Joanne Garde-Hansen
- Introduction: mediating the past
“The past is omnipresent” (Lowenthal, 1985)
- Where do we get an understanding of the past?
- Media, in its different forms, are the main sources for recording, constructing, archiving and disseminating public and private histories in the early twenty first century.
- Call for the end of grand narratives of history for a new approach to understanding the past through “little narratives” of and from the people. – History from below (Focault 1977) (p.2)
- Simon Schama: history as the repository of shared memory.
- Media compels an end to history and the beginning of memory.
- Andreas Huyssen: memory has emerged as an alternative to an allegedly objectifying or totalizing history.
- The powerful desire to remember, to witness, to connect and to feel through audio and visual schema has been reconstructed.
- Is memory a popular, dumbed-down, emotional, untrustworthy purveyor of half-truths and trauma: an agent of repression and self-editing? Or is memory’s amorphousness and lack of discipline (Sturken 2008: 74) the very tonic needed to uncover the active, creative and constructed nature of how human beings understand their past?
- History (writing of the past) memory (personal, collective, cultural and social recollection of the past) (p.6) Media negotiates both history and memory,.
- Our understanding of our nations or community’s past is intimately connected to our life histories.
- However mobile, local or global our present interactions we actively connect ourselves to our pasts through a continual and dynamic accumulation of personal media archives.
- José van Dijck – “mediated memories” (2007)
- From memory, media will be approached from the personal perspective. Memory is a physical and mental process and is unique to each of us. It is this iniqueness and differentiation that often makes it difficult to generalise about its relationship with media. Memory is emotive, creative, empathetic, cognitive and sensory. (7)
- McLuhan: media are extensions of memory. We remember through media forms and practices.
- Understanding the archives we leave for future generations and the way in which we use media to help articulate our own histories both as producers and cosumers.
2. Memory studies and Media studies
- memory and remembering
- memory could offer unmediated access to experience or to external reality (Radstone and Hodgkin, 2005)
- Upsurge of memory (Pierre Nora 2002): opening of existing and the creation of new archives for public and private scrutinity//desire to commemorate, remember and memorialise in ways other than statues and monuments
- Memory: something we live with but not simply in our heads and bodies. We express, represent and feel our memories and we project both emotion and memory through the personal, cultural, physiological, neurological, political, religious, social and racial plateaux that form the tangled threads of our being in the world.
- Locating memory in the brain or mind may miss the bodily, or corporeal and sensory, aspects of memory and remembering. It sometimes evokes a physical reaction. A scent, a sound, a texture, they all trigger memories as images and narratives in your mind that you re-experience, visualise, narrativise and feel.
- We are not simply human beings mapped onto a landscape or situated in ecology. As memories come and go, are lost and found in our minds, so too, the present moment (full of people, places, events, actions, experiences and feelings) connects with past moments (full of people, places, events, actions, experiences and feelings). These connections are not simply with our own personal past, but with a whole range of pasts that are one a micro-level such as histories of family, local community, school, religion, and heritage, and on a macro-level such as histories of nation, politics, gender, race, culture and society. (15)
- Our memories are most of the time triggered rather randomly in a fleeting and disordered way. Whatever we do, when we practise memory on an everyday level we are actually undertaking a function: to remember.
- flashbulb memories // eyewitness memories // experiential memories.
- Memory so interesting for the arts, humanities and social sciences from its creative and undisciplined character: it is interdisciplinary // multi-disciplinary // cross-disciplinary // indisciplined. (Me lleva a pensar en el libro de Ariana Hernández, mundos bioinmersivos)
- Experiential and ordinary accounts of memory from public and private sources have as much value as academic sources.
Memory studies
- First thinkers: all french. What connects them contextually is their reaction to a 20th century Europe in danger: of succumbing to fascism, rewriting history, of the destruction of people, memories, histories and archives. For these writers, a concept of memory desestabilises “grand narratives” of history and power. Memory, remembering and recording are the bery key to existence, becoming and belonging.
- Memory studies have continued to research less mediated, more authentic, more personal and more individualised accounts of memory.
- Bergson: memory in terms of space rather than time. Where are all the memories you cannot recall that are not useful at this present moment?
- Pierre Nora: his work deals with studying the construction of french national identity through the less usual sites of memory: street signs, recipes and everyday rituals. His approach to history through memory signals a shift in historiography, the writing of history, to a more everyday level. – Producing a history in multiple voices. – Emphasises place and locaton and draws into memory studies the importance of community and experience. Memory places are developed as a broad catch-all terms for “any significant entuty, whether material or non-material in nature, which by dint of human will or work of time has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community. (Nora 1996)
- Nora: Memory is constantly on our lips because it no longer exists.
- Le Goff: relationship between history and memory with a focus upon myth, testimony, witnessing, living memory, orality and experiencia that all to some extent pose a threat to the written word of historians.
- Memory studies: deepen our understanding of social, cultural, collective, personal, public and community memory. (24)
Referentes de memory studies:
- The past is a foreign country – David Lowenthal
- How societies remember – Paul Connerton
- Frames of remembrance: the dynamics of collective memory – Irwin Zarecka
- Twilight memories: marking time in a culture of amnesia – Andreas Huyssen
- Rewriting the soul: multiple personality and the science of memory – Ian Hacking