenophobic fear and white nationalism, these lacunae are conspicuous. Moreover, those same reactionaries have often manufactured political conflict in relation to matters of memory—like how Americans remember slavery, the Civil War, Jim Crow, and structural racism. In relation to these themes, conservative politicians and pundits have frequently utilized films, television news, and above all social media to promote a historical narrative that invites Americans to remember in a particular—and often factually dubious—way.
Admittedly, Landsberg published Prosthetic Memory in the middle years of the Bush administration and so could not have foreknown these pernicious iterations of prosthetic memory. Moreover, Landsberg readily concedes that mass media can be used for both justice and injustice. Yet, she maintains, it is precisely because “hate groups and Holocaust deniers have chosen to embrace these powerful technologies” that, “rather than disdain and turn their backs on these technologies, [progressively minded persons] must recognize their power and political potential” (154). What recent events have perhaps shown, however, is that certain forms of mass media—like social media—are particularly conducive to reactionary conservative political causes. At the very least, the mass cultural forms that enable and disseminate prosthetic memories are inescapably double-sided and thus the site of an interminable political war. In any case, social justice-oriented activists and educators should surely heed Landsberg’s call to arms and not disdain, but effectively wield, the ethical and political power of prosthetic memory.
While Landsberg concedes that memory has almost always operated in conjunction with external mnemonic forms—she briefly mentions medieval Christian art, Christian rituals, the Jewish Passover Seder, and nineteenth century monuments erected by nation-states—she claims that prosthetic memory is a unique and unprecedented modern phenomenon due to the development of a commodified mass culture. Mass culture, she maintains, allows individuals who do not share the same race, culture, or ethnicity to nevertheless share memories and incorporate them into their own archive of experience even when they have no “natural” claim on them. So, while the Christian Eucharist, for example, invites participants to remember Christ’s crucifixion, an event which stands outside their lived experience, Christian participants have a kind of “natural” claim to this memory by virtue of their baptism and Christian self-identification. Similarly, Jews have a kind of “natural” claim to the memory of the Exodus which the Passover Seder commemorates. Commodified mass culture, in contrast, has made what was once considered a collective’s private memory—comparable to the crucifixion or the Exodus—widely available to “a diverse and varied populace” (11). Memories made accessible to the broader public by mass culture and mediated by mass cultural forms like films, television shows, and museums do not necessarily reinscribe “essentialist” collective identities; rather, such “prosthetic” memories can “produce empathy and social responsibility” and therefore make possible political alliances that cut across essentialist identities. While prosthetic memories can, of course, be wielded for nationalist and identitarian purposes, their power can also be directed toward a more empathic politics that respects difference and promotes social justice. In this sense, prosthetic memories may serve as “a powerful corrective to identity politics” (21).
Why are memories disseminated by mass cultural forms “prosthetic”? Landsberg offers four reasons: first, “they are not natural, not the product of lived experience . . . but are derived from engagement with a mediated representation”; second, “these memories, like an artificial limb, are worn on the body” in that they “are sensuous memories produced by an experience of mass-mediated representations”; third, they are manufactured, transferable, and commodified; and fourth, they are useful—i.e. they can promote and articulate “an ethical relation to the other” (20-21).
It is in relation to this fourth reason that the concept of prosthetic memory is somewhat opaque. On the one hand, Landsberg indicates at various points that the idea of prosthetic memory is both descriptive and normative: because prosthetic memories are “transportable” and “commodified”, they are not susceptible to “ethnic claims of ownership” (19). Per this interpretation of the concept, prosthetic memory is distorted when commodified memories are used to reinforce essentialist collective identities, since this (mis)use of prosthetic memories contradicts their commodified nature. In other words, this first interpretation of prosthetic memory embeds within it the proper use of memories mediated by mass cultural forms—on account of what they are (transportable, commodified), prosthetic memories should not be mobilized to reinscribe essentialist identities. On the other hand, Landsberg writes that “this book is not meant as a celebration of prosthetic memory,” especially since “prosthetic memory appears more radical in some cases than in others” (21). Per this interpretation, prosthetic memory is entirely descriptive and morally neutral; as a phenomenon, prosthetic memory can be more or less salutary in different circumstances and forms. In Prosthetic Memory, Landsberg is more interested in the salutary forms of prosthetic memory; in fact, she rebuts theorists who view mass culture as primarily or inherently a site of domination, deception, exploitation, and manipulation (20-21). Consequently, she frequently elides the normative and purely descriptive interpretations of prosthetic memory: sometimes, prosthetic memory is not just morally problematic, as the “culture industry” theorists would have it; at other times, it is, by definition, anti-essentialist and uniquely promotes empathy and social responsibility.
Whether prosthetic memory has an inherently normative dimension is important because Landsberg identifies in prosthetic memory considerable ethical potential. With David Harvey, she maintains that successful social justice efforts are only possible within existent socioeconomic systems and necessitate coalitional political alliances; because prosthetic memories offer substantive if not essentialist identities in which individuals from different races, cultures, and ethnicities can participate via mass cultural forms, they are especially useful in the creation of such diverse political coalitions (148). More specifically, social justice-oriented political alliances presuppose empathetic relations between members and, as noted earlier, Landsberg claims that prosthetic memories uniquely foster empathy: they allow people to “put on”—like a prosthetic limb—the lived experiences of others, which in turn rearticulates their own fluid identities.
Landsberg draws on Emmanuel Levinas to explain how individual selves can “put on” the memories of others without domination, colonization, or the abolition of difference between self and other—perils typically associated with cross-cultural transaction. For Levinas, the self is constituted in a relation of radical alterity to the other, whom it neither subsumes nor absorbs; moreover, the self for Levinas is specifically constituted as responsible for the other to whom it owes its constitution as a subject. Levinas is useful for Landsberg because he describes an ethical sociality that “arises out of proximity and yet is premised on alterity”; on her interpretation of Levinas, individuals can therefore have empathetic relations premised not on their essential sameness to others but rather on the real differences between them (151). Prosthetic memory fosters empathy in this Levinasian vein: “In its most progressive versions, prosthetic memory creates a feeling for, while feeling different from, the other, thereby permitting ethical thinking.” Relatedly, prosthetic memory also “makes possible a grounded, nonessentialist, nonidentity based politics based on a recognition of difference and achieved through ‘strategic remembering’” (152).
Where Landsberg falls short in her analysis of prosthetic memory and its ethical potential concerns her underdeveloped conception of ethics and, more specifically, “ethical thinking.” Landsberg claims that “thinking ethically means thinking beyond the immediacy of one’s own wants and desires,” and that “prosthetic memory teaches ethical thinking by fostering empathy” in the manner described above (149). And while she develops a relatively precise concept of empathy as distinct from sympathy and premised on difference, she never expands on her notion of “ethical thinking” beyond this bland allusion to altruism. By way of empathy, does prosthetic memory remind us of our duties of beneficence? When we “put on” the memories of others, does this help us cultivate the virtue of benevolence? How do our own needs and desires relate to the imperative to “think ethically,” if this is even an imperative in the first place? More fundamentally, do we have a responsibility to “put on” prosthetic memories, and if so, does this entail a second-order responsibility to expose ourselves to certain kinds of mass media? These are central questions that remain unanswered. While Landsberg makes a persuasive case for the ethical potential of prosthetic memory, she only superficially explains what this ethical potential entails and never addresses what it may require of us.
Similarly, Landsberg undertheorizes the relation of ethics to politics, which is crucial to her analysis. Recall that because prosthetic memory has a unique ability to foster empathy, it may be an especially useful tool in the creation of social justice-oriented political alliances. Landsberg, however, leaves it at that: she never expands on how individuals’ experience of empathy leads to political mobilization and collective action nor even what “social justice” entails (154). It almost seems as if Landsberg presumes that she and her readers are the same kind of leftists who thereby share more or less similar conceptions of “social justice” and “progressive politics,” which also remains undefined (146). Given how, in recent years in the United States, anti-democratic political operatives have so effectively wielded mass cultural forms to promote xenophobic fear and white nationalism, these lacunae are conspicuous. Moreover, those same reactionaries have often manufactured political conflict in relation to matters of memory—like how Americans remember slavery, the Civil War, Jim Crow, and structural racism. In relation to these themes, conservative politicians and pundits have frequently utilized films, television news, and above all social media to promote a historical narrative that invites Americans to remember in a particular—and often factually dubious—way.
Admittedly, Landsberg published Prosthetic Memory in the middle years of the Bush administration and so could not have foreknown these pernicious iterations of prosthetic memory. Moreover, Landsberg readily concedes that mass media can be used for both justice and injustice. Yet, she maintains, it is precisely because “hate groups and Holocaust deniers have chosen to embrace these powerful technologies” that, “rather than disdain and turn their backs on these technologies, [progressively minded persons] must recognize their power and political potential” (154). What recent events have perhaps shown, however, is that certain forms of mass media—like social media—are particularly conducive to reactionary conservative political causes. At the very least, the mass cultural forms that enable and disseminate prosthetic memories are inescapably double-sided and thus the site of an interminable political war. In any case, social justice-oriented activists and educators should surely heed Landsberg’s call to arms and not disdain, but effectively wield, the ethical and political power of prosthetic memory.
Read
December 3, 2025"This new form of memory, which I call prosthetic memory, emerges at the interface between a person and a historical narrative about the past, at an experiential site such as a movie theater or museum. In this moment of contact, an experience occurs through which the person sutures himself or herself into a larger history […]. In the process that I am describing, the person does not simply apprehend a historical narrative but takes on a more personal, deeply felt memory of a past event through which he or she did not live."
Het vertrekpunt van mijn scriptie over THE ZONE OF INTEREST. Interessant hoe Landsberg dit concept plaatst in het kapitalisme, waarin massacultuur door commodificaties (een film is naast een kunstwerk ook een product) beïnvloed en verspreid kan worden. Deze prosthetic memories genereren (of worden gegenereerd door) empathie, leren de spectator zich in te leven - daarmee heeft het een plek zowel in als tegen het kapitalisme. Landsberg geeft echter toe dat prosthetic memory geen inherent positieve term is; en de mogelijkheid dat deze progressieve politiek opwekt is misschien louter een utopische droom. Ze schreef dit toen het internet zich nog in een formatieve periode bevond, maar zag potentie in de mogelijkheid om het verspreiden van prosthetic memories te bevorderen door een democratisering (hoewel nog steeds via commodificaties). Zoals veel vroege opvattingen over het internet, heeft ook deze een wrang randje gezien het internet ons, hoewel het ons verbindt met de hele wereld, niet veel empathie lijkt te hebben aangeleerd. Als het internet niet kan dienen om prosthetic memories te verspreiden, dan is herinnering van het verleden (zoals Holocaustherinnering) mogelijk in gevaar; sociale media bedreigen door hun populariteit - en het bevredigen van een stijgende vraag naar (visuele) stimulatie - namelijk ook (interesse in) de kunsten en hun ligging, zoals films en bioscopen, waarin prosthetic memories worden aangemaakt.
Het vertrekpunt van mijn scriptie over THE ZONE OF INTEREST. Interessant hoe Landsberg dit concept plaatst in het kapitalisme, waarin massacultuur door commodificaties (een film is naast een kunstwerk ook een product) beïnvloed en verspreid kan worden. Deze prosthetic memories genereren (of worden gegenereerd door) empathie, leren de spectator zich in te leven - daarmee heeft het een plek zowel in als tegen het kapitalisme. Landsberg geeft echter toe dat prosthetic memory geen inherent positieve term is; en de mogelijkheid dat deze progressieve politiek opwekt is misschien louter een utopische droom. Ze schreef dit toen het internet zich nog in een formatieve periode bevond, maar zag potentie in de mogelijkheid om het verspreiden van prosthetic memories te bevorderen door een democratisering (hoewel nog steeds via commodificaties). Zoals veel vroege opvattingen over het internet, heeft ook deze een wrang randje gezien het internet ons, hoewel het ons verbindt met de hele wereld, niet veel empathie lijkt te hebben aangeleerd. Als het internet niet kan dienen om prosthetic memories te verspreiden, dan is herinnering van het verleden (zoals Holocaustherinnering) mogelijk in gevaar; sociale media bedreigen door hun populariteit - en het bevredigen van een stijgende vraag naar (visuele) stimulatie - namelijk ook (interesse in) de kunsten en hun ligging, zoals films en bioscopen, waarin prosthetic memories worden aangemaakt.
October 13, 2020
Most of the book, I really like and appreciate. But unfortunately, the conclusion soured it a bit for me.
The consumation (pun intended, but not yet clear) of her argument is that consumptive choices (there's the ground of the pun) can be a mode of revolutionary activity, by their mere subversive or taboo potentialities. This is part of a larger trend toward demand-side econimic assumptions within academic circles, that essentially reframes the disposable-income-having, interpreting, professional classes as a revolutionary subject (something scholars might find self-flattering)
She cites an absurd example of another scholar about how a child's consumptive choice of blue gummy worms is subversive of the hegemony of adult tastes... which..... has this guy (the one she cites) heard of advertising? Perhaps what is demonstrated here is not the countercultural potential of a child's sweet tooth so much as that parent's aren't actually in charge of society (and that the powers that be play child and adult tastes off each other.
Anyway, don't get me wrong. There is plenty of value here, particularly her analysis of African American memory. I was vibing up until the conclusion, but then I found the rest incredibly irritating for various reasons.
The consumation (pun intended, but not yet clear) of her argument is that consumptive choices (there's the ground of the pun) can be a mode of revolutionary activity, by their mere subversive or taboo potentialities. This is part of a larger trend toward demand-side econimic assumptions within academic circles, that essentially reframes the disposable-income-having, interpreting, professional classes as a revolutionary subject (something scholars might find self-flattering)
She cites an absurd example of another scholar about how a child's consumptive choice of blue gummy worms is subversive of the hegemony of adult tastes... which..... has this guy (the one she cites) heard of advertising? Perhaps what is demonstrated here is not the countercultural potential of a child's sweet tooth so much as that parent's aren't actually in charge of society (and that the powers that be play child and adult tastes off each other.
Anyway, don't get me wrong. There is plenty of value here, particularly her analysis of African American memory. I was vibing up until the conclusion, but then I found the rest incredibly irritating for various reasons.
July 27, 2012
This is a compelling theory which I read in conjunction with Sturken's theory of the tangling of memory and history. However, I think that for the most part, Landsberg's case studies are decidedly not compelling. I am puzzled by how she explores the concept not by looking at how films portray the past and audiences then form an image of that past. Instead, there are parts of the book in which she gets bogged down in analyses of films about memory that in my mind do not help illustrate or prove the theory.
May 20, 2020
Landsberg's concept of prosthetic memory is very useful to help articulate the complex ways in which media influences subjectivity. Her writing is clear and, although I wished for more precision in her use of theoretical concepts, she articulates her arguments very well. I'm sure this book will help me think more critically about media in out times and for that, I'm grateful.
April 8, 2020
Assigned during my freshman year of college, Prosthetic Memory served as a surprisingly fascinating read. Landsberg’s idea of a collective memory is riveting. Although a little wordy at times, the idea of a prosthetic memory is superb. 3/5
Want to read
June 16, 2025Cited in Thompson Hit Makers
November 23, 2015
It's something to say of an academic book that "I actually enjoyed this"--but this was winningly clear, with the kind of forthright simplicity that I'm sure took eons and eons to craft. Strong hook, well-chosen examples, and (I thought) a good, practical take on how mainstream cultural objects can enact political change.
April 29, 2012
Such an interesting concept!
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews