Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies 9780415870894, 9780203762844, 2015008639

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of illustrations
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
Emilio Del Giudice: Renaissance man and scientist of the highest distinction
Introduction: memory work – naming pasts, transforming futures
PART I Theories and perspectives
1 Rethinking the concept of collective memory
2 Reconceptualizing memory as event: from “difficult pasts” to “restless events”
3 Pierre Nora’s Les Lieux de mémoire thirty years after
4 Sites of memory studies (Lieux des études de mémoire)
5 Against memory
6 Cultural memory studies: mediation, narrative, and the aesthetic
PART II Cultural artifacts, symbols and social practices
7 Social movements and memory
8 Banal commemoration
9 Organizational memories: a phenomenological analysis
10 Memory, time and responsibility
11 Memories of the future
12 Housing spirits: the grave as an exemplary site of memory
PART III Public, transnational and transitional memories
13 Globalization and/of memory: on the complexification and contestation of memory cultures and practices
14 The afterlife and renaissance of the plastic people of the (twenty-first-century) universe: continuity and memory in Bohemia
15 The reciprocal relation of scandal to collective memory
16 Antigone in León: the drama of trauma politics
17 Urban spaces, city cultures, and collective memories
18 Digital trauma archives: the Yellow Star Houses Project
PART IV Technologies of memory
19 Cultural heritage: tangible and intangible markers of collective memory
20 Remembering through music: Turkish diasporic identities in Berlin
21 Cinema and memory studies: now, then and tomorrow
22 Memory and future selves in futurist dystopian cinema: The Road (2010) and The Book of Eli (2010)
23 “The mirror with a memory”: placing photography in memory studies
24 Bone, steel and stone: reification and transformation in Holocaust memorials
25 Walking the autobiographical path: the spatial dimension of remembering in a memoir by Italo Calvino
PART V Terror, violence and disasters
26 Southeast Asia and the politics of contested memories
27 Japanese war memories and commemoration after the Great East Japan Earthquake
28 Disaster, trauma, and memory
29 Memory and the recent past: Chile, from revolution to repression
30 An ‘unaccomplished memory’: the period of the ‘strategy of tension’ in Italy (1969–1993) and the Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan
31 Making absence present: the September 11 memorial
32 The Madrid 2004 bombing: understanding the puzzle of 11-M’s flawed commemorative process
33 Remembering 7/7: the collective shaping of survivors’ personal memories of the 2005 London bombing
PART VI Body and ecosystems
34 When memory goes awry
35 Dancing the present: body memory and quantum field theory
36 Implicit memory, emotional experience and self-regulation: the heart’s role in raising our consciousness baseline
37 Cell memory of an ancestral state: going backward across our life span to resume self-healing abilities
38 Memory of water: storage of information and spontaneous growth of knowledge
39 The importance of memory in ecology
40 Soundscapes as commemoration and imagination of the acoustic past
Index

Citation preview

Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies

Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies offers students and researchers original contributions that comprise the debates, intersections and future courses of the field. It is divided into six themed sections: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Theories and perspectives Cultural artifacts, symbols and social practices Public, transnational and transitional memories Technologies of memory Terror, violence and disasters Body and ecosystems.

A strong emphasis is placed on the interdisciplinary breadth of Memory Studies with contributions from leading international scholars in sociology, anthropology, philosophy, biology, medicine, physics, film studies, media studies, archive studies, literature and history. The Handbook addresses the core concerns and foundations of the field while indicating new directions in Memory Studies. Anna Lisa Tota is Full Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Communication and Performing Arts of the University of Rome III in Rome, Italy. Trever Hagen is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the Department of Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology of the University of Exeter, UK.

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Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies

Anna Lisa Tota and Trever Hagen

First published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2016 Anna Lisa Tota and Trever Hagen The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Routledge international handbook of memory studies / edited by Trever Hagen and Anna Lisa Tota. pages cm ISBN 978-0-415-87089-4 (hardback) – ISBN 978-0-203-76284-4 (ebook) 1. Memory–Social aspects. 2. Memory (Philosophy) 3. Collective memory. 4. Recollection (Psychology) I. Hagen, Trever. II. Tota, Anna Lisa, 1965BF378.S65R685 2015 153.1’2–dc23 2015008639 ISBN: 978-0-415-87089-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-76284-4 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Cenveo Publisher Services

Contents

List of illustrations ix List of contributors xi Acknowledgementsxix xxi Emilio Del Giudice: Renaissance man and scientist of the highest distinction Gerald H. Pollack Introduction: memory work – naming pasts, transforming futures Anna Lisa Tota and Trever Hagen

1

Part I

Theories and perspectives

7

  1 Rethinking the concept of collective memory Barry Schwartz

9

  2 Reconceptualizing memory as event: from “difficult pasts” to “restless events” Robin Wagner-Pacifici

22

  3 Pierre Nora’s Les Lieux de mémoire thirty years after Patrick H. Hutton

28

  4 Sites of memory studies (Lieux des études de mémoire) Jeffrey K. Olick

41

  5 Against memory Jeffrey Goldfarb

53

  6 Cultural memory studies: mediation, narrative, and the aesthetic Ann Rigney

65

v

Contents

Part II

Cultural artifacts, symbols and social practices

77

  7 Social movements and memory Ron Eyerman

79

  8 Banal commemoration Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi

84

  9 Organizational memories: a phenomenological analysis Thomas S. Eberle

93

10 Memory, time and responsibility Carmen Leccardi

109

11 Memories of the future Paolo Jedlowski

121

12 Housing spirits: the grave as an exemplary site of memory Hans Ruin

131

Part III

Public, transnational and transitional memories

141

13 Globalization and/of memory: on the complexification and contestation of memory cultures and practices David Inglis

143

14 The afterlife and renaissance of the plastic people of the (twenty-first-century) universe: continuity and memory in Bohemia Trever Hagen

158

15 The reciprocal relation of scandal to collective memory Mark D. Jacobs

168

16 Antigone in León: the drama of trauma politics  Alejandro Baer and Natan Sznaider

181

17 Urban spaces, city cultures, and collective memories Kevin Loughran, Gary Alan Fine, and Marcus Anthony Hunter

193

18 Digital trauma archives: the Yellow Star Houses Project Gabriella Ivacs

205

vi

Contents

Part IV

Technologies of memory

219

19 Cultural heritage: tangible and intangible markers of collective memory Diane Barthel-Bouchier

221

20 Remembering through music: Turkish diasporic identities in Berlin Pinar Güran-Aydin and Tia DeNora

233

21 Cinema and memory studies: now, then and tomorrow Carrie Collenberg-Gonzalez 22 Memory and future selves in futurist dystopian cinema: The Road (2010) and The Book of Eli (2010) E. Ann Kaplan 23 “The mirror with a memory”: placing photography in memory studies Olga Shevchenko

247

259 272

24 Bone, steel and stone: reification and transformation in Holocaust memorials Zachary Metz

288

25 Walking the autobiographical path: the spatial dimension of remembering in a memoir by Italo Calvino Alessandra Fasulo

311

Part V

Terror, violence and disasters

327

26 Southeast Asia and the politics of contested memories Kwok Kian-Woon and Roxana Waterson

329

27 Japanese war memories and commemoration after the Great East Japan Earthquake Philip Seaton

345

28 Disaster, trauma, and memory Bin Xu

357

29 Memory and the recent past: Chile, from revolution to repression Isabel Torres Dujisin

371

vii

Contents

30 An ‘unaccomplished memory’: the period of the ‘strategy of tension’ in Italy (1969–1993) and the Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan Lia Luchetti and Anna Lisa Tota 31 Making absence present: the September 11 memorial Alexandra Délano and Benjamin Nienass

382 398

32 The Madrid 2004 bombing: understanding the puzzle of 11-M’s flawed commemorative process Cristina Flesher Fominaya

414

33 Remembering 7/7: the collective shaping of survivors’ personal memories of the 2005 London bombing Steven D. Brown, Matthew Allen and Paula Reavey

428

Part VI

Body and ecosystems

443

34 When memory goes awry Maria I. Medved and Jens Brockmeier

445

35 Dancing the present: body memory and quantum field theory Anna Lisa Tota

458

36 Implicit memory, emotional experience and self-regulation: the heart’s role in raising our consciousness baseline Rollin McCraty

473

37 Cell memory of an ancestral state: going backward across our life span to resume self-healing abilities Carlo Ventura

489

38 Memory of water: storage of information and spontaneous growth of knowledge Emilio Del Giudice, Alberto Tedeschi and Vladimir Voeikov

500

39 The importance of memory in ecology Sven Erik Jørgensen

511

40 Soundscapes as commemoration and imagination of the acoustic past Jan Marontate, Megan Robertson and Nathan Clarkson

519

Index533 viii

Illustrations

Figures 18.1 Sticker in Budapest 2nd District, April 2014 208 18.2 Yellow Star Houses Guided Walks, 21 June 2014 210 18.3 The website of the Yellow Star Houses Project 212 18.4 Citizens commemorating the events in the courtyard of one of the yellow star houses in the 8th District, Budapest 215 23.1 Daguerreotype of a man in a coat, holding a tinted daguerreotype 274 276 23.2 Kodak ad from Life magazine 23.3 Snapchat logo 277 24.1 Temporary memorial 290 293 24.2 Vietnam Veterans Memorial 24.3 Warsaw Ghetto Monument, The Last March, Nathan 294 Rapoport, Warsaw 24.4 Warsaw Ghetto Monument, resistance fighters, Nathan 295 Rapoport, Warsaw 296 24.5 The Holocaust, George Segal, San Francisco 24.6 Silent Cry, Leah Michaelson, Yad Vashem, Israel 297 24.7 Statue of Mordechai Anielewicz, fallen leader of Warsaw Ghetto uprising, by Nathan Rapoport 298 299 24.8 The Garden of Stones memorial in springtime 24.9 The Garden of Stones memorial covered in snow 300 24.10 Symbolic cemetery and obelisk, by Haupt and Duszenko, Treblinka 301 24.11 Garden of Stones clustered trees 302 24.12 One of the eighteen boulder/tree images from Garden of Stones303 24.13 Broken tombstone memorial, Tadeusz Augustynek, Kazimierz, Poland 304 305 24.14 Valley of the Communities, Yahalom and Zur, Yad Vashem, Israel 24.15 Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, aerial view, by Peter 306 Eisenman, Berlin 24.16 Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (ground view) 307 389 30.1 Piazza Duomo in Milan, the day of the victims’ funerals 31.1 The 9/11 memorial, September 2013 399 31.2 A visitor at the 9/11 memorial displays the Flag of Honor, purchased at the 9/11 memorial visitor center, September 2012 401 402 31.3 Panel S-66, March 2012

ix

Figures and Tables

31.4 Camilo Godoy’s work on the “Unknown” at the 9/11 memorial, September 2012 36.1 Emotions are reflected in heart rhythm patterns 36.2 Diagram of the known afferent pathways by which information from the heart and cardiovascular system modulates brain activity 39.1 Conceptualization of how the external factors steadily change the species composition 39.2 The eco-exergy density in kJ/g for the most advanced organism is plotted versus time

409 478 481 513 517

Tables 27.1  War-related letters in the Fukushima Minp ō newspaper 352 30.1 Terrorist attacks in Italy during the strategy of tension period, 1969–1993387 39.1  ß-values = total work content relative to work energy of detritus 516

x

Contributors

Matthew Allen is Lecturer in Culture and Political Economy for the School of Management at the University of Leicester, UK. He has designed and delivered teaching modules on critical theory and globalization. He is author of The Labour of Memory: Memorial Culture and 7/7 (Palgrave, 2015). His research on memory and digital culture has been published in Memory Studies, Emotion, Space and Society, Media, Culture & Society and Organization. Alejandro Baer is Stephen C. Feinstein Chair and director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota. He also is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology. His current research interests are Spanish and Argentinean memory politics, transnational Holocaust remembrance rituals and contemporary debates on antisemitism. His publications include Holocausto. Recuerdo y Representación (2006) and El testimonio audivisual. Imagen y Memoria del Holocausto (2005). He is working with Natan Sznaider on a book titled The Holocaust and the Ethics of Never Again. Diane Barthel-Bouchier is Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She has published extensively in the sociology of culture, focusing in particular on cultural heritage and cultural diversity. Her most recent book is Cultural Heritage and the Challenge of Sustainability (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2013). Jens Brockmeier is a Professor at the American University of Paris. With a background in psychology, philosophy and language studies, his interests are in issues of mind, memory and language, which he has examined in a variety of cultural contexts and under conditions of health and illness. Steven D. Brown is Professor of Social and Organizational Psychology at the University of Leicester, UK. His research interests are around social remembering amongst marginal and vulnerable groups, affective social ecologies and poststructuralist approaches to psychology. He is author of The Social Psychology of Experience: Studies in Remembering and Forgetting (with David Middleton, Sage, 2005), Psychology Without Foundations: History, Philosophy and

xi

Contributors

Psychosocial Theory (with Paul Stenner, Sage, 2009) and Vital Memory and Affect: Living with a Difficult Past (with Paula Reavey, Routledge, 2015). Carrie Collenberg-Gonzalez received her PhD from the University of Minnesota in 2011 and is an Assistant Professor of German at Portland State University. She has published articles on the aesthetic representation of terrorism and co-authored a textbook on learning German through film entitled Cineplex: German Language and Culture Through Film (2014). Emilio Del Giudice (1940–2014) was a Theoretical Physicist and a former Researcher in High Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA, and the Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen. Beginning in the 1980s he founded a new quantum field theory approach to the study of the property of water with his colleague Giuliano Preparata at the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) in Milan, Italy. He opened new frontier research on water in biology with the theoretical physicist Giuseppe Vitiello, Alberto Tedeschi and the Nobel Prize recipient Luc Montagnier. He was a recipient of the Prigogine Award in 2009. Alexandra Délano is Assistant Professor of Global Studies at The New School and Co-Director of the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility. She is the author of Mexico and Its Diaspora in the United States: Policies of Emigration since 1848 (Cambridge University Press, 2011). Her work has been published in Political Geography, Politics and Society, International Migration Review and Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, among others. Tia DeNora is Professor of Sociology in SPA (Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology) at Exeter University, where she directs the SocArts Research Group. Her main area of research is music sociology where, most recently, she has completed a longitudinal study of music and wellbeing in collaboration with Gary Ansdell, a music therapist at Nordoff Robbins. Her books include Beethoven and the Construction of Genius (California, 1995), Music in Everyday Life (Cambridge, 2000), Music-in-Action (Ashgate, 2011), Music Asylums: Wellbeing through Music in Everyday Life (Ashgate, 2013), Making Sense of Reality (Sage, 2014) and After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology (Cambridge, 2003), which received honourable mention for the American Sociological Association’s Mary Douglas Book Prize. With Gary Ansdell, she co-edits the Ashgate Series on Music & Change: Ecological Perspectives. Thomas S. Eberle is Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Research Institute of Sociology at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. He was President of the Swiss and Vice President of the European Sociological Association. His research interests are phenomenological, cultural and organizational sociology, methodology and qualitative methods. His website is www.alexandria.unisg.ch/Personen/Person/Thomas_Eberle and his email is [email protected]. Ron Eyerman is Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University. His recent books include The Cultural Sociology of Political Assassination (2011) and Is This America? Katrina as Cultural Trauma (2015). He is currently writing a book about how the Vietnam War is remembered by three sides of the conf lict. Alessandra Fasulo is Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Portsmouth, UK. Her research interests are in the area of children’s socialization and narrative psychology. xii

Contributors

She has recently published (with R. Piazza) the edited volume Marked identities: Narrating Lives between Social Labels and Individual Biographies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Gary Alan Fine is John Evans Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University. He is the author of Difficult Reputations: Collective Memories of the Evil, Inept and Controversial. He has recently published on the reputational strategies of Southern segregationist politicians in the United States. Cristina Flesher Fominaya is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) at the University of Aberdeen and a Senior Marie Curie Fellow at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. She has a PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. Her latest book is Social Movements and Globalization: How Protests, Occupations and Uprisings are Changing the World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Jeffrey Goldfarb is the Michael E. Gellert Professor of Sociology at the New School for Social Research. He is the author of dozens of articles and eight books, including Civility and Subversion: the Intellectual in Democratic Society (Cambridge University Press, 1998), The Politics of Small Things (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and Reinventing Political Culture (Polity, 2011). Pinar Güran-Aydin has a PhD in Sociology from the University of Exeter and an MA degree in Ethnomusicology from the Center for Advanced Studies in Music (MIAM) at Istanbul Technical University. She has conducted several research projects on gender and rock music, reggae culture in Istanbul and music, cultural memory and migration. Trever Hagen is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the Department of Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology at the University of Exeter. His research interests include music sociology, sound studies and historical sociology. He is a former Fulbright Fellow and Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Fellow. He is the author of Living in the Merry Ghetto: The Music and Politics of the Czech Underground (Oxford University Press, 2016). Marcus Anthony Hunter is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at UCLA. He is the author of Black Citymakers: How the Philadelphia Negro Changed Urban America (finalist for the C. Wright Mills Award 2013–2014). Patrick H. Hutton is Professor of History (Emeritus) at the University of Vermont. He has written extensively on issues concerning the relationship between memory and history. His most recent publication is a memoir about his work in this field, ‘History as an Art of Memory Revisited’, in the Ashgate Research Companion to Memory Studies, ed. Siobhan Kattago (2015). David Inglis is Professor of Sociology at the University of Exeter. He writes in the areas of social theory, cultural sociology, historical sociology, globalization studies and food studies. He is founding editor of the journal Cultural Sociology. Gabriella Ivacs is Chief Archivist at the Open Society Archives of Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. Since 1999 Ivacs has been responsible for the archival and records management strategies of the Open Society Foundations Network, a non-profit organization active throughout the world. In her capacity she provides expert advice to Intra-governmental

xiii

Contributors

organizations, the European Union, NGO archives, documentation centers and memory institutions. Her current research explores the issue of archival transformations within the new technological landscape: the effects of digital and distributed archiving techniques on memory practices, research methods and access to primary sources and the relationship between professional practices and policies under different socioeconomic circumstances. Mark D. Jacobs is Professor of Sociology at George Mason University, where from 1992– 1999 he was founding director of the first interdisciplinary PhD Program in Cultural Studies in the United States. He is a past chair of the Section on the Sociology of Culture of the American Sociological Association, since September 2013 has been chair of the Research Network on Culture of the European Sociological Association and was the 2010–2011 Robin M. Williams Distinguished Lecturer of the Eastern Sociological Society. He has written Screwing the System and Making It Work: Juvenile Justice in the No-Fault Society (University of Chicago Press, 1990); collaborated with Gerald D. Suttles on Front-Page Economics (University of Chicago Press, 2010); and co-edited The Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Culture (2005). Paolo Jedlowski is Professor of Sociology at the University of Calabria and Vice President of the Italian Sociological Association. He is the editor of the Italian translation of Maurice Halbwachs’ The Collective Memory. Among his English articles are: ‘Memory and Sociology’, Time & Society, 10 (1), 2001; ‘Memories of the Italian Colonial Past’, International Social Sciences Journal, 203–204, 2011. Sven Erik Jørgensen is Professor Emeritus in Environmental Chemistry at the University of Copenhagen. He is honourable doctor at Coimbra University, Portugal, and at Dar es Salaam University. He has received several awards: the Ruder Boskovic Medal, the Prigogine Prize, the Pascal Medal, the Einstein Professorship at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Santa Chiara Prize for multidisciplinary teaching and the Stockholm Water Prize. He has published 368 papers and edited or authored 79 books, translated to several other languages. E. Ann Kaplan is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at Stony Brook University in New York. She is past President of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Kaplan has written many books and articles on topics in cultural studies, media and women’s studies, from diverse theoretical perspectives including psychoanalysis, feminism, postmodernism and post-colonialism. She has given lectures all over the world and her work has been translated into six languages. Kwok Kian-Woon is Associate Professor of Sociology and Associate Provost (Student Life) at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His research areas include Singapore society, the Chinese overseas, cultural policy, social memory and mental health. His publications include Contestations of Memory in Southeast Asia (co-edited with Roxana Waterson; Singapore: NUS Press, 2012). Carmen Leccardi is Professor of Cultural Sociology and Director of the PhD program in Applied Sociology and Methodology of Social Research at the University of Milan-Bicocca. She is currently President of the European Sociological Association. Kevin Loughran is a PhD candidate in sociology at Northwestern University. His work has recently appeared in City & Community and the Du Bois Review. xiv

Contributors

Lia Luchetti, PhD in Communication Sciences at University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’, is Senior Officer at the Communication Office of the Ministry of Agricultural, Food and Forestry Policies. Her research interests are media, memory and gender studies. She is the author of essays about media in domestic spaces, culture jamming, art and fashion. Jan Marontate, Hon. BA (York University), MSc and PhD (Université de Montréal), held a Canada Research Chair in Technology and Culture before joining the faculty at Simon Fraser University (SFU). Her current research studies strategies for the preservation of new media as cultural heritage. Megan Robertson, BA and MA (University of British Columbia) and PhD candidate (SFU), and Nathan Clarkson, BA and MA (SFU), collaborated on this project as research assistants. Rollin McCraty, PhD, is Director of Research at the Institute of HeartMath. His research interests include the physiology of resilience, intuition and optimal function, with a focus on the mechanisms by which emotions inf luence cognitive processes, behavior and health. Maria I. Medved, PhD, CPsych, is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Manitoba and an Associate Professor of Psychology at the American University of Paris. A neuropsychologist with experience in clinical and rehabilitation psychology, she formerly was Chair of Psychological Services at West Park Healthcare Centre in Toronto. Zachary Metz is a scholar and practitioner focused on conf lict, peacebuilding, memory and identity. He is Director of Peacebuilding with Consensus and an Adjunct Lecturer at Columbia University. He has worked in an array of conf lict-affected countries. He is completing a PhD in Sociology at the New School for Social Research. Benjamin Nienass is Assistant Professor of Political Science at California State University San Marcos. He is the co-editor of Silence, Screen, and Spectacle: Rethinking Social Memory in the Age of Information (Berghahn Books, 2014). His work has been published in The Review of Politics, Politics and Society, Globalizations and the International Social Science Journal. Jeffrey K. Olick is Professor of Sociology and History and Chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Virginia (USA). His books include In the House of the Hangman (2005), The Politics of Regret (2007) and The Collective Memory Reader (with Vered VinitzkySeroussi and Daniel Levy, 2011). Gerald H. Pollack’s interests have ranged broadly, from biological motion and cell biology to the interaction of biological surfaces with aqueous solutions. He is the Founding Editorin-Chief of the scientific journal WATER and is recognized as an international leader in science and engineering. He has authored several books on various subjects including water, cell biology and muscle contraction. His latest book is The Fourth Phase of Water: Beyond Solid, Liquid, and Vapor. Pollack was the 2012 recipient of the coveted Prigogine Medal for thermodynamics of dissipative systems. He recently received an NIH Director’s Transformative R01 Award for his work on water. Professor Pollack maintains an active laboratory in Seattle. His website is http://faculty.washington.edu/ghp/. Paula Reavey is Professor of Psychology at London South Bank University, UK. She has published numerous articles on social remembering, child sexual abuse and sexuality, mental xv

Contributors

distress and embodiment and space, using a variety of methodologies, including visual methods, memory work and discourse analysis. She has co-edited two volumes, New Feminist Stories of Child Sexual Abuse: Sexual Scripts and Dangerous Dialogues (with Sam Warner, Routledge, 2003) and Memory Matters: Contexts for Understanding Sexual Abuse Recollections (with Janice Haaken, Psychology Press, 2009), and a sole edited volume, Visual Methods in Psychology: Using and Interpreting Images in Qualitative Research (Routledge, 2011), along with two monographs Psychology, Mental Health and Distress (with John Cromby and Dave Harper, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Vital Memory and Affect: Living with a Difficult Past (with Steven D. Brown, Routledge, 2015). Ann Rigney holds the Chair of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, where she also coordinates the Forum in Memory Studies. She has published widely in the field of cultural memory studies, philosophy of history and historical fiction. She is author of The Rhetoric of Historical Representation (Cambridge University Press, 1990), Imperfect Histories (Cornell University Press, 2001) and The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move (Oxford University Press, 2012). Recent (co)edited collections include Commemorating Writers in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014; with Joep Leerssen); and Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulation, Scales (de Gruyter, 2014; with Chiara De Cesari). She is currently working on a project relating to the cultural memory of protest. Her website is www.rigney.nl. Hans Ruin is Professor of Philosophy at Södertörn University (Stockholm). He specializes in phenomenology, hermeneutics and deconstruction. Recent publications include Rethinking Time: History, Memory Representation (2011), Ambiguity of the Sacred. Phenomenology, Aesthetics, Politics (2012), Frihet, ändlighet, historicitet. Essäer om Heideggers filosofi (2013). He is also Director of the Research Program ‘Time, Memory, Representation’ (www.histcon.se). Barry Schwartz is Professor Emeritus of Sociology, University of Georgia. Since 1982, Schwartz has addressed cognitive, emotional and moral lineaments of collective memory in books and articles on numerous topics. Throughout these works appear the tension between the past as a reality and a construction, conf lict and consensus, memory as a mirror of and model for society, history and commemoration, enterprise and reception in the establishment of collective memory, the superimposition of new conceptions of the past upon traditional ones and the enduring need of individuals to find orientation and meaning for their lives by invoking, embracing, rejecting, revising and judging the past. Philip Seaton is a Professor in the International Student Center, Hokkaido University, where he is the Convenor of the Modern Japanese Studies Program. His publications include Japan’s Contested War Memories (Routledge, 2007) and Voices from the Shifting Russo-Japanese Border (Routledge, 2015, co-edited with Svetlana Paichadze). He is currently working on local history and war memories, particularly in Hokkaido. His website is www.philipseaton. net. Olga Shevchenko is an associate professor of sociology at Williams College where she teaches courses on social theory, visual sociology, post-socialism, culture and consumption. Her most recent publication is an edited volume Double Exposure: Memory and Photography (Transaction, 2014). Currently, she is involved in a collaborative project on Soviet family photography and generational memories of socialism in Russia. xvi

Contributors

Natan Sznaider is Full Professor of Sociology at the Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yaffo in Israel. His research interests and publications over the past few years have centered on giving a sociological account of processes of trauma and victimhood as well as on the Jewish political theory of Hannah Arendt. His publications include Jewish Memory and the Cosmopolitan Order (2011) and The Compassionate Temperament: Care and Cruelty in Modern Society (2000). He co-authored (with Daniel Levy) Human Rights and Memory (2009) and The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (2006). He currently collaborates with Alejandro Baer on giving a sociological account of Spanish memory politics. Alberto Tedeschi is an Independent Researcher on the coherent dynamics of water. He and Emilio Del Giudice developed a technology (WHITE Holographic Bioresonance) to give biological supercoherence to water. He is currently participating in pioneering research on water in biology with Giuseppe Vitiello and the Nobel Prize recipient Luc Montagnier. Isabel Torres Dujisin is an Associate Professor at the Department of Historical Sciences, University of Chile. Her research focuses on the historical politics of the present. Her books include La crisis del sistema democrático: Elecciones presidenciales y proyectos políticos excluyentes – 1958–1970 (2014), Discusiones entre honorables: Triunfos, fracasos y alianzas electorales de la derecha en Chile, 1938–2011 (with Tomás Moulian, 2011) and Estudio de los imaginarios de las elites y los sectores populares a través de la prensa: 1919–1922 (2010). Anna Lisa Tota is Full Professor at the Department of Philosophy, Communication and Performing Arts of the University of Rome III in Rome and Gastprofessor at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. She is a former Chair of the European Sociological Assocation Research Network (ESA RN) on Sociology of Culture and the ESA RN on Sociology of the Arts. She has served for many years as expert evaluator for the European Commission in Brussels. Her research interests include public memories of terror, body memories, gender, cultural sociology and sociology of the arts. She is the author of several books, and more than 80 essays and articles published in Italian, English, German, Spanish and Portuguese. Carlo Ventura, MD, PhD, Cardiologist, is Full Professor of Molecular Biology at the University of Bologna, Italy. He is Director of the Stem Wave Institute for Tissue Healing (SWITH), Gruppo Villa Maria (GVM) Care & Research – Ettore Sansavini Health Science Foundation, Italy. He is also Founder of the Visual Institute of Developmental Sciences (VID). Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi is a Professor of Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the author of After Pomp and Circumstance: High School Reunion as an Autobiographical Occasion (University of Chicago Press, 1998), Yitzhak Rabin’s Assassination and the Dilemmas of Commemoration (State University of New York, 2009) and the co-editor of The Collective Memory Reader (Oxford University Press, 2011). Her papers appeared in American Sociological Review, Social Forces, The Sociological Quarterly, Qualitative Sociology and others. She is currently the Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and is conducting research on home museums. Vladimir Voeikov is a biophysicist and Vice Chairman of the Bio-organic Chemistry Chair, Lomonosov Moscow State University, department of Organic Chemistry at the Faculty of Biology, Russia. His major research interests are energy metabolism, electron transport, cell respiration, free radicals’ role in bioenergetics and research of water biophysics. He received the Prigogine Award in 2013. xvii

Contributors

Robin Wagner-Pacifici is the University in Exile Professor of Sociology at the New School for Social Research. She has researched and written on social, political and violent conf lict and its termination. She is the author of The Art of Surrender: Decomposing Sovereignty at Conflict’s End, Theorizing the Standoff: Contingency in Action, Discourse and Destruction: The City of Philadelphia vs MOVE and The Moro Morality Play: Terrorism as Social Drama. She is coauthor (with Meredith Hall) of a 2012 Annual Review of Sociology chapter on ‘Resolution of Social Conf lict’. In memory studies, she co-authored (with Barry Schwartz) ‘The Vietnam Veterans Memorial: Commemorating a Difficult Past’ (American Journal of Sociology, 1991). Robin is currently writing a book about developing a theory of events, titled: ‘What is an Event?’ An ongoing collaboration to analyze the official language of national security using computation textual analysis has recently (2013) generated the first of several anticipated publications, ‘Graphing the Grammar of Motives in U.S. National Security Strategies: Cultural Interpretation, Automated Text Analysis and the Drama of Global Politics’, with John W. Mohr, Ronald L. Breiger and Petko Bogdanov, in a special issue of Poetics. Roxana Waterson is a social anthropologist and Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore. She is the author of Southeast Asian Lives: Personal Narratives and Historical Experience (Singapore/Athens: NUS Press/Ohio University Press, 2007); and Paths and Rivers: Sa’dan Toraja Society in Transformation (Leiden: KITLV 2009). Bin Xu is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University (2014–2015) and an Assistant Professor at Florida International University (2011–present; 2014-2015 on leave). His research interests include social theory, cultural sociology, political sociology, collective memory and disaster/environmental crises. His articles appear in Theory and Society, Sociological Theory, Social Problems, Social Psychology Quarterly, The China Journal and China Quarterly. He is currently finishing a book manuscript on the 2008 Sichuan earthquake’s political and social impacts, working on a new project on collective memories of China’s ‘educated youth’ (zhiqing) generation as well as a few articles on memory and social theory.

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Acknowledgements

The project of a forty-chapter Handbook requires a great number of people to complete the task. As co-editors, we have had the privilege of working with a group of individuals who, in addition to contributing chapters, have provided enthusiasm, good energies, creativity, positive attitudes, a lot of hard work and, at times, a pinch of madness. Thank you to all the authors for being so efficient, creative, committed, original and determined in helping to produce this Handbook. We would like to thank Gerhard Boomgaarden for having the idea of the Handbook and proposing it to us. Certainly this effort could not be achieved without his continued support throughout the project. We also extend our gratitude to Tia DeNora for sparking our co-editorship; Valeria Cantoni Previ, Emilio Del Giudice and Alberto Tedeschi for helping to contact other scholars working on memory in the hard sciences; Alyson Claffey for her help, efficiency, useful suggestions and support; and to our partners, Anette DujisinMuharay and Giampietro Gobo, for their constructive support over three years of work; and to our readers for their interest and future work which may spring from some ideas that lay in the following pages. As editors we both have attempted our best to avoid just writing ‘another book’, but rather to contribute to the advancement of a type of scholarship that engages the world, empirically and theoretically. We hope that this volume contributes to the scholarly development within Memory Studies and spreads wide original and innovative ideas in relation to commemoration, oblivion, reconciliation and many other issues proposed throughout the chapters for our readers’ contemplation, critique and collaboration. Dear reader, we wish you good reading and good thinking!

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Emilio Del Giudice Renaissance man and scientist of the highest distinction Gerald H. Pollack

To say that everyone loved Emilio Del Giudice may exaggerate the reality. However, his unusual combination of wisdom, charm, depth, humor, and passion for scientific truth was difficult to miss. Emilio honored me with his friendship. Emilio Del Giudice was a pioneer. Forging new pathways was the essence of his being—so unlike many scientists who dwell by adding mass (sometimes clumsily) to existing edifices. Emilio preferred to build new ones. He did that in several fields. He began his remarkable career in high-energy physics, first at MIT and then at the Max Planck Institute in Copenhagen. He then moved to biophysics, collaborating with the legendary Herbert Fröhlich, who very much appreciated his creative intellect; and later with Giuliano Perparata at the University of Milan, where the two collaborated on the structure of water as emerging from quantum electrodynamics. Along the way, Emilio brief ly turned his attention to low-energy nuclear reactions, and finally, together with Antonella de Ninno and several others, to the area of biophysics. Emilio and colleagues long felt that water occupied a central role in biology. Their immersion in quantum electrodynamics led them to argue that water was not merely a random collection of interacting molecules, but that those molecules formed domains of coherence, whose existence depends on incident energy. Coherent domains endow water with properties well beyond those of ordinary bulk water. Emilio pressed on with this theory for many years, writing many insightful papers and speaking at diverse venues. Those venues included our Annual Conference on the Physics, Chemistry, and Biology of Water, www.waterconf.org, where he presented his work annually to audiences eager to hear what he had to say. Emilio could stand at the podium, without slides, and keep audiences mesmerized. He would quip: “I have the answer; just give me the question.” Being a labor organizer in his early days helped him develop this unusual skill. He could talk extemporaneously on practically any subject, always revealing his deep understanding of not only science and philosophy, but also human culture. His breadth and depth were staggering. Emilio will probably be best remembered for his spunk and his humor. Those two traits are best exemplified in a story he proudly told with loud guffaws. Chest pains, one day, landed him in the hospital. The cardiologist insisted on an immediate quadruple bypass. xxi

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When Emilio refused, the cardiologist warned that he could not take responsibility for anything that happened, and forced Emilio to sign a spate of documents relieving the doctor of any responsibility. He assured Emilio that if he were to exit the clinic without the bypass, he would soon die. Emilio lived on—but within six months the cardiologist died. Death recently came also to Emilio. Rarely have I witnessed such an outpouring of affection and sympathy. Those who knew him miss him dearly. Emilio felt strongly attached to the concept of information storage in the coherent domains of water. The chapter in this Handbook, written together with his good friends and collaborators, Vladimir Voeikov and Alberto Tedeschi, deals with that subject. It ref lects a thoughtful vision that has pervaded Emilio’s being for many years. G. H. Pollack

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Introduction Memory work: naming pasts, transforming futures Anna Lisa Tota and Trever Hagen

‘Memory almost full’ A simple, automated message that many have seen on our ubiquitous mobile technologies: ‘Memory almost full’. Too many memories yet not enough memory. Sir Paul McCartney, glancing down at his mobile phone in the early 2000s, saw this understated text message, which triggered a self-reflection on the musician’s illustrious life and career while inspiring the title for his fourteenth solo album. Prompted to delete (or forget?) one’s memories by the non-human limits of data storage is a fitting point, we believe, to consider the so-called ‘memory boom’ not only in academe but also within memory’s everyday persistence in dis/ordering worlds. Indeed, memory, as it seems, is everywhere. From lieux to oblivion, cells to museums, text messages to dementia – memory as an object of study is perpetually elusive and evolving, as several chapters in the Handbook attest to (see Medved and Brockmeier; Ruin). In concert to these transformations, the field of Memory Studies continually refocuses and reinvents itself, searching for moments, events and places in an effort to locate the multitude of ways that memory makes its way into lives, or in fact is life (see Del Giudice et al.; Ventura; McCraty). At times overtly political and public, at other times, subtle and ephemeral, Memory Studies since the 1980s has gained an increasing amount of attention from scholars in widely varying disciplines and perspectives (Mendels 2007; Radstone and Schwartz 2010; Olick et al. 2011; Kattago 2015). As a consequence of this creative and intensive development, Memory Studies now represents a well-established field of research (Tulving and Craik 2005; Erll and Nunning 2010). However, this creative variety of perspectives has implied, to some extent, a theoretical isolationism, most often underpinned by disciplinary conventions. Even though Memory Studies has been investigated from different disciplinary homes (Rubin 1996; Climo and Cattell 2002; Dunlosky and Bjork 2008), there is often little exchange or collaboration between the different perspectives. Therefore, it is regularly the case that, for example, well-known phenomena in the field of neurophysiology are still ignored by social scientists working on the same topic and vice versa. Such theoretical isolationism within the field also derives from the variety of national contexts in which Memory Studies has emerged. Approaches to Memory Studies vary from country to country both in regards to their historical development, empirical focus 1

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and conceptual framework (Van Dyke and Alcock 2003; see Olick; Hutton; Inglis). In this respect the Handbook attempts to explore the dynamic tension between, for example, national memories, diasporas and migrations while pointing toward research in transnational memory production (see Güran-Aydin and DeNora; Hagen). The implied idea is that the analytical framework that has emerged in different nations for the study of memories derives and is shaped by pasts in that particular nation. These memories are ultimately elaborated and inscribed in the national public discourse and drive the ‘methodological nationalism’ present in much empirical work on memory (de Cesari and Rigney 2014).

Archipelagos of memory Over the course of editing the Handbook, our approach to Memory Studies has changed, in part because of the innovative contributions from over forty leading scholars from across the globe, but also because of the profound amount of scholarship we have encountered that we wish we could have included. In this respect, there exist multiple pathways in how to approach the study of memory in terms of grammar and vocabularies, methodologies and at what level (micro, meso, macro, national, international, transnational, network) research is situated. The Handbook is thought of first of all as a comprehensive distillation of these pathways from an interdisciplinary and international perspective (see Schwartz; Rigney). These various pathways are just a handful of concerns that face the field of Memory Studies that chapters in the Handbook address in order to highlight the richness of how individuals, organizations (see Eberle), generations (see Leccardi) and societies come to experience, use and debate memory (see Jedlowski). And further, how technologies mediate meaning and experience of past and future memories (see Kaplan; Collenberg-Gonzalez; Shevchenko). We do not feel it is necessary to reign in the field, therefore the Handbook traces the central characteristics that have come to shape the field while providing a survey of future trends in Memory Studies, from transnationalism to intangible memories, cellular memory to sensory memories (see Tota; Barthel-Bouchier; Jørgensen; Marontate et al.; Fasulo). We hope such diversity contributes to negotiating the isolation and fragmentation among different national and disciplinary perspectives. It is in this light that we see an archipelago of Memory Studies, which has helped forge our primary aim to pursue a multi-disciplinary conversation in an effort to spark ideas and reflection between islands. Therefore there is a risk in putting together chapters written in disparate academic languages, particularly between the humanities, social sciences and hard sciences. Our idea has been to avoid simplifying differences and therefore acknowledge them as important dimensions of Memory Studies, seeking not to dominate knowledge with only a handful of perspectives. In order to maintain diversity, we have let the chapters speak as they are with their own conventions and language. We hope that our readers will be engaged by such differences and will find them challenging, rather than ‘difficult to manage’. To sound the depths of this task, this Handbook focuses on six themes that encompass the core and periphery of Memory Studies: (1) theories and perspectives of memory from sociological, pyschological, historical and cultural perspectives that have come to make up the foundations of the field and subsequently point to its future; (2) diverse collective practices of commemorating, representing and forgetting the past; (3) memory’s relation to public discourse, examining how the past comes to be reconciled or memorialized; (4) technologies of memory, which considers how the past is mediated and mediating; (5) legacies of traumatic events related to violence, terror and disaster; (6) memory work that emerges from ecosystems and bodies. 2

Introduction

Naming pasts, transforming futures Memory scholars have worked for decades on public memories and cultural traumas in different national contexts, recognizing the added value of their work that comes from being ethically engaged in civil society. For instance, social scientists have investigated how memory processes work and to what extent commemorative practices shape the present and the future of a certain society (see Eyerman; Flesher Fominaya; Vinitzky-Seroussi). In many cases, where notions of justice have not yet been reached, the scholarship represents a potential resource for constructing counter-memories based on pieces of evidence in order to provide visibility for neglected and ignored victims and survivors. Social scientists and historians have for many decades worked in this field to shape the world to help victims and victims’ relatives obtain the public recognition of crimes or injustices that they had been subject to (see Tota and Luchetti; Torres Dujisin; Kian-Woon and Waterson). In considering the many uses of researching the past, we think, for example, to the transformative methodology of the action-research perspective (Lewin 1948; Festinger and Kelley 1951)1, to ‘action science’ (Argyris et al. 1985) and to the L’intervention sociologique (Touraine 1984). In this light, we are able to extend the meaning of memory work beyond academe: as a doctor wishes to contribute to the healing process of his/her patient, many memory scholars have attempted to contribute to and understand the reconciliation processes of the societies, collectives, individuals and bodies. Clearly, there are many differences between these approaches within Memory Studies. There is still something in common, though: the well-known idea that by producing knowledge, by naming things differently, we change the objects of our research. To describe, to name is to change, to transform. This is also the mechanism termed the ‘Hawthorne effect’, an expression coined by the Australian psychologist of labour George Elton Mayo (1880–1949), according to whom the researcher’s presence almost always affects the behaviours of the subjects observed. Yet in the case of memory work, it may be even more complex because of the often sensitive nature of the object of research – such as individual, collective or public memories on traumatic pasts (see Baer and Sznaider; Seaton; Xu). By conducting memory research, our value systems have been deeply involved and sometimes strongly questioned. Howard Becker (1967) raised the question ‘Whose side are we on?’ provoking the reflexive situation that comprises giving space to unheard voices and making visible unseen actors. Certainly the question arises as to whom do we give voice; memory work may therefore assume a political role. As this has been a central issue for memory scholars for decades, we see multidisciplinarity as a tool in negotiating ‘sides’ when producing memory knowledge. Many pieces of research within the Handbook elaborate our understanding of memory processes’ role in transformation by virtue of encountering lenses or models from disciplines distant from one’s own. Instead of being locked to the idea of ‘narrating the past’ – and with it, repairing crimes and injustices by properly naming what occurred and identifying perpetrators, thereby contributing to an inscription of controversial pasts in public discourse – the multi-disciplinarity of the Handbook seeks to open up the past and its many voices of experience in reconciliation, notions of healing, biography and injustice and thereby show how memory work reflects and refracts through people’s lives, how it can be both fixed and volatile (see Ivacs; Délano and Nienass; Brown et al.; Metz). In this sense the appeal to a sociology of quantum events, raised by Robin Wagner-Pacifici in the Handbook, is central to a multi-sited representation of the past. By renaming pasts we contribute to transforming and representing them, a task that has many consequences. By inscribing pasts in the public discourse, by contributing to the visibility of experiences, 3

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stories and perceptions, we provoke a transformation of events, places, objects and people (see Loughran et al.; Jacobs). Memory scholars thereby transform events in a fundamental sense that can be understood only by referring to the duality of particles and matter, described by the quantum field theorists. To express this frame of particles and matter within the case of trauma, the public inscription of a trauma in national and international public spheres corresponds to fixing its public meaning and simultaneously to its ‘evaporation’ as a crime, injustice, aberration or abuse. Exactly when the event and its trauma become visible (because they are finally told), they change their nature and their properties: their ‘density’ begins to vanish and the event transforms itself. The word ‘evaporation’ must not be misunderstood. It pinpoints the moment when memory is fixed in a public form and the suffering connected to that event begins to transform itself. In other terms, the process of naming has the property of transferring a certain event from the perspective of matter to that of particles. By doing so, the naming process has the capacity to change the event. Collective reconciliation, for instance, is no longer a ‘magical act’ but now appears far more comprehensible than before. Returning to the comparison between the doctors taking care of a patient and the scholar working on memory, we can say that memory work intervenes in social processes with, we hope, the intention of healing for some groups. In this context, memory work is even more similar to the ‘action research’ or to the ‘L’intervention sociologique’. In this perspective memory work in individuals and in societies shares a common feature, especially when its content is a traumatic one: by remembering what has been forgotten and negotiating what must remain, it is possible to transform the necessity of memory. In some cases, it becomes possible to forget. The key here is memory work’s role in the creation of possibility. After reconciling with a trauma, an individual or collectivity can forget and thereby continue to flow in the present and future. A traumatic past is ‘necessary’ only until it can become visible. Once this important task has been achieved, the time line is, so to say, ‘reset’ (and to an extent, even ‘clean’). Clearly in some cases, one never forgets, or wishes to forget, but rather the trauma can be incorporated into identities. It is the capacity that memory work brings forth that enables a refashioning of memories in ways that make them useable. As Gabriel García Márquez (2003: 106) wrote: ‘the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and … thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past’. This is the reason why, when dealing with public traumas, memory work facilitates the healing process of societies, or at least contributes to it in a substantial way. However, where traumas become visible, when justice is provided for the victims, memory work has more to do with possibility than with necessity. Memory work in this vein concerns perhaps not so much as ‘giving’ voice to unheard stories and experiences as it does with providing the conditions for those voices to speak.

Cartography of the Handbook To open our ears to these voices, Part I of the Handbook addresses debates surrounding memory, which have produced a range of new concepts and theories. As a bold and provoking introductory section, it lays out important ‘turns’ in the field of Memory Studies, its historical development in different disciplines and nations, and thus, orientates the reader to key ideas in Memory Studies by pulling together the various theoretical perspectives drawn from fields such as sociology, psychology, anthropology, literature and history. Part II of the Handbook deals with the social practices that sustain and shape the process of collective remembering. Such social practices range from commemorative ceremonies to public speeches to traditions to social conceptions of time. Not only does this section focus on how collectives remember together, it also gives voice to how collectives forget together. 4

Introduction

Part III takes wide aim of the notion of ‘public’ tracing memory within the ‘public-ness of the past’ as well as ‘memory of publics’. Tensions between public and private, individual and collective and how these relationships are negotiated are at the core of these chapters. Thus, the section considers how we may conceive of a public and how this affects relationships with the past. The concept of public memory is relatively recent and is related to the public use and relevance of memory (Phillips 2004). It drives our theoretical and empirical attention to the fact that the representation of controversial events often becomes a resource strategically relevant for institutional and political arenas. The public knowledge of an event, the ways in which it has been inscribed in the public discourse, can deeply affect the functioning of a democracy. Part IV addresses technologies of memory. Studies concerned with remembering at the cultural level generally focus on documenting the extent of cultural symbols in shaping the content and the meaning of an historical event. If collective memory is a set of social representations concerning the past which different social groups produce and institutionalize, the main question to address has to do with the kind of narratives adopted. By dealing with the relationship between facts and remembrance, in the last decade greater attention has been accorded to the relationship between form and content: once the role of artifacts in remembering has been recognized, the next step has been to focus on the problem of how objects may shape the content of memories. Following this perspective, the notion of ‘technologies of memory’ has been elaborated, which identifies artifacts as able to shape the content of memory. Part V brings together chapters with cases concerned with terror, violence and disaster, which have come to be contested, forgotten or controversial. ‘Controversial’ itself shows a troubled relationship between the past with present legacies of individuals, governments and events. Therefore, a sense of struggle – over definitions, public representation, recognition and so forth – is a common theme. These struggles map how different social groups intervene in public discourse trying to impose their own version of highly contested pasts. Struggles over defining the past imply an articulation of power and conflict. Sometimes they challenge the state and its legitimation itself. Sometimes they create counter-memories that contribute to re-establishing democracy in a country. Controversial pasts nearly always represent a unique opportunity for democracies: they provide the possibility to reaffirm ideals and civil values that have been neglected through violence and injustice. Part VI focuses on bodies and ecosystems. The topics covered concern the memory of water, bodies and ecosystems, raising relevant questions such as: how do our cells remember and how do they forget? Do different organs in our body remember in a different way? Are our traditional conceptions of memory oversimplified to represent the complexity of the processes at work? And moreover, what memory models can we borrow from seemingly unrelated disciplines that might aid in understanding mnemonic processes? Lastly, the Handbook itself is a memory artifact. During the writing of Chapter 38 ‘Memory of water: storage of information and spontaneous growth of knowledge’, Emilio Del Giudice passed away. We wish to dedicate the Handbook to his life and scholarship. We remember him with this phrase, which was among his favorites: The most intimate aspect of reality is invisible and cannot be perceived with the eyes but with a vibrant heart. The resonance of the oscillations of the heart with the oscillations of the universe is the essence of beauty. (Emilio Del Giudice) In the following pages the Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies offers the reader forty chapters of empirical cases and relevant theories to help understand these invisible realities. 5

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Note  1   This kind of research starts from the assumption that knowledge and intervention are part of the process itself of the researcher’s cognitive structuring. Examples are the experimental approach or the psychosocial approaches (as ‘cooperative research’, ‘participatory action research’, ‘action science’, ‘process consultation’, ‘empowerment’, ‘intervention research’ and others) which might fit under the general heading of ‘action research’. The pivotal cognitive mode in transformative research is ‘operation’, in the sense that the researchers work to change the properties under investigation.

References Argyris, C., Putnam, R. and Smith, D. M. 1985. Action Science, San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Becker, H. 1967. ‘Whose Side Are We On?’, Social Problems, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Winter), pp. 239–247. Climo, J. J. and Cattell, M. G. (Eds.) 2002. Social Memory and History: Anthropological Perspectives, Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. De Cesari, C. and Rigney, A. (Eds.) 2014. Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulation, Scales, Berlin: De Gruyter. Dunlosky, J. and Bjork, R. A. (Eds.) 2008. The Handbook of Metamemory and Memory, New York: Psychology Press. Erll, A. and Nunning, A. (Eds.) 2010. The Companion to Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, Berlin: De Gruyter. Festinger, L. and Kelley, H. H. 1951. Changing Attitudes through Social Contact, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Kattago, S. (Ed.) 2015. The Ashgate Research Companion to Memory Studies, London: Ashgate Publishing. Lewin, K. 1948. Resolving Social Conflicts, New York: Harper. Márquez, G. G. 2003 [1985]. Love in the Time of Cholera, New York: Vintage International. Mendels, D. (Ed.) 2007. On Memory: An Interdisciplinary Approach, Oxford: Peter Lang. Olick, K. J., Vinitzky-Seroussi, V. and Levy, D. 2011. The Collective Memory Reader, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Phillips, K. R. (Ed.) 2004. Framing Public Memory, Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press. Radstone, S. and Schwartz, B. (Eds.) 2010. Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates, New York: Fordham University Press. Rubin, D. C. (Ed.) 1996. Remembering Our Past: Studies in Autobiographical Memory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Touraine, A. 1984. Le retour de l’acteur. Essai de sociologie, Paris: Fayard. Tulving, E. and Craik, F. I. M. (Eds.) 2005. The Oxford Handbook of Memory, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Van Dyke, R. M. and Alcock, S. E. (Eds.) 2003. Archaeologies of Memory, Malden, MA: Blackwell.

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Part I

Theories and perspectives

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1 Rethinking the concept of collective memory Barry Schwartz

Collective memory’s fallibility is well documented; its powers less so. How ironic it is that so much ink has been spilled on memory’s incidental functions—the forgetting or ignoring of wrongdoing, legitimating and challenging power, exaggerating and underestimating virtuous acts, giving voice to the marginalized—while its major function, to bring us into more direct contact with the past, has led to nothing significant in the way of theoretical explication. Collective memory’s contribution to homo sapien’s survival is not its malleability; rather, memory enhances survival because it permits us to retain and recover so much of the past. Collective memory does not and cannot work perfectly, but if it did not work well enough for practical purposes—purposes which make the human species unique—then human society would be impossible. This essay bypasses issues concerning the sources and consequences of collective memory: how it reflects the distribution of power, on the one hand, or, on the other, the patterns and moral demands of culture. Memory study needs a better conceptualization of its object. Although conceptual clarification accomplishes nothing in itself, it does invite inspection of memory’s distinctive features, including the workings of memory in its collective aspect and the development and regulation of new lines of inquiry. Collective memory must be explored in its normal as well as pathological working, in how it gets things essentially right and preserves them over vast stretches of time. The study of the past—how it is known, interpreted, and preserved—is currently in an ambiguous state. According to the prominent psychologist Daniel L. Schacter (1995), memory, by and large, reflects reality, “but distortions can arise due to its constructive nature.” Schacter’s emphasis on distortion, so representative of the present state of collective memory scholarship, is symptomatic of disciplinary cultures plagued by excessive, sometimes pathological and often paralyzing cynicism. Research cultures are so determined to disclose memory’s deficiencies that scholars like Schacter often choose topics in which deficiencies are most evident. Books and journals typically show memory at its worst because few editors and readers are interested in cases of accurate remembering. The consequence is a “body of evidence” which exaggerates distortion and forgetting. The situation should be rightly understood. Man’s capacity to twist history to his liking is universal and infinite. Denial of the great genocide of Armenians; conservative Japanese efforts to transform World War II into a defensive war; French nationalists transforming their 9

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forebears’ collaboration with the Nazis into fierce resistance; the oblivion among Western Jews of Sholem-Shumuel Schwarzbard, David Frankfurter, and Herschel Greenspan, the first to stand up against their people’s tormenters—no one can claim that such efforts to remake the past by remembering or forgetting are rare. Knowledge of memory’s pathologies is indispensable to its understanding. However, the more investigators deliberately seek to identify these pathologies, the more they underestimate memory’s power and, worse, raise the possibility that they might actually have an interest in doing so. In either case, knowledge of collective memory’s normal working is underdeveloped. The field of collective memory scholarship is itself a collective enterprise which transcends the achievements and shortcomings of its members. The excesses of this enterprise must be recognized. Few scholars, it is true, have spectacularly overstated the mutability of memory. But, when many scholars select topics where past realities are doubted and differently interpreted while few select topics where such realities are demonstrable and have a limited range of interpretations, collective memory as a field of study assumes a deconstructive perspective.

History, collective memory, and commemoration Collective memory is often reputed to be an ambiguous and complex concept (e.g., Olick and Robbins 1998; Roediger and Wertsch 2008). In fact, few concepts are clearer or simpler, but only when recognized as an emergent entity linked to history and commemoration.

History History is an ancient discipline and admits of many definitions; collective memory is a new discipline, and its scholars are most familiar with the definition proposed by Maurice Halbwachs ([1950] 1980). History, as Halbwachs defines it, seeks an objective standpoint to assess the causes and consequences of events. It is “situated external to and above groups” and describes the past independently of contemporary opinions and conditions. Once established, Halbwachs believes, historical knowledge remains stable—its stream of facts and demarcations “fixed once and for all” (pp. 80–1).

Collective memory As history alone stands “above groups,” memory, individual or collective, is situation-dependent. But collective memory must be assessed at two levels. The term “biographical” memory refers to what individuals know, believe, and feel about themselves at earlier times in their lives. They do so by means of the brain’s storage and recall systems, which mediate information from parents, family members, friends and acquaintances, diaries, photo albums, recordings, birthdays, anniversaries, as well as other social frames, including dates of significant political, economic, cultural, and social events by which individuals locate their own past within the wider world (Halbwachs 1925, [1950] 1980: 22–47). Individual memories are the fundamental units of collective memory, but collective memory itself—the topic of this essay—refers to the distribution throughout society of what individuals know, believe, and feel about the past, how they judge the past morally, how closely they identify with it, and how much they are inspired by it as a model for their conduct and identity. Individuals remember no historical events or historical individuals before their birth or beyond their own experience, but it would be a mistake to conclude that the “memory” of such 10

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occurrences is merely a metaphor that simplifies a complex phenomenon by representing it in familiar terms, for to conceive collective memory in this way fails to show what it is or what it does. As a distributive entity whose key property is variation, collective memory denies the possibility of fully shared conceptions of the past. The adjective “collective” is not synonymous with consensual. That every distribution also has a central tendency makes total dissensus equally impossible. Above all, similar distributions of thoughts and feelings about the past appear in communities widely dispersed and unknown to one another, which means they reflect a transcendent condition common to all. Similar differences across time reflect this same condition. For example, Abraham Lincoln’s renown in the memory of American white people has exceeded that of African Americans throughout the second half of the twentieth and early twenty-first century. But whites’ and blacks’ renown for Lincoln, although differing in magnitude, has fallen at similar rates. This confluence can only result from the same cultural current influencing individuals located in different times and different racial communities (Schwartz 2008: 149, 166–7; Schwartz 2000b). Collective memory must therefore be treated as an emergent entity, a social fact connecting separate and often distant communities. Whether one considers differences at a given point in time or similar differences across time, collective memory is more than a framework for the interpretation of what individuals remember. The distribution of individual memories is itself a social context exercising direct effects on what individuals remember separately. In other words, collective memory’s influence is discerned by isolating the dominant memories of a group from the memories of its individual members (see Blau 1960 on “structural effects”). A useful analogy to collective memory is public opinion. Opinions, like memories, can only be held by individuals and can only be assessed by questioning individuals, but when these opinions are aggregated they assume new significance. Collective opinion affects the way the average person thinks about matters of the day. It renders individuals more or less confident in their personal opinions. Public opinion and collective memory alike affect elections, the morality of given lines of conduct, even the price of goods and services. Although collective memory and public opinion are similarly constituted and exert effects in similar ways, collective memory represents itself not only by what individuals, in the aggregate, believe about past incidents and persons but also by multiple forms of commemorative symbolism.

Commemoration Commemoration, in contrast to history and collective memory, distinguishes events and persons believed to be deserving of celebration from those deserving of being merely remembered. The primary vehicles of commemoration include objects which lift from the historical record those events and persons representing a society’s conception of its ideals and depravities. Commemorative writing includes eulogies, poems, plays, and commentaries motivated by reverence or enmity. Emphasizing the moral rather than factual aspects of the past, commemorative texts lean toward hagiography or condemnation and are thus distinguishable from analytic history and chronicling. Commemorative music consists of anthems, hymns, and songs of repentance, aligning melodic and harmonic structures and lyrics to historical entities in such a way as to dramatize their significance. Icons—signs resembling what they represent—commemorate the past by bringing it to visual presence through paintings, statues, prints, photographs, motion picture film, television, and online video. Monuments, including obelisks, antique temples, and other memorial structures, are designed to elevate the public imagination by dramatic reference 11

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to grand events and their men. Shrines—birthplaces, residences, state buildings, military headquarters, battle sites, and sites of individual death—bring the individual into direct contact with the sacred. Shrines (from the Latin word scrinium, meaning case or chest) are sacred because they are, by definition, containers of relics, objects that, in contrast to mundane things, are associated with extraordinary events or used by extraordinary people. Commemoration is also realized in naming patterns which make the past ubiquitous by incorporating it into the identity of businesses, streets, cities, towns, counties, states, rivers, and mountains. Observances, including periodic performance of anniversary, centennial, and holiday rites, perform the same functions—to maintain the memory of extraordinary events and persons and to preserve their essence within the collective consciousness. The “essence” of a collectively remembered entity refers to its “guiding pattern” (Shils 1981: 32–3) or, more concretely, the “basic pattern” (Kroeber [1923] 1963: 1–27) from which variations, including memory’s fads and fashions, emerge and fade. The relations among history, commemoration, and collective memory can now be stated. History’s goal is to rationalize the past; commemoration and its sites, to sanctify it. History makes the past an object of analysis; commemoration, an object of commitment. History is a system of “referential symbols” representing known facts and their sequence; commemoration is a system of “condensation symbols” (Sapir 1930: 492–93) that simplifies events of the past and clarifies the moral sentiments they inspire. History, like science, investigates the world by producing models of its permanence and change; commemoration, like ideology, seeks to promote commitment to the world by producing symbols of its shortcomings as well as achievements and values (Geertz 1973: 193–233). History and commemoration are at once the sources, vehicles, and products of collective memory. Nowhere is the interdependence among history, commemoration, and memory more evident than in the field of biblical studies. James Dunn (2003), prominent among historical Jesus scholars, declares that “the quest for the historical Jesus” can only be a quest for the “Jesus remembered” by contemporaries and successors, men and women who told or wrote about him and so marked the memory of his life (p. 335). Dunn’s statement stands out in the context of successful efforts, beginning in the first decade of the twenty-first century, to integrate collective memory, commemoration, and biblical history studies (Kirk and Thatcher 2005), but these efforts are generalizable to all fields concerned with the past.

What makes events memorable? Commemoration expresses the memorability of historical events. Social scientists with constructionist bents of mind believe, as did Georg Simmel ([1905] 1977) more than a century ago, that “if something is important, then importance must be ‘ascribed’ or ‘attached’ to it; in other words, it is important [and memorable] because the historian is interested in it” (p. 163). In contrast, the realist historian ascribes significance to an event because of its intrinsic qualities and consequences. Destructive and order-changing events, including the bombing of Hiroshima or the attacks of September 11, compel the realist historian to ascribe importance to them. So do creative events, such as the advent of Christianity and the colonization of the New World. As the consequences of these events cannot be defined out of existence, they become memorable.

How collective memory gets started Although many collective memories go back to time immemorial, others have more recent and ascertainable starting points. Both categories of events may be equally memorable. Almost 12

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nothing was known about U.S. president Abraham Lincoln’s young adulthood when he was assassinated in 1865. But William Herndon, Lincoln’s former law partner, located and interviewed 250 informants, including many former New Salem, Illinois, residents who had known Lincoln while he lived there in the 1830s. Because thirty-five to forty years had passed since these people had last seen Lincoln (an interval equivalent to that separating Mark’s Gospel from the Crucifixion), Herndon conscientiously weeded out distortions, rumors, and mistakes in order to estimate the truth value of their testimony (Wilson and Davis 1998). He then used this adjusted store of information to publish the most comprehensive biography up to that time of Lincoln’s early life (Herndon and Weik 1889). In a second example, Katsuichi Honda ([1971] 1999) during the late 1960s interviewed survivors of the December 1937 to February 1938 Nanking Massacre. These illiterate victims could not have written their own stories, but their oral retellings more than thirty years later enlarged the records of the war crime tribunals. Memories of Abraham Lincoln and the Nanking Massacre were transmitted orally across generations and have been retained long after the people who originally reported them have scattered or died. As these memories were passed on, they were modified, but their essence remained unchanged. How they remained unchanged is the problem.

Redundancy The Lincoln and Nanking narratives show that memory of a single event may have more than one “original” version. Edmund Leach (1976) explains how this is so in his account of myth transmission: Let us imagine the situation of an individual A who is trying to get a message to a friend B who is almost out of earshot, and let us suppose that communication is further hampered by various kinds of interference—noise from wind, passing cars, and so on. What will A do? If he is sensible he will not be satisfied with shouting his message just once; he will shout it several times, and give a different wording to the message each time, supplementing his words with visual signals. At the receiving end B may likely get the meaning of each of the individual messages slightly wrong, but when he puts them together the redundancies and the mutual consistencies and inconsistencies will make it quite clear what is ‘really’ being said (pp. 63–4). In brief, the “meaning” of the message is not in any single one of its versions or carriers but in all versions and all carriers taken together. To return to the examples noted earlier: Abraham Lincoln’s friends did not fall silent when he died, and survivors of Japan’s invasion of Nanking did not forget their suffering after their city was liberated. However, the eyewitnesses need not have told the same story in order for a good estimate of the real Lincoln and the real Nanking atrocity to appear on the “receiving end.” As Leach has demonstrated, the more varied the narrative, the more accurately it is conveyed and remembered. Such stories contain bits of information that are vague at the individual level but coherent in their assemblage.

Collective memory is emergent memory Historical information remains stable when the narrative arising from the multiple versions becomes independent of its tellers—or, to put it technically, when communicative memory becomes cultural memory (Assmann 2008: 109–18). Folklore study demonstrates the point. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French folklorists recorded almost 10,000 popular tales 13

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representing stable oral traditions spanning many generations. These anonymous storytellers, according to Robert Darnton, “kept the main elements [of the traditional narratives] intact, using repetitions, rhymes, and other mnemonic devices” (1984: 16; see also Rubin 1995). Recordings of these stories provide a point of entry into the mental world of the French peasant, who passed them on because he found in them a picture of himself and the hardships of his world. Folklorists could never reach this point had they confined themselves to one version of a story or to fine points of detail, and they felt no need to do so. With 35 variations on “Little Red Riding Hood,” 90 on “Tom Thumb,” and 105 on “Cinderella,” there is sufficient redundancy to discern the stem story’s theme, style, and tone. Redundancy discloses a collective memory that precedes and transcends any particular story telling. Recent data further demonstrate the stickiness of emergent narratives. Over a thirteen-year period (1975–1988), historian Michael Frisch (1989) instructed his college students to “write down the first ten names that you think of in [relation] to … American history from its beginning through the end of the Civil War.” He posed the questions to students with one or no previous college courses in American history and at two different universities in different states. The student cohorts had no previous communication with one another, used different textbooks, went to different high schools, and had different teachers. Nevertheless, their rank orderings of significant figures in American history were almost identical over the entire thirteen-year time span. Because the same names—George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Jefferson, in that order—occupied the top three presidential ranks for every test group, because these and other rankings were independent of knowledge of American history or differences in regional background, and because the test subjects regularly listed historical figures unmentioned in standard textbooks (notably Betsy Ross, who according to popular legend produced the first American flag), Frisch inferred the existence of a collective fixation on formative events. “[T]he list is not only composed of quasi-mythic figures: as a collective portrait, it has a kind of mythic structure and completeness itself, a character confirmed by its re-creation year after year in nearly identical terms” (p. 1,146). Collective memory’s consistency, Frisch concluded, presupposes its independence of the lives of individuals who retrieve and transmit it. The redundancies in scores of French and American stories are generalizable to other oral and written histories, including the New Testament. Although there are only four partially independent Gospels in the New Testament, they make up in time and topic what they lack in number. They refer to a real historical figure, were based on an oral tradition comprising the memories of interacting contemporaries, were written shortly (a few decades) after his death, remained after their tellers vanished. They also conformed to external sources, including Paul’s letters, Roman and Judean historical accounts, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Josephus’s sources, and the anonymous Gospel of Q (Redenquelle [“speech source”]), parts of which appear identically and independently in Matthew and Luke but is external to both. Such stories, in Emile Durkheim’s words, are “collective representations” ([1898] 1974) or “social facts” ([1895] 1982) that transcend and survive their individual sources (see also Durkheim [1901] 1951). Does all this mean that the Gospels “reflect” the life of Jesus? Yes, but no more than any series of books reflect the life of Thomas Jefferson, no more than any series of skeletal remains reflect the path of evolution, no more than the Scholastic Aptitude Test, which has never accounted for much more than a third of the variation in freshman college performance.

Preserving collective memory Coherence of historical description results not only from the obdurateness of the reality it represents but also because this reality inspires preservation and transmission. On the other hand, 14

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the perpetuation of material things—writings, recordings, and paintings stored in archives and museums or preserved on film—is necessary but insufficient for preservation, as many objects thus preserved are totally unknown or ignored. Because effective preservation maintains the past as a living thing, it requires a cognitive bridge connecting past and present. To this end, history must be relevant to the present and resonate with its conditions. Keying makes this connection by aligning current events with happenings in the past, and by activating frames that shape the meaning of these current events (Schwartz 2000a). For example, Abraham Lincoln invoked the American Revolution as a frame for the Civil War by keying his Gettysburg Address into it (“Four-score and seven years ago…”). Carl Sandburg (1934) described the liberating power of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal by keying it to the frame of the Emancipation Proclamation. Similarly, the Gospels keyed Jesus’s activities and fate to Hebrew Scriptures an estimated 300 times. What we call the Old Testament strikingly frames the life of Jesus. Keying and framing thus define collective memory’s function, matching the past to the present, as 1) a model of society—reflecting its needs, interests, fears, and aspirations; and 2) a model for society—a template for thought, sentiment, morality, and conduct. Presupposing one another, these models constitute the frames into which individuals key their experience and so realize its meaning (Schwartz 2000a; 2008; Poole 2008). The meaning of individual experience, however, involves not only the history, memory, and commemorations which frame it but also their transmission across generations (Olick 1999: 9). Collective memory is “path dependent”—affected not only by its social contexts but also by previous representations of its contents. Once a memory is established within a collectivity, it is difficult to modify let alone ignore. In Georg Simmel’s words: “We are free to make the first move, but we are servants of the second” ([1905] 1977: 92). To the extent that earlier Gospel interpretations contributed to the content of later ones, for example, the latter possessed an inertia that only significant social change could modify. That 90 percent of the first Gospel, Mark, appears in Matthew and Luke exemplifies the relevance of path-dependency for tradition as well as collective memory (Kroeber [1923] 1963; Shils 1981).

Reality, history, and memory Historical events and persons are unobservable, and the only way one can know them is through memories of their influence on contemporaries. But how much stock can be placed in recent, let alone ancient, remembrances? Is not the destiny of all memory, in fact, to be annihilated by history? Pierre Nora (1989) tells us so, but if we take him uncritically we must be willing to assert that history can be recorded and understood independently of what witnesses directly or indirectly remember. In recent years, it is true, a nuanced relation between history and memory has emerged, but that revision has proven to be too nuanced—too ambiguous and too confusing. British historian Peter Burke (1989) recognized that “memory reflects what actually happened and that history reflects memory.” This traditional view, however, is no longer valid. “Neither memory nor history seem objective any longer” (p. 97). Jacques Le Goff (1992), among other historians, declares that memory is history’s raw material but is invariably warped and dependent on history to correct it—a confusingly delicate relationship. Other historians, including Pierre Vidal-Naquet (1992), claim that memory is the only antidote for historical error. Dissensus on the relation between memory and history stems largely from the mentality of contemporary humanities and social science scholars who, being more suspicious of knowledge today than in any preceding generation, are more impressed than ever by evidence of memory’s imperfections. This new mood has its virtues, including the protection it affords against naïve 15

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realism, but if we do not recognize this mood for what it is, we lose more than we gain. To say that history and memory are more “selective” and less “objective” than commonly believed is to make a useless statement, because partial (selective) knowledge is not synonymous with faulty knowledge. Failure to recognize the reality of selected events and persons because they are selected, or because existing data allow for incomplete knowledge, utterly confounds the relation among history, memory, and truth. The problem is expressed in Maurice Halbwachs (1941) definition, with which few scholars today take serious issue. In The Legendary Topography of the Gospels, he declares: “If, as we believe, collective memory is essentially a reconstruction of the past, if it adapts the image of ancient facts to the beliefs and spiritual needs of the present, then a knowledge of the origin of these facts must be secondary, if not altogether useless, for the reality of the past is no longer in the past” (p. 7). In other words, the reality of the past is in the present. After seventy years of subsequent scholarship, this statement seems as if it had been made yesterday—which is precisely the problem. No one can doubt that present conditions motivate us to remember in selective ways, but Halbwachs makes no provision for memory as a route to selective realities. Memory is a form of perception, and perception is selective, observe Lindesmith, Strauss, and Denzin: “Motivations and needs sensitize us to specific stimuli or sometimes lead to distorted perception…. But these facts should not cause us to ignore the further fact that reality sets limits to perception…. No one can live in a real world if we see only what suits us” (1988: 124). Philosopher-social psychologist George Herbert Mead likewise defined “the past as that which must have been before it is present in experience as a past” (1929: 238, emphasis added). His point is a special case of Lindesmith, Strauss, and Denzin’s premise. Before we can take “the car to be where we are,” he observes, “we must have first arisen” from sleep (p. 238, emphasis added). That previous events must have happened in order for their consequences to occur does not mean that all memories are true; it does mean that present conditions can only be the result of past events. Such events have “an implied objective existence” and “they exist in the present through memory” (Maines, Sugrue, and Katovitch 1983: 164). In many cases, this implied existence is itself exaggerated, underemphasized, falsified, misrepresented, and misunderstood, but it would be a mistake to take these distortions as collective memory’s paradigm. Nor may we assume that memories are usually, if not always, undistorted. Realism is critical, and its assumption is modest: perception of an event is more often forced upon the observer by its inherent quality than imposed by the observer’s worldview and interests. Reality counts more than selective perception in the remembering of most events most of the time. Many scholars would reject even this qualified proposition. “To remember,” they repeatedly tell us, “is not like pulling files out of a cabinet.” But if memories do reflect, to some useful extent, an original happening, and if we do recall one thing at a time, then remembering is indeed comparable to pulling files out of a cabinet. Even more, if we do not know the past as Leopold von Ranke (1973) wished to know it, wie es eigentlich gewesen (as it essentially was), how could we know that a given representation of it is fabricated rather than authentic? If human memory were typically a “construction,” “fabrication,” or “invention,” it would utterly confound us by concealing rather than revealing reality. The concept of agency—one of the worst sticking points in collective memory scholarship—can be equally misleading because events and persons cannot be known to a later generation unless they are remembered and transmitted by predecessors, including friends, family, and admirers (“reputational entrepreneurs” or memory carriers, as Gary Fine [1996] and Gladys and Kurt Lang [1990] would call them). This statement reminds us that nothing can be known without mediation, and if mediation is conceived as a process of distortion, 16

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then the past becomes inherently unfathomable. We know about the past existence of distant galaxies, for example, because powerful but imperfect telescope lenses mediate the light they emit and gravity warps. Real objects, then, do not determine what we see; they affect it. That eyewitnesses, history texts, and commemorative objects, no less than accounts of the movement of light particles, should be totally independent of the reality they represent is difficult to conceive.

Distortion’s limits Because constructionism is so evident in the way memory problems are selected and defined, its merits as well as limitations must be acknowledged. “Constructionism” refers to the conviction that collective memory depends more on contingencies of social experience than on qualities of the entities remembered. Positively, constructionism compels recognition that the past differs from what it now seems to have been. The number of examples is limitless. Constructionism is a provocation, an invitation to interrogate memory by scrutinizing its contexts. Such is its most useful function, for there are no memories that remain the same forever or do not vary within a given place. Memory must always be taken as an estimate, not reproduction, of the past. The problem begins, however, when investigators attempt to understand propositions solely in terms of the situation within which they have been formed, and, above all, assume that social situations always induce a distorted perspective leading to falsehoods rather than essential or partial truths. Although warranted to an extent, the idea of situational distortion brings to mind Marx’s account of how exposure to competitive capitalism sharpened Darwin’s insight into natural selection. Darwin’s economic “standpoint,” Marx believed, led him to valid, not faulty, observations about nature (Angus 2009). Paul Ricoeur (2004) was right when he warned against those who approach memory on the basis of its deficiencies and therefore mask its indispensability to social and natural history. Abraham Lincoln’s relevance to America’s present obsession with race relations is among the richest cases in point. His personal belief in the immorality of slavery is indisputable, and it is necessary to understand its relation to his political motivation. However, to insist even in the face of significant historical evidence that his emancipationist values trumped his mystical attachment to the Union is to transform a search for historical truth into a false ideological “backshadow”: that we live in a society of relatively race-free opportunities means that a particular forebear of virtue and power must have been motivated to guarantee them (Schwartz 2008; Gallagher 2011). Two cognitive models help to define the limits of such distortion. The first is exemplified by Frederic Bartlett’s ([1932] 1950) oft-cited memory “experiments.” After reading to his subjects a Native American folktale titled “The War of the Ghosts,” a story of a mythical battle to the death involving supernatural forces, Bartlett asked them to replicate the story twenty minutes later. Applying the “repeated reproduction” method, he asked the same subjects to reproduce the story at later times. With each successive reproduction, the story became shorter and more coherent, with fewer mentions of supernatural powers. The order of events changed. The sacred narrative became mundane—a transformation involving omissions, simplification, and translation of esoteric into familiar detail. Gradually, a Native American folktale became a story that read as if had originated in England. Bartlett formulated the concept of “schema” to describe this transformation. A schema is a cognitive framework for the organization of experience which enhances the capacity to remember. If two people are asked to watch a football game, the person who knows what

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the game is about—its rules, strategies, player roles—will remember more of its content than the naïve spectator who knows little or nothing. The experienced viewer remembers better because his schema provides him with a grid on which to locate, then easily recall, the game’s events. Accordingly, the transformation of a Native American tale can be explained as a translation through the schema of Bartlett’s British subjects. The problem with Bartlett’s experiment, one that substantially reduces its relevance for understanding the relationship between memory and history, is that its design deprives subjects of key resources essential to remembering. Aside from his test narrative’s being irrelevant to most of his subjects’ interests, he failed to warn them that they would be tested and that something of importance might depend on their test performance. Because Bartlett’s subjects believed (correctly) their responses would be inconsequential, they relied on the default option, performing as “cognitive misers”—treating the information indifferently and impassively, condensing and simplifying, reducing it to a simple and familiar schematic structure. Most people must be cognitive misers in order to organize in their minds the vast amount of information to which they are exposed. But in many situations, people have a powerful interest in remembering accurately. Students preparing for career-determining examinations, military air controllers taking messages from besieged soldiers, detectives, scientists, and historians, among others, are highly motivated to remember because their interests depend on it. “Cognitive misers” in one situation thus become “motivated tacticians” in others (Fiske and Taylor 1991: 13). The ignoring or simplifying of information in one realm enables people to remember lengthy and complex details in realms that are most relevant to them. Simplification is not the only cognitive tendency overgeneralized by memory scholars. Elizabeth Loftus’s (1974) study of witness reliability involved test subjects watching a video of an automobile accident and being asked to estimate the speed of the vehicles on impact. Significantly, their responses varied with the words the researcher used to describe the impact (e.g., “How fast were the cars moving when they collided into one other?” versus “How fast were the cars moving when they smashed into one another?”). Subjects estimated car speed within a ten-point range: 30 to 40 miles per hour, but no subject estimated the cars to be traveling at 10 or 60 miles per hour. This experiment underestimated the efficiency of memory by overemphasizing its variations. Absence of extreme estimates is also evident in the conformity studies of Solomon Asch (1951), where confederates’ estimates influenced subjects’ later estimates of the length of lines, and Muzafir Sherif’s (1935) experiment on perceived movement of a stationary light. More recently, Daniel Kahneman’s (2011) experimental distinction between the “experiencing self” and the “remembering self” demonstrates that concrete experience of an event always differs from our memory of it, which is stored in the narrative we create for ourselves afterward. Certain contingencies, including the narrative’s ending, affect its remembrance as pleasant or unpleasant. Yet, Kahneman’s conclusion is merely the most recent in a long series of observations which maximize memory’s vulnerability to distortion by minimizing its dependence on experience. These include observation of “critical periods” in the life cycle before or after which memory of events is least accurate (Schuman and Corning 2012). At issue, however, is how much these contingencies affect memory’s accuracy. To say that memory is “inference to the best recollection” is to recognize the way it works, that is to say what makes it imperfect—but efficiently so. In these and all other experimental trials, memory regularly distorts reality to some degree, especially under conformity pressure, but within a limited range—and this limit confirms reality’s constraint on the malleability of perception. 18

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Conclusion In this essay, questions about collective memory began with a distinction between its pathological and normal states. The essay showed how collective memory gets started, how it literally emerges from interacting eyewitnesses and is transmitted as an emergent fact to a succeeding generation; finally, it demonstrated historical reality to be one of the factors—in some cases the major factor—determining what we perceive. Because we are able to capture history “as it essentially was,” the “dynamics of distortion” (Schudson 1995: 346–64) are offset if not negated by the dynamics of authenticity. Most readers will recognize that my application of collective memory theory is open to the charge of naïve optimism, of exaggerating the soundness of what we know about the past and underestimating what we do not know. My inclination and my colleagues’ criticisms of it can be represented as two competing forms of metaphysical pathos. As defined by Arthur Lovejoy (1948: 11), “metaphysical pathos” refers to the affective climate in which objective propositions are conceived. The pathos of collective memory scholarship is fatalistic; it more often tells us how we manage to get the past wrong than how we get it right. This disposition is related to memory scholars’ interest in challenging conventional wisdom, but it relies less on evidence than it should. Memory’s pathologists underestimate the importance of fact because they are convinced that individual and collective memory is inherently subject to distortion. No assumption has done more to impede progress in understanding the relationships between history, memory, and commemoration. This is because every memory, like every scientific accomplishment, is based on inference from incomplete information. In an opening section of this essay, I expressed the wish to explore memory in its normal rather than pathological operation, how it gets things right and preserves them over vast stretches of time. In the process, memory’s relation to history, one of its critical points of reference, is now clearer than before: although there can be no history without memory, assessment of memory’s accuracy depends on the accuracy of its historical criteria. As noted, if we know nothing about the essence of an event, we have no basis for claiming that we have described, distorted, or forgotten it. If such an event were unimportant to us, of course we would have no need to know about it. Realizing that commemorative symbolism is the primary indicator of an event’s importance, commemoration’s relation to memory and history becomes all the more evident.

References Angus, Ian. 2009. Marx, Engels, and Darwin. South Branch, Canada: South Branch Publications. Asch, Solomon E. 1951. “Effects of Group Pressure upon the Modification and Distortion of Judgment.” In H. Guetzkow, ed. Groups, Leadership and Men. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Press. Assmann, Jan. 2008. “Communicative and Cultural Memory.” In Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, eds. Cultural Memory Studies: An International Handbook, pp. 109–18. New York: Walter de Gruyter. Bartlett, Frederic C. [1932] 1950. Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. Blau, Peter. 1960. “Structural Effects.” American Sociological Review 25: 178–93. Burke, Peter. 1989. “History as Social Memory.” In Thomas Butler, ed. Memory: History, Culture and the Mind, pp. 97–110. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Darnton, Robert. 1984. “Peasants Tell Tales.” In The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, pp. 9–72. New York: Random House. Dunn, James D. G. 2003. Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman’s. Durkheim, Emile. [1895] 1982. Rules of Sociological Method. Stephen Lukes, ed. New York: The Free Press. ——. [1898] 1974. “Collective Representations.” In Sociology and Philosophy by Emile Durkheim, pp. 1–34. Talcott Parsons, ed. New York: The Free Press.

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——. [1901] 1951. Suicide: A Study in Sociology. New York: The Free Press. Fine, Gary A. 1996. “Reputational Entrepreneurs and the Memory of Incompetence: Melting Supporters, Partisan Warriors, and Images of President Harding.” American Journal of Sociology 101: 1,159–93. Fiske, Susan T. and Shelley E. Taylor. 1991. Social Cognition. New York: McGraw-Hill. Frisch, Michael. 1989. “American History and the Structure of Collective Memory: A Modest Exercise in Empirical Iconography.” Journal of American History 75: 1130–55. Gallagher, Gary. 2011. The Union War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1925. Les Cadres Sociaux de la Mémoire. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. ——. 1941. La Topographie Legendaire des Evangiles in Sainte-Terre. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. ——. [1950] 1980. The Collective Memory. Mary Douglas, ed. New York: Harper and Row. Herndon, William and Jesse Weik. 1889. Herndon’s Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life. 3 vols. Chicago: Belford, Clarke. Honda, Katsuichi. 1999. Nanjing Massacre: A Japanese Journalist Confronts Japan’s National Shame. Frank Gibney, ed. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Kahneman, Daniel. 2011. Thinking Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kirk, Alan and Tom Thatcher, eds. 2005. Memory, Tradition, and Text: Uses of the Past in Early Christianity. Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature. Kroeber, Alfred L. [1923] 1963. Anthropology: Culture Patterns and Processes. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World. Lang, Gladys and Kurt Lang. 1990. Etched in Memory: The Building and Survival of Artistic Reputation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Le Goff, Jacques. 1992. History and Memory. Trans. Steven Rendell and Elizabeth Claman. New York: Columbia University Press. Leach, Edmund. 1976. “The Structure of Myth.” In Claude Levi-Strauss, pp. 57–91. New York: Penguin Books. Lindesmith, Alfred R.,  Anselm L. Strauss, and Norman K. Denzin. 1988. Social Psychology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Loftus, Elizabeth F. 1974. “Reconstruction of Automobile Destruction: An Example of the Interaction between Language and Memory.” Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 13: 585–9. Lovejoy, Arthur O. 1948. The Great Chain of Being. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Maines, D., N. M. Sugrue, and M. A. Katovitch. 1983. “The Sociological Import of G. H. Mead’s Theory of the Past.” American Sociological Review 48: 161–73. Mead, George Herbert. 1929. “The Nature of the Past.” In J. Coss, ed. Essays in Honor of John Dewey, pp. 235–42. New York: Henry Holt. Nora, Pierre. 1989. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations 26: 7–24. Olick, Jeffrey. 1999. “Genre Memories and Memory Genres: A Dialogical Analysis of May 8th, 1945, Commemorations in the Federal Republic of Germany.” American Sociological Review 64: 381–402. Olick, Jeffrey and Joyce Robbins. 1998. “Social Memory Studies from Collective Memory to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices.” Annual Review of Sociology 24: 105–40. Poole, Ross. 2008. “Memory, History and the Claims of the Past.” Memory Studies 1: 149–66. Ranke, Leopold von. 1973. Theory and Practice of History. Georg G. Iggers and Konrad von Molke, eds. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill. Ricoeur, Paul. 2004. Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Roediger, Henry L. and James V. Wertsch. 2008. “Creating a New Discipline of Memory Studies.” Memory Studies 1: 9–22. Rubin, David. 1995. Memory in Oral Traditions: The Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and CountingOut Rhymes. New York: Oxford University Press. Sandburg, Carl. 1934. “Lincoln-Roosevelt.” Today (February 10):5. Sapir, Edward. 1930. “Symbols.” In Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Vol. 14, pp. 492–3. New York: Macmillan. Schacter, Daniel L., ed. 1995. Memory Distortion: How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct the Past. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schudson, Michael. 1995. “The Dynamics of Distortion.” In Daniel L. Schacter, ed. Memory Distortion: How Minds, Brains, and Societies Reconstruct the Past. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Schuman, Howard and Amy Corning. 2012. “Generational Memory and the Critical Period: Evidence for National and World Events.” Public Opinion Quarterly. Schwartz, Barry. 2000a. Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of American Memory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Schwartz, Barry. 2000b. “The Limits of Gratitude: Lincoln in African American Memory.” Organization of American Historians Magazine of History 23: 27–33. ——. 2008. Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era: History and Memory in the Late Twentieth Century. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Sherif, Muzafir. 1935. “A Study of Some Social Factors in Perception.” Archives of Psychology 27(187). Shils, Edward A. 1981. Tradition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Simmel, Georg. [1905] 1977. The Problems of the Philosophy of History: An Epistemological Essay. Trans. and ed. Guy Oakes. New York: Free Press. Vidal-Naquet, Pierre. 1992. Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust. Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman. New York: Columbia University Press. Wilson, Douglas and Rodney Davis. 1998. Herndon’s Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements about Abraham Lincoln. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

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2 Reconceptualizing memory as event From “difficult pasts” to “restless events” Robin Wagner-Pacifici

This essay is keyed as an appreciative but critical provocation of the entire memory studies ­project. It begins with the premise that memory studies or studies of collective memory involves a fundamental misrecognition. The argument, in a nutshell, is that scholars of memory should re-identify as scholars of events, and that in order to do so, events themselves (their formations and shapes, their mobility and desuetude, and their longevity) must be reconceptualized. Over the past several decades, humanist and social scientific studies of memory have identified many themes and frameworks, among them: the differentiation of memory and history; the distinguishing between collective and collected memory/ies; the dialectic of memory and forgetting; and the distinction between the way memory renders the past from the way it serves present purposes. These approaches, while extremely productive and illuminating, have nevertheless made a series of assumptions about the shapes and life spans of historical events themselves. Perhaps the most pervasive assumption is that memory concerns itself with the aftermath, after-effects, or afterlife of precipitating and causative events (even as the ontological status of the events themselves may be questioned). Memories are understood to occupy a meaningful distance (although spatial and temporal distances vary materially and symbolically) from actual events that have, essentially, ended. This distance can come in several forms: temporal, spatial, cognitive, emotional, and experiential. But while memory studies often articulates the ways that, for example, event-precipitated trauma can continue, the event itself is over. My critique of memory studies follows then from my attempt to elaborate a sociology of events. Traditionally, the division of academic labor has determined that the discipline of history is responsible for events and sociology is responsible for long-term conditions, processes, structures, and practices (the general, the chronic, the repetitive, the habitual). While sociologists have analyzed events, they have tended to favor comparative approaches. Diffidence about claiming events as legitimate objects of analysis has sometimes led sociologists to find more subversive ways to approach events. I would argue that memory studies in sociology has been one mechanism for smuggling events into the discipline. Memory studies or collective memory studies, especially those concentrating on museums, monuments, memorials, and political speeches, have managed to incorporate the so-called original precipitating events 22

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into their agendas through the aegis of analyzing spatially and temporally anchoring stones, cenotaphs, and words. I take issue here with this project (one in which I have myself participated) as I think it misrecognizes and misconstrues the event as memory.1 In other words, it mistakes the event for a memory. In my alternative approach, the memorial, the speech, and the museum are only provisionally congealed moments of the events themselves. While events do have both inchoative and terminative aspects, I would argue that they can never be determined to have ended once and for all. So, for example, I would argue that the 9/11 Memorial and Museum are part of the event of 9/11, one of its myriad shapes or forms, incorporating the massive police presence protecting the fountains, security apparatus, and arduous forms of ingress for the public. Saying this does not deny the rupturing reality and shock of planes f lying into a building on September 11th. But the event “9/11” only takes shape, becomes coherent, insofar as it moves beyond the initial stage of incoherence, rupture, and surprise. And it does take shape—as laws, wars, policies, police presence, and museums and memorials. Thus memory, whatever else it is, is part of the event itself as it lives on in intermittently tamped down and restless modes. Movement and form are both dynamic elements in the existence of the event, as events are both structured and f luid. To grasp them analytically, we must grasp their mobility, their provisional form taking, and their restlessness. Assessing the nature and capacities of the forms in which events live and through which they move is an alternative and, I would argue, more fruitful way of understanding the relationships between memory and social and cultural mediations. First, though, with some inevitable dispatch, I need to indicate what I mean by an event. Here I follow other sociologists. For Andy Abbott events are sites of causation for occurrences with consequences (2001: 273). Similarly William Sewell defines events “as that relatively rare subclass of happenings that significantly transforms structure.” Sewell’s approach brings him to focus on semiotic disarticulations in structures in the wake of events. Sewell writes: “Historical events are never instantaneous happenings: they always have a duration, a period that elapses between the initial rupture and the subsequent structural transformation. During this period, the usual articulations between different structures become profoundly dislocated” (1996: 845). But even Sewell does not go much beyond the idea of identifying semiotic disarticulations as he analyzes historic events like the French Revolution. As well, he sustains the epistemological distinction between events and their effects—that period inaugurated by structural transformation. So what do I have to offer as an alternative? I’m calling for a quantum sociology of events, analogous to quantum mechanics in physics. Quantum mechanics is a branch of physics providing a mathematical description of the dual particle-like and wave-like behavior and interactions of energy and matter. Within this branch of physics, everything—including light and matter—is made up of small, indivisible chunks called quanta. In some conditions, these chunks behave like particles, and in other conditions they behave like waves, without really being either.2 For analytical purposes, such an analogous approach to events would allow us to grasp events in their movements and trajectories and in their stabilizations in forms and objects: movement and stability; particle and wave; continuities and discontinuities; form and f low. This approach shares something with sociologist Jeffrey Olick’s goal of conceiving memory as dynamic rather than static, seeing it as a “medium of our existence in time” (2014: 28).3 Certainly I’m not the first to argue for this type of re-envisioning of events or social life generally. In a related initiative, Abbott describes the concept of the “turning point,” and the diverse ways we can imagine reality as either “discrete and categorical” or “continuous and numerical.” He goes on to say: “The social world is constantly changing and reforming itself. To be sure, large parts of the world reproduce themselves continually; much of it looks stable. 23

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But this is mere appearance” (247). Agreed. As well, Karin Cetina (2007: 132) identifies the difference between networked and scoping systems of financial markets by highlighting the way, in scopic systems, “trading tends to be a form of informed tracing [of nearly simultaneous inputs and outputs] a form of following and anticipating the f low, grounded more in a structure of feeling than in modes of calculation [calculation previously based on coordinated networked relations of trust and time lags].” But neither Abbott nor Cetina provides a mechanism for tracking the turning points, the turns, and the resultant trajectories. Nor do they provide an analytical language capable of grasping and illuminating the forms and the f lows. No one would argue against the idea that events are mobile. In fact we talk about being swept up in events. Nevertheless, we have a hard time precisely focusing our vision on that mobility, knowing where and how to look as events pull and change our world from under our feet. I propose that events can be examined under the overarching frame of a quantum sociology that tracks the particle and wave dialectic of their movements and their forms. How? Events take shape(s), are given names and codified in doctrines, manifestos, declarations, constitutions, bank closures, foreclosures and so forth. But events are also on the move, changing hands, washing over and reconfiguring diverse spaces, times, and populations. They are sometimes violent, sometimes quiescent, sometimes, apparently, in the doldrums—as when news reporters covering war zones and standoffs often paradoxically intone, “nothing is happening here today.” I’ve argued that previous analysis has been hampered by an inability to capture and account for both the shape-taking qualities of events and the mobility and developmental quality of events as they spread, grow, morph, or get bogged down. In my recent writing, I’ve suggested that three distinct features are at work in the process of the emergence, movement, and shape-taking of events: a performative feature, a demonstrative feature, and a representational feature (Wagner-Pacifici 2010). Events are mobilized by and constituted of speech acts or their performative equivalents that materially change the social and/or political world, including the identities of the actors and relationships within it. I refer, of course, to the theory of performative speech acts—acts that change the social world in and through their utterance—associated with J. L. Austin (1975). (For instance: “We find the defendant not guilty,” spoken by a jury foreman to a judge at the end of a trial.) All sorts of what Austin calls “felicity conditions” have to be met for performative acts to be successful, but they are understood to be uniquely consequential kinds of speech. The effectiveness of performative speech acts depends on their uptake by social agents (both individual and collective) in structured but essentially open social and political worlds. Performatives always pivot around the forces of convention and the contingent actualities of uptake. Great things are at stake in performative uptake, including the identity and fate of individuals and collectives—citizenship, nationality, rights, and obligations all hinge on orders, vows and oaths, surrenders, and decrees. Demonstrative terms are indexical. They distinguish proximal and distal entities and relations (for example, the pronouns this, that, these, and those are demonstratives). Demonstratives also include deictic functions of speech—pronouns (I and you) and adverbs of time and place (such as here, there, now, and then). These are elements of language that shift in their referent according to who is uttering them in any given moment of a communicative interaction. The demonstrative feature calls attention to the situated nature of all events. No event can occur outside of context, even as the context itself expands and contracts and is constantly shifting. Demonstratives actively reconfigure contexts through their reorientations and activated vectors. Demonstratives highlight orientations within and toward situations. Event actors and spectators, individuals and collectivities alike, must get their bearings in ongoing situations as relations and identities are in the process of 24

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transformation; they must determine what is ahead and what is behind (or finished), what is close up and what is far away, what is now and what was then, what is central and what is marginal. We should not underestimate the power of such features of orientation and attention. Finally, every event involves representational features (perhaps the feature most mobilized in memory studies): copies of the event, or aspects of the event, are generated and sent outward into the wider world of audiences and witnesses at a distance. The representations recruited for the enactment of the world-changing performatives and the reorienting demonstratives participate in the dialectic, which characterizes events, of convention and contingency. Representational copies attempt to stabilize and sediment the historical transition in the face of uncertainty, incoherence, distance, and resistance. Representations have multiple forms and mimetic capacities. The work of genre is critical. Genres such as narrative, drama, poetry, and pictorial images differentially contain and construe time, space, and causality. Sociologists, perhaps in the aim to find general laws and conditions, tend to under-specify forms, although recent interest in what is sometimes called materiality and iconicity studies identifies and specifies the social and cultural work that different forms do. There’s an interesting convergence here with actor-network theorists as they track the relays (or what some call translations) from one form to another in settings as diverse as laboratories and fishing villages. In my own terminology I want to track the handings-off of representations as they, in tandem with performatives and demonstratives, move the event along. No event lives for more than an instant without copies, and no event escapes representational transformation. Any ideas about permanent form-taking are futile, and there is an inevitable dialectic between the sedimentation and redirection of forms and meanings, even as social, political, and economic consequences occur in their wake. But a cognate question is necessarily raised here: how specific does the analyst need to get in detailing the variable capacities of forms to signify, to carry meaning, to shape events? Probably this is an empirical question that varies from case to case. I have found specific differences to be meaningful in certain examinations—for example, the essential diachrony of narrative precluding expressions of simultaneity. Of course, when the political stakes in expressing simultaneity are high (as when four airplanes are hijacked more-or-less simultaneously), these generic differences are obviously important. In a similar vein, the great art critic and essayist John Berger notes that medieval paintings of the Garden of Eden scene were painted via cartoon-like narrative sequences. First Eve picks the apple and eats it, then she gives it to Adam, then they discover their nakedness, then the covering, and then the expulsion. Then, he writes: “During the Renaissance the narrative sequence disappeared and the single moment depicted became the moment of shame. The couple wear fig leaves or make a modest gesture with their hands. But now their shame is not so much in relation to one another as to the spectator” (Berger 1972: 49). The event of the eating of the apple, the shameful recognition of nakedness, and the alternating sense of exposure to each other and to a judging spectator is constituted differently: the narrative program is metonymically condensed in a moment that is pictorially unrelieved by any suggested subsequent turning point. These kinds of genre specifics are important. Arguably as important, though, is how the ­tripartite machinery I’ve offered leverages our ability to track how events are both particlelike and wave-like. A provisional answer is that the demonstratives and performatives assist the representations in the dance of particle and wave. Here’s a snapshot: planes f ly into buildings and crash in a field in Pennsylvania. The President in a statement of ostensible solidarity with Arab Americans two days after the attacks of September 11 refers to winning “the war.” War metaphors are frequently deployed in social and political crises—so its appearance here 25

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might not immediately draw attention. Or it may have served as a (pre-emptive) representation of a state of affairs that had not yet been declared. Or, the phrase might also stake a performative claim if it had force as an authorized declaration of war, in itself containing a representation of the attacks of September 11 as an act of war, rather than a heinous crime. What’s interesting is that its status as a speech act is undecidable and is contingent on its uptake—or not—by a population in a state of shock, by other branches of government, and by allies newly aligned or aligning into a coalition. And here the dance of the performatives, the demonstratives, and the representations is at its most elemental and consequential. A populace reorients its vision, its concerns, its sense of time and history and space and boundaries. It also reanimates and reconfigures its collective identity. It looks skyward and outward in fear as a threat is identified as coming from without rather than within. Space expands and contracts, epochs are cauterized or transposed (an anachronistic cold-war instinct leads military personnel to think that soviet missiles are coming from the sea). War is declared, named (the “war on terror”), alliances are formed (the “coalition of the willing”). In each of these cases, we can look at the emergent forms as particle-like or as wave-like, as bound and binding or as available for mobilization. Finally, it is important to appreciate that events are not always on the move. Events can get stalled and turn in on themselves through neglect, abandonment, or indeterminate oscillations between opposing forms and forces. Thus eddy—meaning the circular movement of a liquid, counter to a main current and causing a small whirlpool—is a useful term for the analysis of events experiencing such indeterminacies. By definition, event eddies turn in on themselves and are thus without direction and mobility. They may be, nevertheless, filled with intense gyrations and collective emotions. These emotions often take the forms of lamentation—neither inarticulate nor fully civic, the sociologically anticipated pathway from individual trauma, to familial mourning, to collective sentiments, to political program gets diverted into a vortex. Event eddies are just one conceptual approach to the shapes, forms, f lows, and trajectories of events. An event in the doldrums, dragged under by political controversies, paradoxically, might take the form of multiple memorial projects. Here we find contested representations, unclear demonstrative orientations, and performative speech acts without uptake. Reconceiving these projects and moments of memory as part and parcel of an event itself leverages and extends our understanding of meaning moving through or getting stuck in culture and history.

Notes 1  Cf. Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz, “The Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial,” 1991 and Wagner-Pacifici, “Memories in the Making,” 1996.  2  According to one physicist: “Their behavior depends on how much ‘stuff ’ (other chunks) is nearby. If a chunk is very isolated from everything else (e.g., a lone electron in a cold, dark vacuum), then it behaves like a wave. If there’s a lot of stuff nearby (e.g., an electron in a metal), then the chunk’s position gets ‘localized’; you basically know where it is. That means the chunk behaves like a particle.” Personal communication, Leon Maurer.  3  “We commonly speak of a or the memory rather than of remembering; we judge memory as an accurate or inaccurate representation of the past rather than seeing it as a medium of our existence in time….” (Olick 2014: 28).

Bibliography Abbott, A. 2001. Time Matters: On Theory and Method. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Austin, J. L. 1975. How to Do Things with Words, 2nd Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 26

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Berger, J. 1972. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Group. Cetina, K. K. and A. Preda. 2007. “The Temporalization of Financial Markets: From Network to Flow,” Theory, Culture, and Society 24: 116–38. Olick, J. 2014. “Willy Brandt in Warsaw: Event or Image? History or Memory?” In Double Exposure: Memory and Photography, Ed. Olga Shevchenko, pp. 21–40. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Press. Sewell, W. 1996. “Historical Events as Transformations of Structure: Inventing Revolution at the Bastille,” Theory and Society 25(6): 841–81. Wagner-Pacifici, R. 1991. “The Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial: Commemorating a Difficult Past.” Co-authored with Barry Schwartz. The American Journal of Sociology 97(2): 376–420. ——. 1996. “Memories in the Making: The Shapes of Things that Went,” Qualitative Sociology, Special Issue on Collective Memory, 19(3): 301–21. ——. 2010. “Theorizing the Restlessness of Events,” American Journal of Sociology 115: 5, 1351–86.

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3 Pierre Nora’s Les Lieux de mémoire thirty years after Patrick H. Hutton

Les Lieux de mémoire and the crisis of contemporary French identity French historians have long aspired to place themselves within the avant-garde of historical writing. From Jules Michelet to Fernand Braudel, French historiography has enjoyed international prestige for pioneering new directions in historical research. Pierre Nora (b. 1931) has furthered this venture by taking French scholarship into an unexplored realm of intellectual inquiry in the late twentieth century, thanks to his project on the deconstruction of the French national memory. His Les Lieux de mémoire (1984–1992) serves as a landmark in the emergence of memory studies, not only in France but around the world. Nora presented his project as a collaborative enterprise of some 125 well-known colleagues. But its overall conception was very much his own. His explanatory essays frame its organization and guide its reading. Though he focused exclusively on France, Les Lieux was recognized at once as a foundational study in the politics of commemoration and, subsequently, as a turning point in the conceptualization of historical writing for our times. The success of its reception surprised everyone, perhaps no one more than Nora himself. Nora arrived on the scholarly scene at an opportune moment to pursue this project, a time in which the leading traditions of French historical writing were visibly losing the force of their once considerable cachet. Marxism no longer exercised the mystique it had once held for left-wing intellectuals of the postwar era. The Annales movement, with which cutting-edge research in social and economic history had been identified since the mid-twentieth century, had shed the evangelical fervor of its beginnings in the interwar years. The grand ambition of its founders, Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, to write a total history had stalled, as these pioneers of the Annales movement were followed by settlers content to articulate the paradigm. A sure sign of the way innovation had yielded place to convention was the elevation of its founders as commemorative totems of its beginnings (Hutton 1997). A younger generation of Annales scholars, Nora among them, codified its accomplishments in encyclopedias and handbooks during the 1970s (Le Goff 1978; Le Goff and Nora 1974). Significant in a more general way was the waning inf luence of the French revolutionary tradition as the foundational frame of reference for writing about French history. That tradition had been sustained by a variety of ideologies born of the matrix of the French 28

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Revolution—liberalism, radicalism, communism, and nationalism the most prominent among them, not to mention a resurgent royalism as their persistent adversary. Those who wrote about modern French history tended to identify with one or another among them, their fairness and objectivity notwithstanding. By the 1970s, however, historical writing inspired by ideological conviction—whether of the Left or the Right—was losing its appeal for French historians. French historical scholarship was in the process of cutting itself free from its deep roots in the revolutionary tradition. With that separation, the broadly conceived narrative of the rise of the modern French nation-state that had sprung from that tradition lost its coherence. The decline of the conception of French history as an ongoing narrative driven by expectations of the future signified a broader historiographical trend. Scholarship across the humanities and the social sciences was taking a rhetorical turn in which scholars sought to deconstruct narratives to understand the bias of their composition (White 1973; Harlan 1989). Nora’s project was conceived within this context. He aspired to inventory the many places of memory—some marginalized or obscured by the force of the revolutionary tradition—that had contributed to conceptions of French identity along the way (Nora 1984). By the time that Nora embarked on this venture during the late 1970s, France was no longer the nation once celebrated in the grand narrative about its making. Its stature as a nation-state had diminished over the course of the twentieth century. France had accepted a humiliating armistice with Nazi Germany at the outset of World War II, and the complicity of the Vichy regime in the Holocaust took decades to work through in critical historical examination. Belated cases against collaborators taken up during the 1980s were a cause of public embarrassment. France, moreover, had been obliged to surrender its worldwide colonial empire, in the case of Algeria with considerable strife. France retained its stature as an important nation-state, but now as one among many in an emerging economic and political confederation of Europe. Even for its high culture, France no longer enjoyed unchallenged pride of place. Francophiles still delighted in its beautiful language. But as a lingua franca for science and commerce, French had been obliged to make way for American English in an age of globalization. Possibly most important, the dramatic popular upheavals of the nineteenth century that had lent credence to the idea of a revolutionary tradition were now fading memories. Such were the issues that converged to raise questions about the nature of France’s historical identity as it might be understood in the present age. What remained to bolster national pride was a heritage, a resource of great complexity whose story Nora wanted to tell in an innovative way. He envisioned a new paradigm for writing French history, one that was less an interpretation of its realities, more a ref lection on the imaginative ways in which its identity had been represented through the ages. Like the founders of the Annales movement who had set an agenda for historical research in the early twentieth century, Nora set another at the century’s end. It was to be no simple task. He notes that he devoted a decade of scholarship to its conceptualization. His ref lections on the historiographical implications of his project continue to this day. As Nora addressed the editorial tasks of this venture, the bicentenary of the French Revolution loomed on the horizon. The memory of the Revolution, dramatized in images of its popular insurrections, had been the foundation of the French national identity. Drawing on the political tradition that the Revolution had inspired, France had provided leadership among the European nations in forging democratic institutions within the framework of a liberal society (Thomson 1969). By the late nineteenth century, the construction of a republic on stable institutional foundations was celebrated as a hard-won accomplishment, not only for the triumph of its principles over rival models of government, 29

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but also for its role in promoting science and the humanities, hallmarks in the making of a modern way of life. But on the eve of the twenty-first century, Nora asked, was the legacy of the French Revolution any longer an adequate frame of reference with which to evaluate the newly emerging realities of French identity? The once powerful image of France as a nation of small property owners in rural villages and small towns, politically democratic yet socially conservative, had become an obsolete cliché. France had become more urban, more heterogeneous in its population, more aware of its regional diversity, more caught up in the globalizing economy of a consumerist culture. The French had celebrated the centennial of the Revolution with a certain harmony and satisfaction. Preparations for the bicentennial, by contrast, were fraught with controversy. There was little consensus about how it should be celebrated (Kaplan 1995). One well-known scholar of the Revolution facetiously questioned whether it should be celebrated at all (Furet 1983). Certainly, it could not be celebrated in the way it had been 100 years before. If the Revolution was no longer the matrix of the national identity, how then should that identity be reconceived for the present age? Was it not time, Nora wondered, to inquire once more into deep sources of the French national heritage, evoking not only wellknown commemorative images of recent origin but also others that were residues of once bright and vital memories, now long lost and forgotten.

Memory palaces for the places of the French national memory Nora was ideally suited to undertake this project. As a young scholar, he had written two important articles on Ernest Lavisse (1842–1922), a magisterial figure in the professionalization of historical writing in the late nineteenth century and, one might say, a leading proponent of the grand narrative of French history. Lavisse had worked in the Positivist tradition of Auguste Comte in an effort to move historical scholarship out of the realm of literature into that of social science. As a professor at the Sorbonne, he had presided over an entourage of young scholars who enthusiastically followed him into the archives for endless hours of research. Lavisse was also a leading figure in educational reform. His multi-volume history of France became a primer for the French public schools. Well connected with leading statesmen of the turn of the twentieth century, he had played a key role in providing an intellectual apology for the liberal values of the Third French Republic. Nora’s study of Lavisse not only enabled him to understand the bias of historical writing in that era but also gave him a frame of reference for assessing the historical perspective of his own. He noted that Lavisse, for all his research, scientific rigor, and sense of civic purpose, wrote a history that was profoundly grounded in an unacknowledged memory of the origins and development of France as a nation-state. Lavisse presented the Republic as the instrument of the civilizing process, and as such endowed with high moral purpose. Such a history emphasized the continuity of the story of France from its medieval beginnings. It presumed a sense of direction (Nora 1986; 2009). Nora, by contrast, sought to explain why that conception of history had lost its meaning for the present age. Nora launched his project modestly in the late 1970s as a seminar at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, the prestigious French graduate college to which he had recently been elected. He claims that this venture was initially experimental, an open-ended excursion into the sources of the French cultural heritage. He is quite specific about the time that collective memory as a concept for exploring that heritage became a topic of particular interest to historians. He pinpoints 1970–1980 as the crucial decade (Nora 2011d: 13). In his public role, moreover, Nora doubled as an editor at the Gallimard publishing house. He had an 30

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insider’s knowledge of the best current research and was able to call upon eminent scholars to write about particular places of memory that he wanted to include in his ambitious enterprise. The project grew as it moved from his seminar to his editorial offices. Its scope morphed from three into seven large tomes over the course of the 1980s. As a point of departure, Nora took a lesson from the early twentieth century French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, who had written seminal studies about the workings of collective memory. For Halbwachs, collective memory provides the source material for history. But such memory is sustained by social power. The rise of professional history, Nora perceived, was coeval with the rising power of the bourgeoisie to fashion the nation-state in its own image. As its role expanded and its prestige grew over the course of the nineteenth century, the writing of history took its cue from this sustaining memory of its civilizing role. Nora further reasoned that as the nation-state as a magnet of social allegiance weakened in the late twentieth century, so too did the grand narrative of French history on which it was based. It is worth noting that only a few years before the first volume of Nora’s project on the national memory appeared, philosopher Jean-François Lyotard famously wrote a widely read book about the postmodern abandonment of the grand narrative of history (Lyotard 1979). That dissolution of the story of modern French history became the backdrop of Nora’s research project. As the capacious collective memory of the rise of the nation-state lost its force, the past was opened to a variety of alternatives. Each one offered a perspective on a particular aspect of French identity. A coherent story gave way to the aggregation of many. Here Nora borrowed the idea of places of memory from a book on the ancient art of memory by the English historian Frances Yates. For her, the art was more than a method of memory retrieval or even an appreciation of the ornate “memory palaces” that Renaissance cosmologists constructed on its principles. Yates’s method was philological. Places of memory were points of intellectual departure. One returned to such places to follow the stories they had inspired. The chains of memory they narrated were over time revised, and their meanings assumed different forms (Yates 1966). Places of memory, therefore, were references for writing a history that reconstructed the past as it had been imagined—as places on a map of memory. Nora’s plan for exploring the French national memory, therefore, borrowed her idea of spatial design. He framed his study as a repertoire of maps, each one grouping related memories in the conceptualization of the French national identity—republic, nation, cultural heritage. As an art of memory, his scheme could be read in two ways, genealogically and culturally. It was to be read genealogically as a descent from the present into the past. Culturally, it was read as a move from concrete toward abstract notions of the French heritage (Hutton 1993: 147–153). Still, this tripartite notion of Nora’s design does not adequately convey the multitude of places of memory that populate these schemes, whose diversity he and his contributors set about to explore. His three principal repertoires of maps might be likened to memory palaces, but on a scale beyond any that Yates’s Renaissance philosophers might have imagined. Within each palace, he identified conceptual networks that might be characterized as its hallways. His own essays—ten in all—opened doors to these passageways. Among the networks of the memory of the republic, he included such imaginary concepts as symbols, pedagogy, commemorations, and counter-memories of its opponents. For the nation, he organized his scheme around mnemonic notions of histories, landscapes, monuments of the state, past glories, and beloved writers. For his third palace, les France, the coordinating sinews included such categories as conf licts over identity, traditions, ways of life, and the archives and emblems that housed profound secrets of the French cultural heritage. Linked by these networks, the articles of his contributors served as rooms in the palaces, each one anchoring a different place 31

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of memory. Nora included some 125 contributors, all French with rare exception. Les Lieux was thus composed of 128 articles: 18 for the Republic, 48 for the Nation, 62 for Les France. Did such an aggregation of particular memories of France permit a unified conception of what it means to be French? Nora conceded that his repertoire of maps of French memory did not display the readily visible unity of the grand political narrative about the rise of the nation-state. But unity, he believed, could no longer be conceived exclusively in political terms with well-defined territorial borders. Here he treated France as an imagined community bound together by the network of its places of memory. Each site ref lected all of the others, he remarked in his essay prefacing his third volume, “Comment écrire l’histoire de France.” As he explained: Each of these essays is a profound sounding, a view of France from a f ly’s eye, a crystal ball, a symbolic fragment of a symbolic ensemble. There may well be a unified France, but none of these subjects, these objects, or these “places” would serve as the foundation for a unified history of France. Each is all of France, according to its manner (Nora 1992a: 22–23).1

Nora’s reflections on Les Lieux thirty years after As the memory phenomenon in contemporary scholarship took hold by the end of the twentieth century, Nora’s stature as an historian grew. In 2002, he was elected to the Académie Française. In 2011, an admiring colleague wrote a highly sympathetic biography (Dosse). Nora was called upon to speak everywhere about Les Lieux, and he composed numerous essays along the way concerning the historiographical implications of his project—both its strategy for writing French history and its re-visioning of French historical identity for the contemporary age (Nora 2011a; 2011b). In a recent reflection on the significance of his project nearly thirty years after the appearance of the first volume of Les Lieux, Nora placed his accent on the context in which his project might best be understood in light of France’s historiographical traditions (Nora 2011d). In Les Lieux, he had organized his historical places of the French memory as a genealogical descent: from republic, to nation, to les France. In this essay, he reverted from the spatial design of Les Lieux to a more conventional linear one that demarcated the ascending stages of the history of modern French historical writing. He outlined four broadly conceived stages in the changing historical consciousness of modern France, considering each in light of its understanding of memory. He dealt with the first two stages quickly. Early nineteenth-century historiography was romantic in its desire to make the memory of the past live again. The writing of such history aspired to touch living memory directly, as noted especially in the writings of Jules Michelet. For this much beloved historian, modern French history was visibly inspired by the revolutionary tradition, as he evaluated the past in light of his personal witness of the revolution of 1830. In the late nineteenth century, by contrast, historiography had come to wear the mantle of social science in the manner prescribed by Lavisse. Living memory sustained the writing of history, but as a tacitly understood resource. The heart of Nora’s account, however, was his contrast between the historiography of the Annales school and that of his own mnemonic turn. For the better part of the twentieth century, Annales scholarship had claimed the title of the “new history.” But for Nora, the new history of the Annales had grown old, whereas memory, long regarded as the unwritten source of history, had come forth from the shadows to serve as subject matter for historical scholarship in the present age. Annales scholars had been 32

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interested in collective memory, but primarily as the deep source of attitudes embodied in the collective mentalities of a rural, pre-industrial society whose habits of mind lingered into the modern age even though its customs were dying away. Here Nora was able to contrast the history of collective mentalities—the last realm of Annales historiography during the 1960s—with his own history of collective memory to dramatize the shift in historical thinking that was underway. The Annales interest in barely perceptible change over long periods of early modern history (histoire à la longue durée) gave way to an appreciation of the accelerating pace of change in the present age. The Annales investigations of the workings of living tradition to illuminate long-term cultural continuities yielded place to Nora’s inventory of the ever more frequent erection of commemorative sites, which he interpreted as efforts to resuscitate tradition’s waning authority. The historical study of the past as a way to anticipate the future was abandoned in the knowledge that today we no longer sense that the past sustains us, any more than we possess a sure expectation of where history may be tending. Nora also offered a new set of mnemonic places as a basis for this historiographical ref lection. It is instructive to juxtapose the old set to the new. The historical places of Les Lieux—republic, nation, les France—were here set aside in favor of historiographical ones—present, nation, memory. Each, Nora commented, has profound implications for what his project revealed about a change in historical consciousness in our times. As he put it somewhat dramatically, “the decade 1970–1980 is the one that has witnessed the most important mutation in the national memory (modèle) since the revolutionary decade of 1789” (Nora 2011d: 13). He characterized these places of today’s French historiography in the following three themes:

The Present Age has shed its ties to the past Nora argued that the present age is not an extension of the past, but rather an age apart. Lavisse’s conception of modern history, he remarked, had been future-oriented. It looked to origins and it anticipated a direction of progress through reform. Contemporary historical scholarship, by contrast, is present-minded. It has no foundational touchstone of the sort that Lavisse’s mémoire/histoire ascribed to the French Revolution, nor does it anticipate what might lie beyond the horizons of the future. It does not look to the near past for reassuring continuities but rather to random places of memory both near and far. Topics localized there are imported into the present insofar as they speak to present needs. The present age, therefore, is a time of memory—“an era of commemoration,” as Nora put it (Nora 1992b). In effect, he believed, the intense interest in memory in relation to history is symptomatic of a new way of thinking about historical time. Here he drew on the scholarship of François Hartog, who introduced the notion of “regimes of historicity” to characterize these shifts in the perception of historical consciousness (Hartog 2003).

The Nation and the waning of the French revolutionary tradition As for the French nation, its changing politics reflected the changing identity of its culture. The notion of republican/royalist rivalry issuing from the combats of the nineteenth-century revolutionary tradition had been laid to rest. Its late twentieth-century avatars were the Communist Party and the faithful disciples of Charles de Gaulle. Both had been mainstays of the French resistance during World War II and so renewed the memory of the revolutionary tradition in the postwar era. By the 1970s, however, the Communist Party had become a senescent, sectarian organization, conspicuous for its outdated doctrinal orthodoxy. 33

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Its stance on the student “revolution” of 1968 was noteworthy for its refusal to take seriously the grievances of this youth movement for educational and environmental reform. By the mid-1970s, the Party had succumbed to what Nora characterizes as the “Solzhenitsyn effect”: the brutal record of its dictatorial forebearers had been too starkly exposed to merit apology any more. Communism, irreparably vitiated by its Bolshevik heritage, was dying. The fortunes of Gaullism played out somewhat differently. As a coherent political movement that embodied French nationalism, the Gaullist coalition appeared to have disintegrated upon the death of de Gaulle in 1970. But his memory lived on as his nationalism of statecraft was transfigured into patriotism associated with the larger French cultural heritage (Nora 1990; 1992c). This subtle transition from ideology to heritage was to be observed as well, Nora argued, in the emergence of the hybrid politics of presidents Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and François Mitterrand during the decade 1975–1985. Giscard, a latter-day embodiment of Orléanist elegance, combined respect for tradition with support for technological initiatives. Mitterrand, the first professed “socialist” to win the presidency, was a humanist and a cultural Catholic. Their pragmatic policies, Nora contended, signaled the end of the old ideologies as defining forces in French politics. The revolutionary tradition had come to be identified with a dated way of thinking. As its inf luence faded, a middle-of-the road politics emerged to guide French public affairs (Nora 2011d: 13–19). About the same time, François Furet, then a leading historian of the French Revolution, emphasized the consolidation of governmental power and reduced ideology to the status of an imaginary discourse in his provocative reinterpretation of its long-term legacy (Furet 1978: 15–16, 46, 49).

Memory then and now Given the weakening authority of the revolutionary tradition, Nora argued, collective memory ceased to sustain historical interpretation in the way it had a century before. For Lavisse and his colleagues, he noted, collective memory had provided centuries of staying power upon which they might draw to correct its distortions and remedy its deficiencies. At the same time, historians had cautioned one another not to stray too close to the present (roughly defined as the span of three generations), for they judged living memory unreliable and resistant to critical interpretation. For historians of that epoch, it took time for testimony to coalesce into usable evidence. But so much had the chain of the French national memory been fractured over the course of the twentieth century, first by war and then by fast-moving technological change, that yesterday’s wisdom was today dismissed with hardly any regret. What counted for understanding change in the present age was rapid, ceaseless innovation. As the power of collective memory born of the experience of the past waned, that of living memory in the present ironically acquired ever greater intensity. Living memory, once identified with the wisdom of the ages, was reconceived narrowly as the experience of the present age. What had been perceived to be the deep living sources of the national history were reduced to lifeless remains, accessible only in their commemorative representations. The effect was two-fold. First, a newfound interest in commemoration burst forth on the public scene during the 1970s and quickly became a national obsession (Nora 2002b). Commemorative events took off in a way that exemplified the democratization of public memory. The new enthusiasm for memory was made manifest especially in the historic preservation movement, which vastly widened the sphere of its concerns. The French had long sought to refurbish their decaying cathedrals and chateaux. But now mementos of a vanishing rural way of life came to the fore. As the young escaped the small towns and villages of 34

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France, living memory of a way of life that had roots in the Middle Ages gave way to the commemoration of its passing. This expansion of commemorative practices signified nostalgia for a disappearing way of rural life in the face of an emerging urban economy and the growing ethnic diversity of the French population. The cause today among the thousands of emerging local historic preservation societies, Nora remarked, is “to save the village laundry and the cobblestones of the old streets” (Nora 2011d: 18). Second, and as a counter-current, living memory was reborn as the mode of contemporary history, stimulating popular interest as never before. Witnesses to the great or catastrophic events of our times wrote testimonies. Statesmen wrote accounts of their years in office. Even historians wrote memoirs (égo-histoires) of their entry into and progress within the profession. On the popular level, the historical reenactment movement took off, drawing in cadres of history buffs who wished to experience vicariously “what life was like” in the events that they dramatized in costume and ritual performance. Living memory was perceived to be the real “existential” history, and as such was given fuller attention than ever before. But the span of such living memory had contracted narrowly around the generation that had come of age. In this way, living memory became a surrogate for contemporary history, for what mattered most was the present age conceived as the privileged moment of historical time.

Nora and his critics Paul Ricoeur: “L’Insolite Lieux de mémoire” The most searching critique of Nora’s project was offered by philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005), a leading phenomenologist of his day. A decade after the final volume of Nora’s project appeared, Ricoeur engaged him in a polite exchange. It was one between two very different kinds of scholars and, one might say, personalities. Nora was the historiographer par excellence. He had pioneered a new way of framing history by reconfiguring its relationship to memory. Genial and outgoing, he sensed that he was riding the crest of a new wave in historiography. Ricoeur, by contrast, was a rear-guard philosopher. By nature, he was modest and retiring. He followed new trends in historical writing with interest, but commented on them only after they were solidly established. He took up the “new” work of the Annales school, for example, as it settled into academic institutionalization (Ricoeur 1980: 7–12). His following project on the theory of narrative appeared long after academic fanfare over the rhetorical turn in scholarship had quieted down (Ricoeur 1983–1985). Accordingly, his study of the relationship between memory and history, his last major work, was offered as a mature reflection on decades of scholarship (Ricoeur 2000). He probed the meaning of this line of scholarly inquiry as tested against the teachings of the great philosophers of the Western tradition (Ricoeur 2002: 54–55). Ricoeur challenged Nora for his abandonment of the grand narrative of mémoire/histoire. He addressed Nora’s thesis about the mnemonic turn from the vantage point of the most neglected realm of his project—that of the relationship between memory and history in Holocaust studies. Whereas Nora had devoted his energy to issues about the French identity, his German counterparts had been intensely preoccupied with the repression of the Holocaust in postwar memory. By the late 1980s, Holocaust studies had become a major field of scholarly interest in Germany, the United States, and Israel. More indebted to Freud than to Halbwachs in method, Holocaust scholars addressed memory as a process of mourning and noted limits to the historical representation of the suffering of victims of Nazi crimes against humanity. Ricoeur, therefore, called upon Nora to take into consideration this neglected line 35

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of inquiry, for it revealed the nature of memory’s autonomy vis-à-vis history (Ricoeur 2000: 529–534). Here, unrequited memory (insolite mémoire) bodied forth its claims, for trauma does not respond to the historians’ interrogation in the transparent way that Nora proposed. The living memory of the Holocaust remained opaque to the outside world, its meaning held fast within the psyches of its victims. What such memories might reveal was enshrouded in their existential suffering. Before proceeding to issues of identity, Ricouer argued, history had first to beg pardon of these memories. Mourning takes time to come to terms with the ordeal of persecution (Ricoeur 2000: 648–650). Ricoeur, therefore, underscored the importance of sorting out the properties of memory vis-à-vis those of history as modes of evoking the past. Nora may have argued for the unraveling of the memory/history relationship in the present age. But in history’s interrogation of memory in the Lieux project, Ricoeur asked, was history not laying claim to domination over memory? Was Nora not minimizing the significance of repressed memory, dormant but alive, by limiting his discussion to residues of memory that no longer animated contemporary conceptions of the past? To adduce his argument, Ricoeur turned to philosopher Jacques Derrida’s writing about “Plato’s pharmacy,” based on a critical reading of Plato’s Socratic dialogue Phaedrus (Derrida 1972: 69–197). Therein Socrates had raised the question: is the written word as opposed to its oral expression a remedy or a poison in the pursuit of knowledge? Ricoeur’s point is that neither memory nor history can impose its will upon the other. Each has its own vocation as a way of truth, yet in ways that can never be totally reconciled. History affirms the reality of the past in fixing its events accurately. It aspires to tell the truth about what happened. But history is always an interpretive construct. It explains the meaning of the past in a way that is self-limiting. History composes a set narrative out of the many ways in which a story might be told. Memory, in contrast, is the seat of the present imagination. It is born of experience, and it is a “little miracle” in its open-ended capacity to awaken the imagination of the past in the present. Whereas history is deliberative and studied, memory is dynamic and inspirational. Memory, therefore, cannot be trapped in the logic of historical narrative. Memory may take unexpected turns, thanks to sudden promptings that revitalize the meaning of the past for the present (Ricoeur 2000: 175–180, 525, 644–646). Nora took Ricoeur’s gentle prodding seriously. It became the basis for their scholarly exchange in November 2002, published in the journal Le Débat. Ricoeur’s attention to the methods of Holocaust scholarship on memory also prompted Nora to take into consideration for the first time his own Jewish heritage. The scion of an assimilated Jewish family, he had thought of that heritage as only a marginal aspect of his identity, even though he as an adolescent during the war years had outwitted agents of the Gestapo when they had come to arrest him. On this issue he was pressed as well by his biographer François Dosse, who sought to find a larger place for Nora’s Jewish heritage within his life story (Ricoeur 2002: 51–56; Dosse 2011: 10, 256–257; Nora 2013: 46–49). The terms of the debate between Ricoeur and Nora were couched in an exchange about the meaning of the work (travail) of remembering as opposed to the duty (devoir) to remember. These terms were metonyms, signatures of opposing ways of thinking about memory. Ricoeur’s “work of memory” denoted the Freudian task of acknowledging guilt for past failings (more specifically France’s complicity in the Holocaust during the Vichy era), followed by a process of “working through” repressed memories that continue to haunt present-day consciousness. Nora’s approach, by contrast, battened on the Halbwachsian notion of the role social power had played in the selection of the main element of the modern French national memory. His study illuminates history’s judgment on the relative importance of artifacts, mementos, and souvenirs of a past that had lost its relevance for defining identity in the present age. 36

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Nora responded to Ricoeur with tact. He took issue with Ricoeur for a critique that aspired to take the memory/history relationship into a realm beyond time, when in fact what was most important for understanding his argument was historical time itself. Nora underscored the importance of the context in which the memory phenomenon had emerged—as a transition between “regimes” of historical time. He pointed out that he had embarked on this project in an open-ended way, never quite sure where his research would lead. Along the way he found that his interest in the question of memory vis-à-vis history was an intuitive response to a shift in the contemporary understanding of historical time. The notion of places of memory as a concept for historical interpretation, he contended, is no more strange than the well established ones to which historians ordinarily have recourse, such as fact, cause, structure, or mentality. At issue, he continued, was a breakdown in a tradition of historical thinking about a relationship between past and present that dated from the time of the French Revolution. Historical realities in the late twentieth century were visibly different from those earlier in the century. Accordingly, the devoir of memory as an imperative for the present age had been incited paradoxically by a perceived need to preserve a far greater range of mementos of the past than ever before, all because of uncertainty about what posterity might want to recall (Nora 2002a). Nora therefore posited crossing historiographical ideas that were reshaping thinking about the relationship between memory and history (Nora 2002b). The first was the notion that time is accelerating. This perception was born of the fast pace of innovation in all spheres of life in recent decades, especially in economic and cultural endeavors. As a historiographical interest, politics had been marginalized. Consumerism, gender reconfiguration, and especially technologies of media in a digital age drove this perception. Combined, they reinforced the sense of the irrelevance of the politics of the past for understanding the present age, now cut adrift from a timeline long identified with the modern era. The teleological notion of progress inherent in such thinking had lost its appeal. Not only had expectations for the future become uncertain, but so too had the meaning of the heritage of the past. The obsession with memory was symptomatic of the anxiety that sprang from such uncertainty. The second historiographical idea, Nora proposed, concerned the “de-colonization” of history. This concept had less to do with historical time, more with social discontent. With the dissolution of the grand narrative of history as the story of the rise of the nation-state, a surge of memories held by disenfranchised groups welled forth to demand history’s recognition. Their cause, too, became a “devoir” of memory in light of new thinking about the politics of identity. The collective memories of these groups had the distinction of being “living memories,” as opposed to what were now regarded as faint images of the one that had once promoted a unified conception of French history. Identity politics aroused a rivalry among conceptions of history advanced by particular groups. This combined challenge—the call to memorialize the heritage of the past in all its myriad forms, together with the demand to acknowledge the living memory of minority groups—threatened to take possession of what had once been regarded as the authoritative role of professional historians: their singular ability to interpret the meaning of the past for the present generation. Whereas it was once assumed that history would reign over memory by subjecting it to rigorous critical analysis, memory now made its claims upon history.

Laurent Gervereau: “Pourquoi canoniser Pierre Nora” Another type of critique was more practical. So celebrated has been Nora’s accomplishment that some critics have asked whether its importance was being exaggerated. Laurent Gervereau, a leading French public intellectual, has cautioned against an overly ready reliance 37

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on Nora’s thesis. He pointed out the perils of conflating the “phénomène mémoire” with the “moment de Nora.” Acknowledging the value of Nora’s contribution to rethinking French history, he wanted to show that no thesis is invulnerable to criticism (Gervereau 2011). Gervereau noted two dangers in Nora’s approach to history, one pedagogical the other scholarly. In terms of pedagogy, he claimed that Nora’s project has little to offer students coming of age today. It is too much, he argued, to ask beginning students in French history to find an orientation amidst the kaleidoscopic world of places and images that Nora offers as a framework. Chronology matters, Gervereau reaffirmed. More importantly, today’s students live in a vastly different world from that contained in Nora’s conception of the French national memory, which for all of its innovation is retrospective in outlook. Nora has little to say about the larger world in which the French now live. Our references today, Gervereau pointed out, are not those of Lavisse’s nation-state, now disassembled, inventoried, and redeployed for ref lection, but rather local and global places of memory that must be interpreted with the future in mind. Nora’s history envisions not new beginnings but the recomposition of old ways of understanding the French past. His project offers no pathway into this emerging global culture. Our need today, Gervereau asserted, is to interpret the meaning of the past less with an eye to our present “era of commemoration,” more with one looking to the future. As for the scholarly plane, Gervereau contended that Nora’s map of history as a mnemonic landscape renders history vulnerable to identity politics. Far from making history the master of memory in its investigative interrogations, history has become a prey to the biased interpretations that are generated at the topical reference points on his maps of memory. With his emphasis on the rhetoric as opposed to the evidence of history, Nora discounts the honest labors of historians in their primary research. The truth of history lies in hard evidence of empirical facts gathered, more than in representations of the past as it was once imagined. The old method of picking up on traces of evidence is still our best route to knowledge of the past reliable enough to serve as a basis for ref lection about our present choices. Nora’s forte was his work as a publicist, building a network of useful professional associations and writing critical essays of a theoretical nature. To the limits of history, Gervereau suggested, must be added the limits of memory as an avenue for investigating the meaning of the past, for it recycles old ways of assessment when our need is for new beginnings. Gervereau seems to be saying that historians should rescue their work from this idealist realm of imagined communities in favor of the empirical one of tangible realities. Nora’s project, he concluded, is at best transitional. It marks the end of an era in its deconstruction of a once valued model of history. But it provides no guidance for how we may replace it.

Nora’s reply to his critics Nora has taken much of such criticism to heart. He has his own nostalgia for what has been lost in the mnemonic turn in French historiography. His recent writings betray some unease about the Pandora’s box that he has opened: memory, with its present-mindedness, has come to trouble history in a new way. He acknowledged with irony that a new historiography that had discarded ideology in favor of rhetoric has opened the way for the return of ideology in a new guise, one of a nature that has politicized the meaning of the past to serve present-minded purposes of particular groups whose interests were once subordinate to those of the society at large. Their varied claims upon the past have had a subversive effect on any quest for interpretative coherence. These concerns led Nora to think again about why the Positivist tradition of nineteenth-­ century historiography had held its grip on the interpretation of the French past for so long. 38

Pierre Nora’s Les Lieux de mémoire

Even the Annales movement, which gravitated toward a cosmopolitan viewpoint, never ­abandoned its French point of departure. In a talk at Blois in 2011, then published in Eurozine, Nora ref lected on what had been lost with the demise of French history conceived in the old way as mémoire/histoire (Nora 2011c). In that guise, historical scholarship had contributed to the stability of a long tradition of national identity. Before the rhetorical turn with its scrutiny of metanarratives, historians had been able to concentrate on problems of evidence. Historians prided themselves on the long hours they labored in the archives. Positivist in their method, they concentrated on descriptive certainties and contented themselves with telling the stories that unfolded from them. They stood apart from the political fray. They thought of their role as essential in the education of the nation to civic purpose. Research specialists, some nonetheless wrote general works for the instruction of students in primary and secondary schools. Historians in that tradition, Nora noted, played a role of leadership within an emerging profession. Some spoke of themselves as artisans supervising the work of journeymen laborers in the archives. Marc Bloch, beloved among the Annalistes for his scholarly integrity and personal courage, famously cast himself in just such a role (Bloch 1949). Historiography was scrupulously devoted to problems of evidence, patient sifting through ordinary documents, while never overly hopeful of uncovering the extraordinary find. Positivist historians in the tradition of Lavisse were self-assured in their conception of their role. They were oriented toward the past and wary of moving too close to the present for fear that living memory might cloud their judgment. They took seriously their pedagogical role. They respected the grand narrative of the history of France, so that youth might share a common appreciation of their heritage. The French Revolution was the foundational event of modern history. Adversaries about its meaning were paradoxically bound together in a unified framework of historical understanding. Not anymore, Nora allowed. Memory has been appropriated by a consumerist mentality about its uses, and as such has come to be enlisted in the service of political causes that distort the historical record. He expressed his particular misgivings about interpretation identified with “neo-colonial” historiography, for he worried that the exaggerated place it ascribed to imperialism in the French heritage would diminish the significance of all that French civilization has been when viewed in its ensemble. His first book had dealt with the Algerian crisis, and one might argue that, as a lycée professor in Oran during the late 1950s, he was a late exemplar of France’s “mission civilisatrice” in the last redoubt of its far-f lung colonial empire. In this closing assessment, Nora reminds us that history is not what it used to be, and that this is a time in which the French need the historians’ impartial judgment more than ever before. If Nora’s project is a requiem for a past approach to history more than a plan for how it should be addressed in the future, it is nonetheless an honest effort to separate what is living from what is dead in the legacy of the French past. Such has been the devoir that has defined his contribution to our understanding of the relationship between memory and history in our times.

Note  1  The conceptual coherence of Nora’s project was lost in translation as it was parceled out into two separate American editions. American publishers divided up and abridged the project, picking and choosing among its essays.

References Bloch, Marc. 1949. Apologie pour l’histoire ou métier d’historien. Paris: Armand Colin. Derrida, Jacques. 1972. La Dissémination. Paris: Seuil. 39

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Dosse, François. 2011. Pierre Nora; homo historicus. Paris: Perrin. Furet, François. 1978. Penser la Révolution française. Paris: Gallimard. ——. 1983. “Faut-il célébrer le bicentenaire de la Révolution française?” L’Histoire 52: 71–7. Gervereau, Laurent. 2011. “Pourquoi canoniser Pierre Nora?” Le Monde.fr (1 November), consulted 14 July 2013. Harlan, David. 1989. “Intellectual History and the Return of Literature.” American Historical Review 94: 581–609. Hartog, François. 2003. Régimes d’historicité; présentisme et expériences du temps. Paris: Seuil. Hutton, Patrick. 1993. History as an Art of Memory. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. ——. 1997. “France at the End of History: The Politics of Culture in Contemporary French Historiography.” Historical Reflections 23/2 (Spring): 105–27. Kaplan, Steven L. 1995. Farewell Revolution: The Historians’ Feud, France, 1789/1989. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Le Goff, Jacques, ed. 1978. La Nouvelle histoire. Paris: Editions Complexe. Le Goff, Jacques, and Pierre Nora, eds. 1974. Faire de l’histoire, 3 vols. Paris: Gallimard. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1979. La Condition postmoderne. Paris: Editions de Minuit. Nora, Pierre. 1984. “Entre mémoire et histoire.” In Lieux de mémoire 1: xviii–xli. ——. 1984–92. Les Lieux de mémoire, 3 vols. Paris: Gallimard. ——. 1986. “L’Histoire de France de Lavisse.” In Lieux de mémoire 2: 317–75. ——. 1990. “L’Historien devant de Gaulle.” In Présent, nation, mémoire, 278–88. ——. 1992a. “Comment écrire l’histoire de France.” In Lieux de mémoire 3: 11–32. ——. 1992b. “L’Ere de la commémoration.” In Lieux de mémoire 3: 977–1012. ——. 1992c. “Gaullistes et Communistes.” In Lieux de mémoire 3: 347–93. ——. 2002a. “L’Histoire au second degré; réponse à Paul Ricoeur.” Le Débat no. 122 (November– December): 24–31. ——. 2002b. “Reasons for the Current Upsurge in Memory.” Transit 22 (4 April): 1–8. ——. 2009. “Pourquoi lire Lavisse aujourd’hui?” In Présent, nation, mémoire, 193–204. ——. 2011a. Historien public. Paris: Gallimard. ——. 2011b. Présent, nation, mémoire. Paris: Gallimard. ——.  2011c. “Recent History and the New Dangers of Politicization.” www.eurozine.com (24 November), consulted 16 August 2013. ——. 2011d. “Les Trois Pôles de la conscience historique contemporaine.” In Présent, nation, mémoire, 7–29. ——. 2013. Esquisse d’égo histoire. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer. Ricoeur, Paul. 1980. The Contribution of French Historiography to the Theory of History. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ——. 1983–1985. Temps et récit, 3 vols. Paris: Seuil. ——. 2000. La Mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli. Paris: Seuil. ——. 2002. “Mémoire: approches historiennes, approche philosophique.” Le Débat. no. 122 (November– December): 51–6. Thomson, David. 1969. Democracy in France since 1870, 5th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. White, Hayden. 1973. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Yates, Frances. 1966. The Art of Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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4 Sites of memory studies (Lieux des études de mémoire) Jeffrey K. Olick

Introduction There is a well-known joke that the three most important factors in real estate are location, location, and location. In this essay, I would like to explore to what extent something similar can be said about memory studies. In order to do so, of course, one must specify exactly what one means by location. In reference to memory studies, we can mean at least four different things. First, location might refer to discipline, as in sociology, anthropology, psychology, literary studies, etc. Second, one might mean the geographical and historical location of the subject of the memory study, for instance the American Civil War, the Holocaust, the Szechuan earthquake, Gallipoli, etc.; this sense of location can in turn be divided into physical location (e.g., the U.S. South) and location in time (e.g., the mid-nineteenth century). Third, location might refer to the carrier of the memory, such as the human brain, a group discussion, a museum, monument, or memorial. Finally, and most salient for me here, location can refer to the national tradition of scholarship. In this essay, I focus on the question of whether there are in fact distinct traditions of memory scholarship—e.g., individualist and collectivist, social and cultural—in particular French and German, though also British, American, Estonian, and Polish, among others. If so, how are they constituted and maintained? In what ways do they organize, and in what ways are they organized by, the other senses of location? This question about locations and traditions of memory studies is not an idle one of intellectual history or the sociology of knowledge—as much as those are interesting and relevant concerns. Rather, the question is in part a response to the recognition in recent memory scholarship and elsewhere that memory studies, and other forms of scholarship, have been overly beholden to assumptions about “container culture,” the idea that nation-states are natural subjects for, and carriers of, memory and identity (Levy and Sznaider 2005). In contrast, much recent work has emphasized the ways in which memory and identity “travel” and are “multidirectional” (Rothberg 2009; Erll 2011). My question here about the locations of memory studies is thus a second-order one: What would it mean for memory studies to travel in similar ways to memory? Does it (or has it)? And what are the conditions for recognizing, and supporting, multidirectional memory studies alongside multidirectional memory? 41

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I. Discipline The different disciplines that practice and contribute to memory studies began to do so at different times, have unfolded differently over time, define the object—memory—differently, and approach it in different ways. These dimensions of memory studies’ disciplinary locations, of course, are not entirely independent of each other.

Psychology For psychology memory has been a central concern since the very beginnings of the discipline. Indeed, laboratory studies of recall and other forms of memory by pioneers like Wilhelm Wundt and Hermann Ebbinghaus in the late nineteenth century were key sites in the development of modern psychology as an experimental science (Danziger 2008). To be sure, in those early moments, psychologists did not uniformly have as individualist or materialist an understanding of memory as most of their legatees. Wundt himself, for instance, did extensive yet largely forgotten work on cultural differences in the forms and contents of memory. Nevertheless, experimental psychology, born in these German laboratories, though elsewhere as well, largely locates the action of memory in the structures of the individual mind or brain (e.g., the hippocampus), and has largely studied these in artificial settings outside of social and cultural contexts (though indeed there has been a turn to studying memory in “natural settings” in the last decades [Neisser and Hyman 1999]).

Sociology Sociologists, in contrast to psychologists, are more likely to see memory ontologically as collective—occurring in interactions or as a property of the group—and are more likely to approach memory ethnographically or interpretively. The concept of “collective memory,” for instance, was an important result of Emile Durkheim’s effort in the decades before World War I to institutionalize sociology’s distinctive approach to the world; in Durkheim’s treatment, this meant the analysis of uniquely “social facts” that could not be reduced to the individuals who are shaped by or merely enact them (Durkheim 1982). It was of course one of Durkheim’s protégés, Maurice Halbwachs, who developed the concept of “collective memory” as an analogue to his teacher’s central notion of “collective representation,” and whose work in this area was revived decades later as a nearly totemic source for contemporary studies. In some contrast to psychology, however, memory—individual or collective—has never been at the center of the discipline of sociology, which is overwhelmingly concerned with social problems like inequality and unrest. By the same token, sociology has not been as central in memory studies as one might imagine, given the totemic status of Halbwachs.

Anthropology Though also inspired by Durkheim’s foundational work, anthropology has had a somewhat distinct approach to and history of work on memory compared to sociology. To the extent that anthropology is the study of societies without writing or at least without widespread literacy—though this extent is perhaps not nearly as great as conventionally assumed or as was historically the case—anthropologists are more likely than either sociologists or psychologists to locate memory in oral traditions and practices as well as in symbols and myths. Anthropology also has not been beset by the reflex toward methodological individualism 42

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to the extent that sociology has, though its interest in language and its cultural approach to psychology has perhaps made it more open to cognitive questions. It was indeed an anthropologist, Mary Douglas, who was responsible for the first translation and edition of Halbwachs’ posthumous essay collection, The Collective Memory, into English. A number of important anthropological works, moreover, have engaged with Halbwachs, ­including E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s The Nuer (1940), Roger Bastide’s The African Religions of Brazil (1978), and Jack Goody’s The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society (1986), the last of which also raises media-theoretic issues for memory studies. Evans-Pritchard’s most famous book, of course, addressed the mnemonic carrying capacities of oral cultures, among other things, while Bastide challenged Halbwachs’ theories in light of problems of cultural transfer (from Africa to Brazil) and especially in regard to implicit residues of the past.

Psychoanalysis The question of implicit rather than explicit residues of the past has always been more pressing in both psychoanalytic and cultural disciplines than perhaps elsewhere. In psychoanalysis, the question of residues appears at both the individual and collective levels. For the individual, memory works on the present in complicated ways, and not primarily when it is conscious; memory that is repressed or hidden behind other memories is the most interesting and theoretically challenging. But questions of “screen memories” and the “return of the repressed” were, for Freud, not merely questions of individual psychology but of collective identity. In both Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism ([1939] 1955), among other works, Freud raised the question of how group memories are preserved and affect the present, particularly in the absence of explicit references and tangible transmission; Freud asserted, for instance, that the repressed memory of the patricide of Moses continued to affect group identity over millennia without explicit reference. These processes are what Jacques Derrida (1998, p. 35) later referred to as the “ciphered” transits of the “archive, the science of which has not been at a standstill.” The science to which Derrida refers is mainly cultural studies, though collective psychoanalysis and other enterprises as well. These concerns about implicit transmission and intangible residues of the past not in the mind of the individual but in the identity of the society point in two directions. First, they point to an earlier biological discourse about so-called organic memory, which hypothesized a cultural equivalent to biological inheritance for culture through the medium of memory; this history can be expressed as an effort to extrapolate from genes to culture. This move “from genes to memes,” as interpolated by contemporary evolutionary psychologists (e.g., Dawkins 1990), was part of the effort to see culture as deep and hidden. Second, however, the inquiry into implicit modes of cultural transmission and intangible residues was also a key inspiration for the art historian Aby Warburg, whose work on his Memnosyne Atlas (2008)—a collection of accreted image-references undergirded by an iconological theory of cultural transmission—has underwritten a great deal of contemporary cultural memory studies, and forms a cultural twin to Halbwachs’ status as an icon for social memory studies. Awareness of Warburg’s work, however, has been uneven across disciplines and languages; it is much more prominent, for instance, in Germany than elsewhere and in art history than in, say, sociology.

Cultural and literary studies It remains an open question whether schematic differences can be drawn between social memory studies or cultural memory studies in a landscape in which terminology is often imprecise and 43

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overlapping. This is so despite Jan Assmann’s important claims that Halbwachsian approaches represent an interest in what Assmann termed “communicative memory”—those processes in which versions of the past are presented in conversational or other face to face encounters, particularly between the generations—(Assmann [1999] 2011), while Warburg-inspired cultural memory studies is more interested in “the vertical anchoring of mankind” (Assmann [1999] 2011, p. 170), the study of which entails hermeneutic and philological techniques rather than observational ones. For Assmann, the latter enterprise is clearly the more interesting. Notably, however, the social psychologist Harald Welzer has criticized this distinction as overly sharp, and Assmann’s ascription to Halbwachs of a lack of interest in the past is at least questionable. Still, it remains an open question in what ways, and to what extent, there is a clear difference between the social memory studies inspired by Halbwachs and others, and the cultural memory studies often inspired by Warburg. It is certainly clear enough, however, that literary studies have intersected with questions of memory with different concerns and emphases than the social scientific. Regardless of the extent to which explicit reference is made to Warburg, literary contributions to memory studies, and approaches to it, have sought to identify resonances and residues of earlier symbols and meanings, which arguably take place through different media and less explicitly than in the ways social scientists have most often investigated. One might thus reasonably claim that social scientific approaches are more inclined to be interested in the presence of collective representations while cultural theorists are more inclined toward an interest in their latency; again, this is the “archival,” the pathologies of which Derrida was referring to. By the same token, one might suppose that different national traditions as well might be more or less open to an appreciation of such processes and possibilities, just as the disciplines have different valences in different countries. Some national traditions, in other words, may be more at home with notions of the occult (in the sense of allusion, rather than supernaturalism) and in the disciplines that explore this, whereas others are more inclined to suspect intentional invention and misrepresentation, and thus to pursue debunking approaches. Because of extant political realities—for instance, an oppressive regime—some might be more inclined than others to emphasize a larger gap between explicit and latent, manipulated and preserved; this is in part because the Derridian “transits” objectively need to be more complex in politically repressive societies. This is the idea represented in Milan Kundera’s (1980) famous line about the struggle of man against power consisting of the struggle of memory against forgetting. It is not by accident that this line was so apt in a Czechoslovakian novel—though it was a sentiment also expressed by George Orwell in 1984 (a novel of course concerned with the specter of Communism, among other things).

History The location of memory studies in historiography in turn raises yet another set of questions about the organization and purpose of inquiry. Here the issues have traditionally been more epistemological than ontological: Do oral accounts and other non-archival sources provide a reliable foundation for historical science? Can eyewitness accounts be trusted, either at the moment or as recorded historically? To the extent that oral history has expanded the informational basis on which historians can rely, it is seen as a promising expansion of both method and material; and to the extent that such “sources” are treated not for their informational value but for evidence of worldviews or systematic mistakes—measured against what we “really” know or can confirm about the past—they are reasonable topics for specialists. 44

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But to the extent that they are part of an unchecked valorization of democratizing historical methods at the cost of traditional rigor, they are seen as profoundly challenging. The history of notions of “objectivity” in historiography, or of the involvement of professional history in different nation-building projects in different times and places, is of course highly varied (Novick 1988). The new discourse of collective memory that has supposedly f lourished since the early 1980s thus raises questions about the purposes and functions of historiography in society differently, depending on the role of objectivity in the historiographical tradition and the explicit role of historiography in the particular national context. But most generally, it is always a challenge to the very nature of historical work, namely: Is history merely a kind of collective memory? On the one side, there are those who are adamant that history is a science that must be careful about its role in the processes it studies; on the other side, there are those who point out that historiography has always been involved in those processes and denies such imbrication at its peril; and in the middle are those who see history as “an art of memory” (Hutton 1993) or who recognize that “a historiography that does not aspire to be memorable is in peril of becoming a rampant growth” (Yerushalmi 1982, p. 101). The overriding point of the foregoing is that the different disciplines themselves have different histories in different national contexts. In some, one disciplinary approach to memory may, for a variety of reasons, have been more powerful than others. And the relative power positions of the different disciplines in different countries often shifted over time, with implications for the overall shape of and interest in “memory studies,” if indeed such a field ever formed, in the given country. “Memory” clearly travels within and among disciplines, though in different ways at different times and in different places. The nature and extent of memory studies thus depends on the specific history of the different disciplines in different national contexts.

II. Event/geography This brief overview of the different disciplines that have studied memory is radically incomplete both internally and externally; there is certainly much more to be said about each of these disciplines, and there are other disciplines that should be included. My purpose, however, has been to lay a foundation for understanding the different ways these disciplinary identities and concerns shape, and are shaped by, different traditions of memory studies. In a similar way, it is important to look very briefly at the ways in which national traditions of memory studies—should such things exist as reasonably coherent patterns, which remains an open question—constitute and are constituted by the different historical and geographical, in addition to disciplinary, locations of memory itself.

Lieux de memoire It should be obvious, for instance, that different nations remember different historical events, just as different groups in them or across them remember different events or remember the same events differently. Gallipoli, for instance, is an historical referent of more primary relevance in Australia than, say, in France; “Remember the Alamo!” is more likely to evoke specific associations in Texas than in the rest of the United States and in the states more than elsewhere. By the same token, there are some events that have multiple historical referents and some that are referents in multiple places but in different ways. For instance, Anzac (Australia New Zealand Army Corps) Day, according to the Australian War Memorial website, is “the day we remember all Australians who served and died in all wars, conflicts, 45

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and peacekeeping operations,” though of course, as the acronym indicates, the day serves as a central commemorative occasion for two sovereign nations; its historical referent has also broadened out over time from one in which Gallipoli was central to being a more general memorial day. The fact that different historical events and themes serve as referents in different national identities is one of the central insights that underlay Pierre Nora’s grand project on French “lieux de memoire” (1984–1992). There has of course been some debate over whether Nora’s effort to catalogue the many different sites of national memory in France—as well as the changes in them—was a neo-nationalist’s effort to recuperate lost traditions (Mercer 2013), or a postmodernist’s effort to autopsy their remains (Hutton 1993). But, either way, the assertion that national identities are constituted in part by a shared lexicon of cultural referents has been a key idea for memory studies. Memory studies in each country—or, perhaps better, memory studies of each country—clearly refer to a distinct set of historical events and themes. And even when some of these events or themes (e.g., World War II) are referents in the national identities of multiple countries, the specific varieties of meanings they have in each are nonidentical, just as the national self-understandings are. In the meantime, not only has Nora’s concept shaped discourse in memory studies across a wide number of national contexts, but the project has been imitated, most prominently in Germany (Francoise and Schulze 2001), though also in Eastern Europe (Weber et al. 2011). And one can imagine a similar project in virtually any nation, or even a lieux de memoire for global memory and identity. By the same token, one can imagine something similar not just for sites of memory, but for sites of memory studies: namely, a particular author or work might be a central referent—even an intellectual hero—for memory studies in a particular country. In Estonia, for instance, Yuri Lotman is a lieux de memoire for memory studies to a greater extent than he has perhaps been elsewhere; Aby Warburg is a greater lieux de memoire for German memory studies than for French, as he has been for cultural memory studies more than for social memory studies.

Which temps perdu? Beyond any catalogue of names and themes—both of memory and of memory studies—it is important to recognize the different temporalities of collective memories, and hence of memory studies as well. There is, for instance, the proverbial forty years; there is also the ancient saeculum, or expected natural life span, along with what some trauma theorists (e.g., Jean Amery) have referred to as the natural or biological time of healing, in contrast to the disrupted temporality of trauma, which resists such passages of time (Amery [1966] 1986). Such considerations are quite relevant for the development of memory studies in different countries in a variety of ways. For instance, one—though surely only one—dimension of the Holocaust’s impact on the formation of memory studies in Germany is its recentness, in contrast to, say, the American Civil War. Are direct participants still alive? Are they dying out? Are they long gone? And who are the scholars of these events? Participants? Bystanders? Victims? Descendants? These differences matter, though not necessarily in easily generalizable ways. Halbwachs himself used a loose period of about three generations—the span across which the oldest generation can pass on their memories to the youngest—to identify the space of collective memory versus the space of history. Others have referred to a “f loating gap” between memory that is still communicated and that which has already sedimented into culture. Still others, of course, have theorized the complexities between transmission and sedimentation, particularly 46

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through attention to what Marianne Hirsch (2008) has termed “postmemory,” which refers to the ways in which second and third generations can carry the legacies of their parents’ experience (particularly when that experience has been traumatic) in a way that it is not unreasonable to think about as a kind of memory (or, again, postmemory). The current state of memory studies in any particular disciplinary or national context is thus likely shaped in complex ways by the distance from particular mnemonic references. For instance, the events of 1989 (circa 25 years ago) are among the more significant mnemonic references in Eastern European countries, whereas the Vietnam War (circa 50 years ago) might be in the U.S., World War II and the Holocaust (circa 70 years ago) in Germany, versus Gallipoli (circa 100 years ago) in Australia. And these different distances are important not only for the memories but for the form of memory studies. Of course, the mnemonic landscape of any given country has multiple referents at different intervals and over different durations, and the ways in which mnemonic occasions are in dialogue with each other is complex indeed. But it is not unreasonable to assume that the particular pattern of any country’s remembered events—and places within its unfolding trajectory—is a powerful factor in the shape of its tradition of memory studies. This is not only because of the differing distances of the events, but because of the differing existential relations the memory scholars themselves have to them. Generational experiences shape both our interest in particular memories and the ways we analyze them.

III. Carrier I have already touched on the issue of carriers of memory in my discussion of the disciplines above (though surely I could have included media studies there as well). There the key distinction was whether the discussion of memory is dominated by concern with individual or biological carriers or collective and cultural ones. Psychology, for instance, tends toward the individual and biological (brain), and sociology tends toward the collective and cultural (though perhaps not as much toward the cultural as literary studies does). This specific meaning of the “location” of memory, of course, seems of less obvious relevance to potential differences in national traditions of memory studies. But one should not be overly hasty to disregard possible connections. Not only is the hierarchy of scientific disciplines different in different national cultures, it is also shaped by differing institutional structures. In the U.S., for instance, psychology has been more routinely grouped with the natural rather than social sciences, and has received financial support that underwrites particular kinds of research in particular ways. In contrast, other national scientific apparatuses have provided more significant grant funding for research in the humanities than others. Additionally, different national cultures value individualistic assumptions more than others, which perhaps more readily accept collectivistic ones. This is one reason, one might hypothesize, that sociology has been a more marginal and scorned enterprise in the U.S. than it has been in Europe, and by extension why collective memory research has a larger uphill conceptual battle in American culture than in European. How robust is the belief in individuality and individualism, and hence in private memories versus public memories, personal identities versus collective identities, as carriers of memory? The political salience and potent presence of memory politics in European nations, moreover, has translated into a much larger array of institutional apparatuses for social and cultural memory studies than in the U.S.; anecdotally, it seems clear that there are more institutes, programs, schools, projects, groups, etc.—many with significant financial support from national research infrastructures—for memory studies in Europe than in the U.S. And these 47

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scholarly structures and events often seem to attract more media and political attention in Europe than in the U.S. In the U.S., memory discourse is often touristic and pluralistic, while in Europe it perhaps tends to be more academic and political. These institutional contexts are both carriers of memory as well as foundations for memory studies. There is, of course, much more to be said about these issues, but my space is limited.

IV.  National traditions Are there, then, national traditions of memory studies? And, if so, of what are they constituted? It is important to begin from the premise that there are no singular national traditions of memory studies, just as there are no monolithic memories in different countries. In Germany as well as in France, there are traditions of social memory studies and cultural memory studies, and anthropological, psychoanalytic, sociological, etc. traditions as well, to say nothing of disagreements within them. Such considerations, moreover, are distinct from other dimensions of the event/geography of memory studies, most obviously the substantive issues of the events that are major referents for memory studies in different national contexts. In Germany, for instance, the Nazi genocide is obviously the key—though not the only— topic shaping German memory, and memory studies as an enterprise in Germany is clearly shaped by that referent too, though of course memory of the Holocaust is a key referent for memory scholarship in many places. Memory studies in France has thus unfolded differently from memory studies in Germany, in part because of the different meanings of the Holocaust in these two countries and on the differential centrality of it in their national memory cultures. At the same time, memory of the revolutionary Terror is inscribed in French culture and society in a way it is not in German culture, though that is not to say that the French Revolution did not also shape Germany, and German memory scholars are certainly aware of these multiple referents. Indeed, it is particularly interesting to see which events are part of the standard knowledge base for both ordinary people as well as memory scholars in different countries, and also which ones are part of the vocabulary of any competent memory scholar no matter what his or her national identity or identities. A very large percentage of memory studies scholars, whether or not they are interested in literature, Argentina, or Czechoslovakia, for instance, can glibly quote Borges (“Funes the Memorious”) and Kundera (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting), and one wonders what percentage of memory scholars who refer to Proust’s madeleine have read more than a few pages of In Search of Lost Time. The geographical location of memory and its event referents thus matter and do not. Nevertheless, it is possible to characterize some broad differences in national traditions of memory studies, constituted only in part by national differences in memory cultures. Like Europe itself, memory studies is dominated, though not entirely, by France and Germany. But their cultures of memory studies, like their cultures of memory (though not in any one to one fashion), are indeed very different despite complex transfers. As Nora’s project itself demonstrates, French memory—like that of any other nation—is constituted by an enormous number of referents, though most prominently by the Revolution, Vichy, Algeria, and May 1968. Obviously, numerous empirical memory studies have addressed these and similar events. But, as already mentioned, the language of French memory studies is not nearly as tied to these events as one might assume. After all, Halbwachs wrote before all but the Revolution and was more interested in methodological and ontological questions than in the memory history of particular events; as already noted, his work was an extension 48

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of Durkheim’s effort to institutionalize sociology as the predominant frame of reference. In the process, Halbwachs’ major targets were psychology and history. Halbwachs’ closest interlocutors for his work on memory were the physician Charles Blondel (1926), who was interested in the complexities of memory but resisted what he saw as Halbwachs’ disregard for or downgrading of the somatic bases of memory, and the historian Marc Bloch (1925), who questioned Halbwachs’ interest in the operation of collective memory separate from a consideration of historical fact. As a sociologist, Halbwachs was interested in the constitution of the group (seeking Durkheimian analogues to the Marxian notion of class consciousness), as well as in the social frameworks of seemingly individual processes. In articulating these positions, Halbwachs was not ultimately successful, or at least not with his imperial ambitions, but he was surely inf luential on the founders of the so-called Annales tradition in French historiography. This is important for our understanding of memory studies as a field, because French scholars have not been tempted by the discontinuist understandings of memory studies that have taken hold elsewhere. French intellectuals, for instance, do not need to be reminded that there is a direct chain of connection between those early discussions, the development of the Annales school, the rise of the history of mentalities, and the return (though it was more a latent continuity than a return for the French) of “collective memory” in the work of Jacques Le Goff (1992) and Pierre Nora in the late 1970s (Confino 1997). Halbwachs was never forgotten in France; thus assertions of a sudden memory boom in the early 1980s make somewhat less sense in France than elsewhere. Memory studies in Germany has been a rather different affair. Not only are the events different (compare, for instance, the contents of the German Erinnerungsorte to the French Lieux de memoire encyclopedias), the entire political and cultural valence of the issues have been distinct. In German intellectual discourse, the philosophy of history led to a lengthy and important discourse on “historical consciousness,” which was always quite different— grander, more abstract—than French notions of mentality (and in many ways the polar opposite). History from below, in Germany, moreover, had a very different import than the history of everyday life in France. In Germany, it has often taken on an almost exculpatory tone, with the continuities of everyday life opposed to the more troubling world of power politics. In France, while to be sure there is a sense of opposition in the history of the everyday (and of memory as part of it) to the narrowness of official history, the sense seems to have been more a contribution to total history. To be sure, there are moral issues in both countries: in Germany, the everyday provides a refuge against accusations, while in France the everyday was often the location of a myth of resistance. As a result, memory studies concerned with the everyday in France has sometimes involved demythologization, while work on the everyday in Germany has involved mythologization. The development and trajectories of memory studies in other countries are fascinating stories in their own rights, and it is interesting where and when such stories have developed. For instance, memory studies has a complex yet robust history and presence in Estonia, stemming in part from the Tartu School of semiotics and from the profundity of Yuri Lotman’s work (Tamm, forthcoming). The importance of memory in Estonian academic culture is also incidentally supported by the fact that one of the most prominent memory scholars in American psychology is the Estonian Endel Tulving. Another remarkable story is that of the history not only of memory but of memory studies in Poland. In the first half of the twentieth century, there were exceptionally strong connections between the Polish and French academic worlds, and these connections were particularly strong for sociology; several Polish sociologists were connected directly to Durkheim—most notably Stefan Czarniowksi—who was also a pioneering memory scholar. In part as a result 49

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of this connection, but through others as well, memory studies has a complex and interesting history in Polish sociology. This story has been more than ably told by Kornelia Konczal and Joanna Wawrzyniak (2012), though the fact that they have so far only published this work in Polish and German is a good example of the complex barriers to the travel not just of memory but of memory studies. There is a great deal more to say about these cases and many others as well. As I am an American writer, it is perhaps worth mentioning just in passing once again that memory studies has not been as significant a presence in American academia as elsewhere: American exceptionalism in this too. This is in part, I believe, because of the temporal distance of, as well as a strong consensus not to address, the United States’ most significant lieu de memoire, namely slavery. It is also due to a general cultural belief in a nation of immigrants that memory is a recall of things that happened elsewhere. The myth of rebirth in American culture, the transformation of historical ethnicities into merely symbolic or optional ones, as well as the capacities of American cities in particular to move beyond older ethnic conf lict in situations when frequently there were too many different ethnicities and too small a hegemonic grouping to allow such antipathies to have too much continuing power, all contribute to this mnemonic exceptionalism—though this exceptionalism is itself a complex memory. In any case, the situation of ethnic conf lict is one of greater mixing in the U.S. than it often has been in Europe. Memory studies has also developed in very different ways in the different memory cultures of other places, and there are wide varieties of regional memory cultures, for instance Northeast Asia, Oceania, the Southern Cone, etc. In situations of ongoing conf lict or significant regime change, moreover, memory studies has more often taken the form of a concern with “transitional justice” than the more amorphous “memory”—though, to be sure, one can expect transitional justice solutions to become part of collective memory in such places, just as they did, and continue to be, in Europe.

Travelling memory studies According to Mieke Bal (forthcoming), memory is a “travelling concept,” one that takes on different meanings in different contexts. This is a radical notion because it works against the operationalizing demands of logocentric discourses, in which one must specify memory’s location, divide it into specific subcategories, separate it from bordering phenomena, parse its complexities, and correlate it traits. The latter is the kind of discourse that, for instance, simultaneously rejects “collective memory” as a metaphor (Kansteiner 2002), while also specifying as many as 256 different authentic types of individual memory (Roediger et al. 2002). Not only does the concept of memory travel, however; specific memories and memory processes travel. In the middle of writing a handbook essay, for instance, while trying to recall a particular scholarly reference, I might also glance up at the photo of my children, while also remembering to get gas on the way home. These are trivial travels indeed. Recent memory studies, however, has embraced concepts of travel, trade, and transmission across contexts, persons, borders, epochs, and entities, and has shown that memory transits these in ciphered as well as manifest ways, back and forth, again and again. But with the recognition of the many ways—the multidirections—in which memories travel—and the remarkable creativities and cross-fertilizations, as well as disputes and even pain, such travels cause—comes a greater awareness of the ways in which memory studies travel as well. This is in part because of the ways memory travels with the brains and communities and media that carry it. It is in part because of the ways in which disciplines 50

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carry, exchange, and transmit knowledge. It is because of globalization in all its multifarious forms, personal, economic, electronic, and otherwise. It is also, however, because of the way memory scholars travel. One interesting finding of the travelling memory scholar is how widespread and robust the belief is that, like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, the problems of the past and the forms of memory studies that address them are unique in each time and place. To be sure, each case and context is unique, and the concepts and discourses that have arisen to analyze them have their unique qualities. There is a reason Polish memory studies looks different from French memory studies, both of which look different from German memory studies. But there are both costs to parochialism and benefits to exchange that cannot be underestimated. Sometimes, local discourses are like Moliere’s Bourgeois Gentleman, who discovers he has been speaking prose all along; the problems of memory and commemoration are sometimes better theorized than one might imagine, and the similarities in discourses are often more important than the differences (though the discourse of interdisciplinarity often risks underestimating real differences). One must be careful as well not to impose one model on other places that work differently, for instance the German model on Poland, or the sociological model on psychology. But the more we both travel among disciplines and media and nations, and the more we learn of the different meanings of the conceptual baggage we bring with us on our travels, the more resilient will we be to the dislocations involved. This, I believe, has been the impulse behind the consolidation of memory studies as a scholarly field and the increased rates of interchange among its diverse practitioners. One can indeed—one should indeed—be in more than one place at a time.

Bibliography Améry, Jean. At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities. S. Rosenfeld and S. P. Rosenfeld, trans. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986 [1966]. Assmann, Jan. Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen. Munich: Beck, 1999. (Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.) Bal, Mieke. “Travel Companions.” Ashgate Research Companion to Memory Studies. Siobhan Kattago, ed. London: Ashgate, forthcoming. Bastide, Roger. The African Religions of Brazil: Toward a Sociology of the Interpenetration of Civilizations. Helen Sebba, trans. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Bloch, Marc. “Memoire Collective, Tradition et Coutume.” Revue de Synthèse Historique 40: 73–83, 1925. Blondel, Charles. “Revue critique: M. Halbwachs Les Cadres Sociaux de la memoire.” Revue Philosophique 101: 290–8, 1926. Confino, Alon. “Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method.” The American Historical Review 102(5): 1386–403, 1997. Danziger, Kurt. Marking the Mind: A History of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Derrida,  Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Eric Prenowitz, trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Durkheim, Emile. The Rules of Sociological Method. Stephen Lukes, trans. New York: Free Press, 1982. Erll,  Astrid. “Travelling Memory.” Parallax 17(4): 4–18, 2011. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People. Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 1940. Francoise, Etienne and Hagen Schulze, eds. Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, 3 vols. Munich: Beck, 2001. Freud, Sigmund. Moses and Monotheism. Katherine Jones, trans. New York: Vintage, 1955 (1939). Goody, Jack. The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Hirsch, Marianne. “The Generation of Postmemory.” Poetics Today 29(1): 103–28, 2008. 51

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Hutton, Patrick H. History as an Art of Memory. Burlington: University of  Vermont Press, 1993. Kansteiner, Wulf. “Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies.” History and Theory 41(2): 179–97, 2002. Kończal, Kornelia and Joanna Wawrzyniak. “Erinnerungsforschung in Polen: Traditionen, Konzepte, (Dis) Kontinuitäten.” Osteuropa 5: 19–46, 2012. Kundera, Milan. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Aaron Asher, trans. New York: Harper Collins, 1980. Le Goff, Jacques. History and Memory. Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman, trans. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Levy, Daniel and Natan Sznaider. Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age. Assenka Oksilof, trans. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005. Mercer, Ben. “The Moral Rearmament of France: Pierre Nora, Memory, and the Crises of Republicanism.” French Politics, Culture, and Society 31(2): 102–16, 2013. Neisser, Ulric and Ira Hyman, eds. Memory Observed: Remembering in Natural Contexts. New York: Worth, 1999. Nora, Pierre. Les Lieux de Mémoire, 7 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1984–1992. Novick, Peter. That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity” Question and the American Historical Profession. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Roediger, H. L., E. J. Marsh, and S. C. Lee. Varieties of memory. In D. L. Medin and H. Pashler, eds. Stevens’ Handbook of Experimental Psychology: Vol. 2 Memory and Cognitive Processes, 3rd ed., pp. 1–41. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2002. Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. Tamm, Marek. “Semiotic Theory of Cultural Memory: In the Company of Juri Lotman.” Ashgate Research Companion to Memory Studies. Siobhan Kattago, ed. London: Ashgate, forthcoming. Warburg, Aby. Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne. Martin Warnke and Claudia Brink, eds. Germany: Akademie Verlag, 2008. Weber, Matthias, Burkhard Olschowsky, Ivan A. Petransky, Attila Pók, and Andrzej Przewożnik, eds. Erinnerungsorte in Ostmitteleuropa. Erfahrungen der Vergangenheit und Perspektiven. München: Oldenbourg, 2011. Yerushalmi, Yosef H. Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982.

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5 Against memory Jeffrey Goldfarb

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting “The mixture of abuses of memory and abuses of forgetting … allows us to speak of too much memory at times, and too much forgetting at other times. It is the responsibility of the citizen to arbitrate between such hazardous assessments.” Paul Ricoeur, “Memory, History, Oblivion”

In this chapter, I will highlight the promise and especially the perils of collective memory, and the need to address the perils. The theoretical orientation of the chapter includes the above mentioned literary reflections of William Faulkner and Milan Kundera, the philosophical inquiry of Paul Ricoeur, along with the fictive imagination of Toni Morrison: serious thinkers about memory, using their primary means of knowing—the novel and literary and philosophical essays. Novelists and a philosophers combine to contribute to a more adequate sociology of collective memory. I will demonstrate this by comparing and contrasting three distinct sites of memory contestation: communist Central Europe, post-communist Central Europe and present day Israel-Palestine. The sites will be explored as they reveal the complexity of the social condition (Goldfarb, 2013; Tavory, 2013) surrounding memory, and as they illuminate the way people navigate through the complexity. I will conclude with normative reflections on the implications of the inquiry. We start with a sociological dilemma. There are two distinct and competing positions in the study of collective memory (with interesting variations on these themes). On the one hand, there is the approach that emphasizes the power of the present over memory of the past. On the other hand, there is the approach that emphasizes how the past, both remembered and forgotten, determines the present. We will see how these apparently conf licting approaches work in practice as a way to understand the textured dilemmas of collective memory: collective memory as a manifestation of the social condition.

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Many studies, following Maurice Halbwachs (1992), show that collective memory is a projection into the past of present social circumstances and needs. We remember together what happened then to enable us to act together now. Memory is a function of present collective practices and needs. On the other hand, studies that recognize the power of the past over the present go in two directions, positive and critical. The “positivists” show how going into the past reveals experiences that shape our present circumstance, how cultural and social traditions work, as Edward Shils (2006) explored. But remembering the past also involves the discovery of roads not taken, to dive down into the past to find pearls of past experience that can enrich the present, suggesting alternatives, disrupting hegemonic common sense and prevailing ideologies. This is the approach pursued by Walter Benjamin, as appreciated by Hannah Arendt (see Benjamin, 1969). The politics of memory invoke the authority of the positive and critical approaches.

For memory There are studies of the politics of collective memory that assume an enlightenment prejudice: Remembering will set us free. The “dark times” of the twentieth century is the common context. Confronting modern barbarism and its opposition, the memory of a collective trauma or accomplishment, is seen as being the precondition for some sort of progressive action. Examples: the Jewish and specifically Israeli confrontation with the Holocaust as a political precondition of “never again.” And in a parallel fashion, the German confrontation with the genocide understood as a requirement for a decent democratic society in the shadows of the Nazi regime (Olick, 2007). The need of East and Central Europeans to remember their history apart from communist ideology as a way of developing an independent democratic movement in the 1970s and 1980s contributed to the great events of 1989. The project of Palestinians to confront the Nakba, the catastrophe (Sa’di and Abu Lughod, 2007), with progressive Israelis joining in and rightist Israeli authorities worried about the enlightened implications trying to repress the memory, sustain the official account of Israeli independence. An example of a memory project left undone: I remember talking to a visiting scholar from China. He was studying the Cultural Revolution with the American journalist and student of recent Chinese history Judith Shapiro (see Heng and Shapiro, 1984). He admired the Jewish memory work on the Holocaust and wondered why there was no similar work being done in China confronting the atrocities of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. He asked me once: Was there something about the Jewish and the Chinese political culture, or, at least, their distinctive collective experiences that explained these different approaches to collective trauma? The supposition was that to remember was to set one free. Then there is the case of Adam Michnik, Poland’s leading intellectual opposition leader in the 1970s and 1980s, and later, after the changes of 1989, the editor of Poland’s major newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza. He is a memory worker, although he calls himself a historian. He uses history in special ways. He reminds his readers of something in the past and proposes it as a guide for future action, thinking between past and future, as Hannah Arendt would put it (Arendt, 1961). Thus, in his classic essay “The New Evolutionism” (Michnik, 1986) he remembers the so called Polish positivists of the nineteenth century who proposed pragmatic reform over romantic revolt, and he remembers those who joined the communist system from Catholic parties and made small differences in the post-Stalinist period. He presents such memories to his readers as he proposed in 1976 a new course of resistance to the communist system, remembering the failures of 1956 in Budapest and of 1968 in Prague. He proposes not revolution from below or reform from above, but reform from below for social change. 54

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He proposed a vision of change that anticipated, even guided, the action that became Solidarność and contributed in a significant way to the democratic postscript of the communist experience. And very much informed by Michnik, I also recognize that I have been very much involved in the enlightenment prejudice when it comes to studying collective memory. In work on the relative autonomy of culture as one of the definitive structures of modernity (Goldfarb, 1983), I have posited a positive connection between collective memory and creative independence. I studied artists who remembered the past, a variety of artistic traditions, to establish their distinctive work apart from the orthodoxies of the old regime of previously existing socialism. Solzhenitsyn used the officially available works of Tolstoy to create a new literary alternative to socialist realism (the post-Stalinist Lukacs, 1971, notwithstanding). Grotowski used Stanislavsky. Polish student theaters drew upon the literary and theatrical imaginations of Witkiewicz and Gombrowicz (Goldfarb, 1980). The inherited socialist and nationalist cultural traditions available because of official support for a dominant interpretation, the officially supported collective memory of the cultural past, provided the grounds for critical creative innovation. As Milan Kundera, in his The Art of the Novel, asserts: “The novelist needs answer to no one but Cervantes”(Kundera, 1988, p. 144). This is an argument for a specialized collective memory as the basis for artistic creation. When this is enacted a significant support for cultural freedom is constituted (Goldfarb, 1983).

Against memory With such observations in mind, why a chapter “against memory,” when collective memory is so important for human achievement and resistance? At issue is a complexity of the sociology of collective memory: not only asking how we work to remember, but also how we work to forget, understanding that memory and forgetting are two sides of the same coin. Generally, forgetting has been seen as a failing, as an incapacity, as not being willing or able to remember. Here we see memory and forgetting both involving active creativity, and understand that there are potential normative problems with both sides of the coin. Or as Paul Ricoeur (2003) puts it: “The mixture of abuses of memory and abuses of forgetting … allows us to speak of too much memory at times, and too much forgetting at other times. It is the responsibility of the citizen to arbitrate between such hazardous assessments.” In order to remember together, we must forget together, pay attention to some things that happened as we ignore others. We do this because what we remember and what we forget has practical implications. And sometimes we need, or at least want, to change what is to be remembered and what is to be forgotten. This is what Michnik was trying to work on when he came up with his politically wise counsel—“amnesty without amnesia”—in trying to address the dilemmas of moving from dictatorship to democracy in post-communist Poland. It is also what happens in the various memory battles over controversial exhibits about difficult pasts that reveal hitherto unexamined aspects of the past, for example, as Vera Zolberg has studied in the case of the controversies over the Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian (Zolberg, 1996), or as Robin Wagner-Pacifici and Barry Schwartz analyzed in their brilliant analysis of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz, 1991). People go to the memorial calling a truce in a cultural war, forgetting their differences on a war, at least situationally. They remember together a shared, though differently understood, collective experience. They “re-remember”: thus Adam Michnik’s inventive notion of “amnesty without amnesia,” in the first years after the fall of Communism (see Matynia, 2009). Michnik affected to have it both ways: to both remember the injustices and suffering of Polish society under 55

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communist rule and to avoid the problems of revolutionary justice. He wanted to forgive, but not to forget. Michnik worried that the movement from a regime with blood on its hands, one that started with Stalinism and ended with martial law and its aftermath, that penetrated every sphere of social and private life with an all encompassing ideology, presented the real danger that a new anti-communist revolutionary justice would replace communist justice. He recognized that a new authoritarianism was a real threat, and hoped to avoid it by embracing his former jailers, despite their politics, as long as they were not guilty of specific crimes. Remembrance without retribution was his call. Yet, there was a real practical problem with this. Poland is a complex modern differentiated society, meaning many different people, doing different things at different times, in different places, who do not understand each other. It is because of these differences that Michnik’s idea could not succeed. It required concerted forgetting that he did not work on. He and his supporters had to work to convince the population beyond his elite readership. Michnik, standing in a very privileged position in society, could come up with his subtle idea, and his informed reading public, both at home and abroad (including me), were persuaded. But when he acted following his idea and was seen by a broader, differently positioned public, the meaning of his actions was understood in very different ways. He presented his subtle position, but in his actions he appeared to the less (or should I say “differently”?) informed, the less well connected, just to have forgotten what happened, or worse. He seemed to want people to forget what happened because he was somehow implicated in the crimes of the past. Beyond the political class, when he had his weekly meetings with his former jailers and publicly treated them with respect and deference, he appeared as one who didn’t remember and who was complicit in the injustices of the communist regime. In a sense that was Michnik’s point. He wanted to act as if the wrongs of the past were forgotten so that the pressing problems of the present and the near future could be acted upon. Being too involved with the past would not allow for sensible action. Because he did not convince the broad public to willfully forget together in their actions, even while they remembered what happened in the stories they told each other about their pasts (conveniently overlooking their own little complicities in the old order), the problems of “lustration,” of purging those supporting the communist regime, has haunted Poland, and its neighbors, ever since. A battle is ongoing, with the issue of memory and forgetting playing a significant role in elections. One party builds its future around the theme of retribution, of remembering communist atrocity, while the other works a “progressive collective project of forgetting.” Of course, I am being ironic using the phrase “progressive forgetting,” but only a bit. Looking closely at politics, it is very impressive how important purposive forgetting is for a free politics and society. We will see what a project of forgetting looks like in the case of Israel-Palestine at a time of sustained and apparently unending conf lict. But it is first important to fully understand what the situation looks like when there is too much memory, not enough forgetting. Consider how this worked in the case of Zygmunt Bauman in Poland. Bauman is a distinguished social theorist, the author of dozens of important books in sociology and social theory. One of his major works, Modernity and the Holocaust, contributes a great deal to how we remember the great trauma of the twentieth century (Bauman, 2001). He is also a subject of memory wars. When it comes to Bauman there is a strikingly toxic “mixture of abuses of memory and abuses of forgetting,” abdicating the responsibility of citizens to arbitrate between hazardous assessments (to paraphrase Ricoeur). On June 22, 2013, in the city of Wroclaw, a lecture by Bauman was aggressively disrupted by a group of neo-fascists (Beyond the Transition, 2013). When I first read about this, I was 56

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concerned, but not overly so. The extreme right has a persistent, visible, but ultimately marginal presence on the Polish political scene, I assured myself. As a video of the event reveals (Ibid.), there is the other, apparently more significant, Poland that invited and wanted to listen to the distinguished social theorist speak, and cheered when the motley crew of ultranationalists and soccer hooligans were escorted from the lecture hall. While xenophobia and neo-fascism are threats in Eastern and Central, and even Western, Europe, I was pretty confident that in Poland, they were being held at bay. But, after a visit to Wroclaw, I realize that I may have been wrong. I had the occasion to talk about the “Bauman Affair” with some friends and colleagues. A highlight was around a dinner, though not a kitchen table; I articulated its significance in my chapter “Theorizing the Kitchen Table and Beyond” in The Politics of Small Things (see Goldfarb, 2006). The discussion revealed that a significant problem with collective memory was being enacted, not only concerning the disruption of Bauman’s lecture, but also in the way remembering is challenging democracy. The dinner was at the home of Hana Cervinkova and Lotar Rasinki, a distinguished academic couple, an anthropologist and a philosopher. Among the other guests were Elzbieta Matynia, Susan Yelavich, Dick Bernstein, and Carol Bernstein of The New School; Juliet Golden, a Wroclaw resident and superb observer of the material life of the city; and her husband, a distinguished craftsman, restorer of among other things the Jewish cemetery in Wroclaw. The Wroclaw Solidarność hero, Władysław Frasyniuk, and his wife joined us, as did Sylvie Kauffmann, the former editor of Le Monde, who reported extensively around the old Soviet bloc in the 1980s and 1990s, and now returns as the wife of the French ambassador. The dinner followed a public discussion between Frasyniuk and Kauffmann. Also joining us was Adam Chmielewski, who as the Chair of the Department of Social and Political Philosophy of the University of Wrocław was one of the co-sponsors of the Bauman lecture. All were concerned about the Bauman affair, and understood that at issue was not only the talk of a challenging professor. My concern was rather straightforward. It had less to do with the quality of the extreme right, reprehensible as it is, and more to do with its relationship with the less extremist mainstream. While extremists are indeed at the margins of Polish public opinion, they are becoming more and more effective in making themselves visible to the general public and becoming more acceptable. Politicians are coming to accept the extremists’ definition of controversies, the way they choose to remember and forget. While the politicians try to take advantage of their impact, the media, many public intellectuals, and academics are following their framing of memory, or at least not forcefully opposing their frame. Thus, Bauman’s lecture was framed as a scandalous talk by a Stalinist, rather than as a presentation by a distinguished, highly creative social theorist. The hegemonic mode of collectively remembering cultural accomplishment and the politics of Stalinism was at stake. The disruption was debated as a problem of the legacies of communism and not as a problem concerning the fate of academic freedom in an open society. The public question became: Should a Stalinist speak? The quality of Bauman’s work, the importance of his diagnoses of the problems of our times, was put aside. The debate became how the politics of a young man, of a Jewish communist, should be judged, and whether its purported inf luence needed to be controlled. The fact that Bauman was hounded out of Poland in the wake of an anti-Zionist wave in 1968 (in that case purported anti-Zionism was really a thin guise for anti-Semitism) was not discussed. The problem of the attempt to silence a critical opinion was not the issue. Rather, the occasion of Bauman’s lecture and its disruption was used to call for the long delayed lustration, a cleansing of communist inf luence from Polish public life. This dominated national discussion 57

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of the Bauman Affair. Bauman indeed worked as an agent of the Stalinist secret service. Ultra nationalists used the memory of this to disrupt an academic lecture and beyond that to redefine political culture in a nationalist and xenophobic direction, remembering the young Stalinist in order to forget the legacy of Polish anti-Semitism and critical intellectual accomplishment. The major opposition party, PiS (Law and Justice) has seemed to be supportive of the actions of the extreme right, while the ruling party, PO (Civic Platform), seemed to be reluctant to denounce the extremists too forcefully. And intellectuals and professors, even those who privately found the attacks on academic freedom repugnant, have been reluctant to speak up. PiS accepts the extremists definition of the situation. PO is reluctant to oppose it, as are many others. There is not much active direct support of neo-fascists. Yet indirect support and the absence of strong opposition is a serious problem. Forgetting, or creating the social and cultural conditions for at least not focusing on, the details of Bauman’s youthful activities is required to sustain democratic politics in Poland. A major party is in bed with the extremists. The ruling party is not forcefully opposing them. And there does not seem to be a broad civic response against this situation. While memory played a key role in the development of alternatives to the previously prevailing communist order, an excess of memory focused on the problems of that order is undermining democratic capacity. Citizens do indeed have a responsibility to arbitrate this. There needs to be a critical ref lection on when memory and when forgetting become toxic. Michnik tried to intervene by developing a neat formula, “amnesty without amnesia,” but because his experience was so remote from a broad swath of Polish society, such intervention did not work, opening the door to a politics of retribution, exactly what he tried to forestall. It also has revealed an unattractive side of Polish intellectuals, what might be called a post-communist treason of intellectuals. It is particularly disturbing, and uncharacteristic of what I have long admired in Polish cultural life. There are narrow-minded calculations by academics surrounding the Bauman affair. There is ambivalence about one of the most distinguished men of Polish letters; supporting him may be dangerous: to do so might compromise one’s career or lead to weakened institutional support. Suffice it to say that I admire and support my Polish colleagues who invited, listened, and critically and deliberately considered Bauman’s talk, whether or not they agree with him (as, by the way, I don’t on many issues of form and substance). I am disturbed by the problems my friends and colleagues face. There is a clear and present danger, and it is not the specter of communism. Note: In the past, intellectuals used their capacity to remember a cultural world beyond the communist order to develop a capacity to question that order and to act upon the questions. Now memory is stif ling. As it empowers the xenophobic, it enfeebles those who would defend academic freedom but fear to be associated in any way with the old repressive order. This is a specific case of a more general phenomenon, in Poland, among its neighbors, and far beyond: What to remember and what to forget about a difficult past, and how to balance memories in such a way that contributes to a desirable present. Of course, what is seen as desirable and what is understood as difficult is very much open to debate. One person’s dream is another’s nightmare, both in remembering and forgetting the past, and in trying to act accordingly. This is where the politics of memory comes in, and it is also where contributions are made by memory workers: those who would actively bring forward memories forgotten, or memories that have been systematically ignored, the project of “re-remembering.” 58

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Re-remembering “Re-remembering” is a notion Toni Morrison presented in her masterpiece, Beloved (Morrison, 1987). She challenged the collective memory of slavery in America. Morrison presented the sound position on the ethical question of the relationship between poetry and atrocity, first opened by Adorno (Adorno, 1983). She reveals the necessity of poetry, the necessity of artistic imagination after horror. It makes an ethical political life possible. More specifically for our investigation, Morrison helps us understand how memory works, and how working against memory is so important. Her idea about re-remembering is the central point of this chapter: to remember anew, to remember differently. She tells the story of a runaway slave, who when caught kills her baby to free her from the pain and suffering of slavery, an act too difficult to remember, too painful to forget. We explore the difficulty and pain with Morrison. The tension of the novel and the questions it raises are the tensions between the need to forget and the equally powerful need to remember anew. This is the tragedy in Morrison’s novel and her life’s work. Ricoeur refers to this tension as “the responsibility of the citizen to arbitrate between such hazardous assessments” of memory and forgetting. Consider a telling example: the major hot spot of contemporary politics and the struggle over memory, the Middle East, specifically the Israeli-Palestinian conf lict. Here memory rules, apparently dictating tragedy. But there are those who work to overcome this. A remarkable example is Israeli Palestinian Bereaved Families for Reconciliation and Peace, which is tellingly depicted in the film Encounter Point. [For more detail, I analyze the group and the film more thoroughly in Goldfarb (2012). An able description of the film can be found in The New York Times’ review of the film, see Anita Gates (2006).] The film shows the extraordinary side of rather ordinary people on both sides of the conf lict. These are people who have lost love ones in the conf lict, victims of wars, military raids, suicide bombings, terror of the state apparatus, and of resistance organizations. The group members are dedicated to not having their loss used to justify a politics of retribution. It started in Tel Aviv, among a group of Israeli parents. It has both Palestinian and Israeli branches, with the Palestinian group slightly outnumbering the Israeli one. The groups operate independently and also work jointly. Getting together, a crucial part of their endeavors, though, is not easy. Travel restrictions make Palestinian movements within Israel proper difficult if not impossible. And Israeli citizens also are restricted in their movements in the occupied territories. In the film we see a group meeting in Jerusalem. What we don’t see are the obstacles and checkpoints that had to be surmounted for the Palestinians to take part. We are shown an attempt by the Israeli group to meet a group in the West Bank, and though they finally do get through, their difficulties are clearly depicted. It includes a postscript of the Palestinian host of the gathering being arrested as a terrorist, but released from prison thanks to his Parents Circle Israeli colleagues. Road blocks, checkpoints, official regulations, and fear are the group’s immediate obstacles. But memory is a more profound one. In the report of the Jerusalem meeting, we see a discussion between two families who lost their daughters to the conf lict, in an antiterrorist military operation in Bethlehem and in a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv. It is a quick empathetic conversation, casual, seemingly not of profound significance. But we see more outside the meeting. We learn that the family from Bethlehem had the bad luck of driving their late model car on a shopping trip on the same day a group of suspected terrorists were driving the same model. And when their car came into view of the Israeli army, they were attacked and their daughter was killed. We see the funeral, a full martyr’s ceremony, with nationalist, almost militaristic, rhetoric and with the father actively 59

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taking part. And we see the father, later, now a member of Parents Circle, as deputy major of the city. This is a moving sequence of events. The family, of course, has not forgotten the loss of their daughter, but in their actions, they are undermining a dominant way of remembering, trying to create another way, apparently with some success. Their Israeli counterparts do the same thing. We see the father who lost his daughter to a suicide bombing go to school groups and argue not only for peace and reconciliation, but also against the linking of memory and retribution. He may not convince, but he is, at least, opening up new possibilities. Both fathers know that as they work in their own communities, they make it possible to work together, and in doing so, they are creating new political alternatives to the logic of the central authorities, by redefining their situation and acting together based on that redefinition, by reinventing their political culture (Goldfarb, 2012). Also from Israel: an Israeli Jewish group that is working to remember the Nakba, Arabic for the “disaster,” as the moment of Israeli independence is commemorated among Palestinians. As they describe themselves on their website (http://zochrot.org/en): “Zochrot [“Remembering”] is a group of Israeli citizens working to raise awareness of the Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948.” They go on to describe their goal: We hope that by bringing the Nakba into Hebrew, the language spoken by the Jewish majority in Israel, we can make a qualitative change in the political discourse of this region. Acknowledging the past is the first step in taking responsibility for its consequences. This must include equal rights for all the peoples of this land, including the right of Palestinians to return to their homes. Note how their project of coming together is pitted against memory. It is about remembering in a different way, re-remembering. It’s not a Jewish memory of the Jewish state, but a memory for an Israel for all its people. Yifat Gutman analyzes this group, along with the Jewish and Palestinian Autobiography of a City, and the all-Palestinian Baladna. The three groups have been re-remembering Palestinian experiences of the 1948 war around the country incorporating locally familiar commemoration practices with new meaning: tours of the ruins of pre-1948 Palestinian villages and testimonies of their former inhabitants, now refugees, performed during the tours, recorded and collected in archives, available through publications and websites (Gutman, 2011). The project of re-remembering has led to the development of a unique museum form, the memorial museum. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, the House of Terror Museum in Budapest, and the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre are prime examples studied by Amy Sodaro (Sodaro, 2011). She highlights an irony. While the makers of these museums work hard to account for difficult pasts in a new and different way, they are more projects of contemporary politics than they are projects of recovery of past horrors. They reveal the priorities, self understanding, and desires of the present, reimagining the troubled past. In her account of the Terror Museum and the Genocide Memorial Centre, this seems to be a matter of raw partisan politics. But even when this is not the case, as with the Holocaust Memorial Museum for example, a problem remains, as with Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. The task of both of these museums is somehow to keep the memory of past horrors alive, but the way the memory is framed to make them understandable is in terms of present circumstance, American liberal pluralism and Zionism respectively. The dominant ideology, the hegemonic cultural position, contemporary common sense, frame the unique horrors, so that the horrors seem to become invisible as the priorities of the present circumstance prevails. 60

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But on the other hand, there is an alternative possibility. Despite the framing, museum exhibits can speak for themselves, from Rwanda to Budapest, from Washington to Jerusalem, and in the hundreds of museums of memory and history in between. Exhibits are framed promoting specific political meanings, but they can and are interpreted by visitors in both predictable and unpredictable ways. This is where the research of Irit Dekel comes in. She studies memory practices, how people go about remembering in their interactions. Her Mediation at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin is on the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin (Dekel, 2013). Going beyond a reading of the memorial and exhibit, she examines the making of the memorial, the discussions that went into its construction, the way the proposal of the memorial was discussed by a distinct set of social actors, the deliberations about how the memorial would be constructed and presented to visitors, and crucially the way different types of visitors go through the museum and make sense of it all. Hers is a critical ethnography of memory practices, or more precisely, it is an ethnography of the social practices that go into the making and using of memorials. She observes how present concerns and experiences, including the experiences of guides to the memorial, constitute collective memory both as artifacts from the past challenge conventions of the present, and as the present creates a useable past. Both appear in the interactions she studies. Ricoeur (2003) tells us that “the memory image is present in the mind as representing something which is no longer there but which has been” and goes on to say, “This ‘having been’ is what memory tries to recover; memory claims to be faithful to this ‘having been.’” Ricoeur continues: “Memory, then, was not only taught by history but wounded by it.” Memory exhibits wound memory and memory wounds the exhibits. Re-remembering is challenged by inconvenient material, and we forget or remember the inconvenient for our present purposes. And things do not always work out as expected.

Memory and the social condition Our inquiry considering memory, forgetting, and re-remembering illuminates what Iddo Tavory and I call the social condition. Tavory (2013) explains the general project: Sociologists face three distinct intellectual projects in their work. They are well aware of two of them, but the third remains in the shadows. The two standard projects are the study of the social construction, and the study of social effects. The third, the study of the predictable existential dilemmas we face, is the one Jeff Goldfarb and I are working to develop in our work, what we call “the social condition.” In this chapter, we have observed how remembering, forgetting, and re-remembering are three moments, not absolutely distinct, of the politics of collective memory. We have reviewed how the dynamics of collective memory have clear, if sometimes contradictory, causes: the projection of the present into the past, and the resistance of the past to such project, as they are socially constituted, serving one social or political project or another. By analyzing particularly troubling cases, I have attempted to show the richness of collective memory, the way it is over-determined, and dynamic. The problems surrounding collective memory reveal dilemmas that are inevitably built into the social fabric, are a manifestation of the social condition, as we understand it (Goldfarb, 2013). I entitled the chapter “Against memory” not because I think memory is always a bad thing; to the contrary, it is clearly an important way that social orders are sustained, and as this is 61

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the case, memory also provides bases for the transformation of social orders. Memory serves to open up a repressive society, we observed in the case of the old regime of the Communist bloc (Goldfarb, 1978), while it also can work to close open societies, as was revealed in the Bauman affair. Indeed, sometimes memory acts work both to open and close at the same time, as we have seen in memorial exhibits and memory activism. Memories of Stalinism can motivate those who would silence and prosecute Zygmunt Bauman and those who fear such repression while remembering Stalinism and the dangers of absolute true beliefs. Thus Michnik was willing and able to sit with his former jailers because he is cognizant of the dangers of the revolutionary justice that Stalinism included. As Michnik counseled “amnesty without amnesia,” he remembered some things, and suggested that others be forgotten. Here I want to underscore that the social work needed to forget is sometimes as important as the work needed to remember, noting that it is complicated and that the balance cannot be decided definitively. The memory is indeed socially constructed but it includes great contradictions and tensions. Indeed, built into the situation is the fact that as one remembers one thing for one purpose, other purposes may be undermined. There are remarkable ironies of consequence, unanticipated consequences for good and for ill. As the genocide of Rwanda is remembered in a center of remembrance in the capital, the way of remembering beyond the center is undermined (Sodaro, 2011). Remembering Jewish suffering in Europe makes it difficult for Israelis to apprehend Palestinian suffering with the establishment of Israel. Yet ways of remembering the Zionist project provide the tools to remember Palestinian suffering, providing a most serious challenge to the order of things (Gutman, 2011). The remarkable members of the Israeli Palestinian Bereaved Families for Reconciliation and Peace are open to the dilemmas of collective memory. They work against the memories that fuel battles of retribution. They carefully re-remember, working against memories that perpetuate an apparently endless conf lict, trying to affirm not only their own dignity but also the dignity of the other. Yet, the evenhandedness of their approach, their recognition of the tragedy, holds the danger of equating suffering. To many Zionists, this appears like identifying justifiable Israeli self-defense with terrorism; for many Palestinians this identifies justifiable resistance with the repressive force of occupation. The activities of the PalestinianIsraeli group are then seen either as marginal, or if not so, dangerous. When viewed as marginal, they are not taken seriously, seen as soft-headed liberals by the Israeli mainstream and as “kissing cousins” by critical Palestinians (Tamari, 2005). Such groups are either tolerated or opposed. And when opposed they reinforce the very situation that they wish to overcome. Even in the way collective memory worked around the old Soviet bloc, as the memory of national and international traditions made available by the communist authorities to oppose the interpretation of those traditions by the communist authorities, the way Tolstoy, et al., became a model for Solzhenitsyn, et al., provided a means to justify the existing order of things that was being opposed. Thus, for example, the great Hungarian Marxist celebrated the major dissident from the Soviet system as a prime exemplar of the cultural project to which Solzhenitsyn was directly opposed, socialist realism (Lukacs, 1971).

Concluding note: between collective memory and collective imagination Against memory because it is closely linked with forgetting. Against memory because it suggests that memory will set us free, when in fact it embeds us in the dilemmas of the social condition. Against memory because memory cannot substitute for imagination. 62

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Memory studies have f lourished in recent years, as has memory activism. With the ideologies of the twentieth century losing their appeal, politics have been built around remembrance. To some degree, this is a welcome development; utopian projects that have little relationship with common experience have been a cause of great human suffering. But so has neoliberalism in which all cultural quality is reduced to market calculation, as have collective memories when they teach that the way things were, in an idealized past, is the alternative to the way things are. When these take a radical turn, memory is especially dangerous: market, national, racist, sexist, and religious fundamentalisms. The utopian visions of the twentieth century needed to be tempered by memory, thus Kundera’s (1982) observation: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” But today we might observe a corollary: the struggle of imagination against memory clichés— the clichés of the anti-communists in Poland, but also the Islamists of North Africa and the Middle East, the clichés of Israelis who declare never again for their collective but do it again to their Palestinian neighbors, and the clichés of Tea Party remembrance of the U.S. Constitution as a divine deliverance. These clichés, among others, are not tempered by imagination, not controlled by realistic humane judgment of where their projection into the future might lead. There is a need for memory tempered by imagination. There is a need to not only remember, forget, and re-remember, but also to re-invent (Goldfarb, 2012), to work to start anew.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. (1983) Prisms. MIT Press. Arendt, Hannah. (1961) Between Past and Future. Viking. Bauman, Zygmunt. (1989) Modernity and the Holocaust. Cornell University Press. Benjamin, Walter. (1969) Illuminations. Schocken. Beyond the Transition. (2013) “Far Right Disrupts Bauman Lecture,” June 23. http://beyondthetransition. blogspot.com/2013/06/far-right-disrupt-bauman-lecture.html. (Video available at https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=ubF-1axqPPw.) Dekel, Irit. (2013) Mediation at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. Pelgrave. Faulkner, William. (1975) Requiem for a Nun. Vintage. Gates, Anita. (2006) “On Opposite Sides: United by Grief,” New York Times, November 11. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/17/movies/17enco.html?_r=0. Goldfarb, Jeffrey C. (1978) “The Social Bases of Independent Public Expression in Communist Societies,” American Journal of Sociology 83(4): 920–39. ——. (1980) The Persistence of Freedom: The Sociological Implications of Polish Student Theater. Westview. ——. (1983) On Cultural Freedom: An Exploration of Public Life in Poland and America. University of Chicago Press. ——. (2006) The Politics of Small Things: The Power of the Powerless in Dark Times. University of Chicago Press. ——. (2012) Reinventing Political Culture: The Politics of Culture versus the Culture of Politics. Polity. ——. (2013) “The Social Condition,” Public Seminar. Gutman, Yifat. (2011) Past Before Future: Memory Activism in Israel-Palestine. Unpublished dissertation, New School for Social Research. Halbwachs, Maurice. (1992) On Collective Memory. University of Chicago Press. Heng, Liang and Shapiro, Judith. (1984). Son of the Revolution. Vintage. Kundera, Milan. (1982) The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Farber and Farber. ——. (1988) The Art of the Novel. Perennial Library. Lukacs, Georg. (1971) Solzhenitsyn. MIT Press. Matynia, Elzbieta. (2009) Performative Democracy. Paradigm Publishers. ——. (2014) An Uncanny Era: Conversations Between Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik. Yale University Press. Michnik, Adam. (1986) Letters from Prison and Other Essays. University of California Press. Morrison, Toni. (1987) Beloved. Knopf. Olick, Jeffrey K. (2007) The Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility. Routledge. 63

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Ricoeur, Paul. (2003) “Memory, History, Oblivion,” a paper presented at the conference “Haunted Memories? History in Europe after Authoritarianism,” Central European University, Budapest (March). Sa’di, Ahmad H. and Abu Lughod, Lila. (2007) Nakba: Palestine, and the Claims of Memory. Columbia University Press. Shils, Edward. (2006) Tradition. University of Chicago Press. Sodaro, Amy. (2011) Exhibiting Atrocity: Memorial Museums and the Global Struggle to Face the Past. Unpublished dissertation, New School for Social Research. Tamari, Salim. (2005) “Kissing Cousins: A Note on a Romantic Encounter,” Palestine Israel Journal. Tavory, Iddo. (2013) “The Social Condition: The Third Intellectual Project,” Public Seminar. Wagner-Pacifici, Robin and Schwartz, Barry. (1991) “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial: Commemorating a Difficult Past,” American Journal of Sociology 97(2): 376–420. Zolberg, Vera. (1996) “Museums as Contested Sites of Remembrance: The Enola Gay Affair.” In Theorizing Museums: Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World. Gordon Fyfe and Sharon Macdonald, eds. Blackwell.

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6 Cultural memory studies Mediation, narrative, and the aesthetic Ann Rigney

The concept of cultural memory How does the embodied memory of individuals relate to the collective memory shared by communities? For scholars working in the field of cultural memory studies (usually with a disciplinary basis in literature and media studies), the key to the articulation between the individual and the collective lies in culture. While people sometimes have similar recollections because they were exposed at the same time and place to similar experiences, this is a relatively limited phenomenon and should be considered at best as ‘collected’ memory rather than ‘collective’ memory (Erll 2011a). For memory to be ‘collective’ it must involve not only recollections that are held in common, but reflections that are also self-reflexively shared as part of common knowledge about the past. And memory can only become collective in this specific sense when different acts of communication and representation using whatever tools are available have come into play so as to create a common pool of stories and figures of memory to which reference can be made. To speak of the collective memory of World War II, for example, means to refer to sets of representations about the global conflict between 1939 and 1945, with which particular groups are familiar thanks to media of all sorts; these provide common points of reference within a community. The greater the scale of the communities involved, the greater is their reliance on media technologies to produce, store, and circulate communal stories. As time passes, moreover, and participants with their embodied recollection of particular events die out, people become totally reliant on the stories carried by cultural artefacts for their memory of what happened to earlier generations. And clearly, as daily lives become ever more saturated with media use, so too does the interaction between ‘embodied’ and ‘mediated’ experience become ever more intense. In sum: culture constitutes the ‘brains’ of society, permitting the preservation and reproduction of stories across space, time, and communities. In the process, however, cultural artefacts, forms, and practices do not just provide a conduit for expressing already existing memories; as many studies have shown, they also play an active role in shaping what is remembered and how. These insights into the importance of mediation lie behind the development of what has come to be called cultural memory studies (see Erll and Nünning 2008; for an excellent 65

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synthesis, see Erll 2011a). ‘Cultural memory’ has become the f lagship concept for scholars approaching the study of memory from various disciplines in the Humanities (literary studies, media studies, cultural studies, cultural history) and for whom the primary focus of research is culture as such rather than the actors and institutions who take centre-stage in social science research. Where sociologists prefer the term ‘collective memory’ (or ‘social memory’; see Olick et al. 2011) and wonder who is doing the remembering and with what impact on social relations, scholars in the field of cultural memory studies focus on the cultural foundations of collective memory: using which media technologies and with the help of which cultural models and forms, do particular stories become constituted, shared, and linked to identity? Central to this line of inquiry is the understanding, which underpins all Humanities research, that culture and cultural practices are not simply epiphenomena which merely ref lect social attitudes, but that they are formative in their own right, and need to be understood in their own terms as well as in relation to the actors whose attitudes and emotions they shape. Like two sides to the same sheet of paper, the ‘collective’ and the ‘cultural’ perspectives on memory should thus be seen as complementary rather than as mutually exclusive paradigms.

Culture as memory, cultures of memory Although the intellectual concerns at its core have been around for a long time, the term ‘cultural memory’ as such and the related term ‘cultural remembrance’ came on the scene only in the last decades. It has a double genealogy. It emerged first in German theory (see Olick in this volume) and then in the quite different research tradition of Anglo-American cultural criticism (mostly notably via the Stanford UP series ‘Cultural Memory in the Present’). In the latter case, the study of ‘cultural memory’ stands by and large for the close reading of particular phenomena, often a single cultural artefact, from an overtly critical or ‘etic’ position in the present. German-trained scholars in contrast are less focussed on single works of high art, and more concerned with analysing more general processes from an ‘emic’ position that strives to be as value-free and systematic as possible. As the international field of cultural memory studies becomes more convergent, however, the two traditions are beginning to mingle in interesting ways to which I will return. From the outset, however, some clarification is needed of the terminological opposition between ‘cultural memory’ and ‘communicative’ memory, since it is regularly cited in broader debates and generates some confusion. When Jan and Aleida Assmann first introduced the term kulturelles Gedächtnis (literally: cultural memory) in the early 1990s, they did so with reference to a much more restricted phenomenon than is covered nowadays by the term ‘cultural memory’. In conceptualizing different phases in the evolution of shared memory, the Assmanns distinguished between ‘communicative memory’, corresponding to informal face-to-face exchanges relating to lived experience, and ‘cultural memory’ (kulturelles Gedächtnis) corresponding to a later phase when experience has become entirely mediated and crystallized into a limited canon of stories and images which are a source of normativity and identity for the group in question. Given this definition, the concept of kulturelles Gedächtnis might better have been translated as ‘canonical memory’ in that it refers to a limited ‘body of texts, images, and rituals specific to each society in each epoch, whose “cultivation” serves to stabilize and convey that society’s self-image’ (Assmann 1995: 132). While processes of canonization are certainly an important feature of shared memory, the implicit suggestion that there is a diachronic opposition between ‘communicative’ and ‘cultural’ (in the sense of ‘mediated’) forms of memory, has not been generally accepted. Instead, embodied recollection and processes of 66

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mediation are seen in more recent publications as continuously interwoven, as entangled from the word go rather than as representing two different phases in memory production. The cultural aspect of the memory that is studied in cultural memory studies, then, has a less restrictive meaning than in the Assmanns’ sense of kulturelles Gedächtnis. It refers more generally to the role of culture in the production of collective memory. This includes the question how culture itself becomes an object of self-ref lexive recollection (as in canonical memory), but even more fundamentally the question how culture mediates collective memory and gives it substance, form, and social reach. On occasion the mediating and canonical aspects of culture can be observed working in tandem. The HBO television series Band of Brothers (2001), for example, uses the mini-series format and audio-visual drama to depict American action in Europe from D-Day to the end of World War II, and thus produces culturally a certain story about the final stages of the war. At the same time, the title of the series invokes culture (in the shape of Shakespeare and all he stands for) as an object of recollection in its own right, with the ‘Band of Brothers’ echoing Henry V’s famous speech to the English on the eve of the battle of Agincourt. In recollecting a key work in the literary canon, the television narrative suggests that the events depicted in the striking and engaging narrative of 1944–45 are part of a longer tradition of heroism (and its cultural representation) on whose prestige it draws. The fact that the depiction of history in Band of Brothers is thus profoundly artificial and culturally mediated, although based on extensive personal testimony, does not lessen its potential to shape collective memory. On the contrary, in our increasingly media-dependent societies, shared memory is always vicarious memory, dependent on imagination as much as on lived experience. At an even more fundamental level, if culture is viewed as a system of inherited codes and beliefs then acculturation can itself be seen in terms of the acquisition of ‘semantic’ and ‘habitual’ memory (see Erll 2011a). When individuals learn to speak certain languages, act in certain ways, and cherish certain attitudes and beliefs, they are in essence appropriating the memory of earlier generations as this has been transmitted through performance, faceto-face communication, and exposure to multiple symbolic artefacts. Culture is in effect a vast reservoir of languages, ideas, and attitudes, a non-genetic inheritance, which generates continuity with earlier and future generations. And a mnemonic approach to the study of culture offers interesting prospects for interdisciplinary research into the intersections between autobiographical memory (relating to one’s own experience) and the repertoire of inherited templates that individuals can use to interpret that experience. Nevertheless, the main concern in what follows will not be with the cultural foundations of individual memory, but with the cultural production of collective memory with specific reference to modern societies. Collective memory will accordingly be understood as shared recollections of the past that rely on media and are linked ref lexively to collective identity. Historical research has shown how, particularly since the French Revolution, specialist activities have been developed that are dedicated to the public cultivation of shared memory. Alongside textual mediations such as histories, memoirs, and historical novels, these include monuments and commemorative rituals, the building of archives and museums, to name just a few, such that we can speak both of cultural memory in general and of particular ‘cultures of memory’ (Erll 2011a; Assmann 2011). Like other forms of culture, cultures of memory are susceptible to change along with the relative importance attached to memory as a marker of identity within particular societies. The intensification of memory practices over the last two hundred years, which can be seen as a by-product of rapid modernization, has led to shifting fashions in, among other things, commemorative rituals and public sculpture. This can be illustrated with reference to the changing shapes of monuments: where nineteenth-century 67

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statues tended to be celebratory and to depict important men in striking poses, sometimes accompanied by allegorical semi-naked females and national symbols, recent monuments are more likely to be about losses suffered, to take an abstract form and have an interactive dimension, and to memorialize groups rather than celebrate heroic individuals. Studying such transformations and innovations in our cultures of memory is an important part of cultural memory studies (see for example Winter 1995; Huyssen 2003; Rigney 2012).

Remembering as cultural practice While the term ‘cultural memory’ has become current in designating the general field of study outlined above, scholars have nevertheless become increasingly wary of the static connotations of ‘memory’ and take care to emphasize that ‘memory’ is never pre-given but the always emerging outcome of acts of remembrance, of ‘mnemonic practices’ (Olick and Robbins 1998; see also Rigney 2005). The belief that memory is best seen as a practice of remembrance and not a ‘thing’, reflects more generally the growing importance of performativity in cultural studies, the idea that language and other symbols should not only be studied in terms of the meaning they produce, but as actions which produce affects and effects in the world. This turn to performativity has provided cultural memory studies with a new way of conceptualizing the link between human agency and that of cultural artefacts and symbolic forms (Taylor 2003). Where analysis used to be focussed on discrete artefacts (be this a text, a monument, or a theatrical production), it has now shifted to the practices involved in the making and using of those artefacts, with reception as important as production. Inspired by such developments, remembrance has come to be defined as an observable cultural practice (as distinct from a purely mental operation) which involves the public enactment of affective and cognitive relations to the past using whatever media and cultural forms are available and appropriate to the particular context. To the extent that engagement with acts of remembrance can in turn generate new acts of remembrance in the form of embodied acts or new artefacts, it has become logical to speak of ‘productive reception’ (Rigney 2012) in order to designate the ways in which stories are reproduced as they travel across media and are appropriated by different actors. A consequence of this shift from ‘product’ to ‘process’ is the realization that the production of memory is part of an ongoing dynamic and that it should be studied in these terms. A memory must be kept alive through repeated acts of recall if it is not to be de facto forgotten by becoming culturally insignificant and ceasing to produce responses. The key to memory is not in storage (the fact of information being archived) but in the capacity of a particular story to stimulate its own reproduction in a new form: to procreate (Rigney 2008). There is no (longer) memory where there are no new acts of remembrance. If a story is taken for granted or stops being relevant to contemporary concerns it will cease generating new versions of itself. At best, such a ‘forgotten’ story becomes an inert piece of the archive which only becomes culturally active again when someone brings it back into circulation (on the distinction between inert archive and active remembrance, see Assmann 2008). An illustration of the gradual forgetting of memories is offered by the fate of certain ‘great men’ who were memorialized in the nineteenth century but whose statues are at best recognized today as quaint but rather meaningless objects in the streets of our cities. An example of such a (re)emergent memory is that of the colonial troops on the Western Front in World War I. Once absent from mainstream narratives, troops from the European empires are now beginning to figure in recent depictions of the conf lict, with the help of newly discovered archival materials and their creative reworking – as in Philip Sheffner’s documentary film 68

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The Halfmoon Files (2007), for example, which recycles and repurposes original sound recordings of Indian prisoners of war in Germany in order to highlight these hitherto forgotten (at least among the general public in Europe) actors in the war. The Halfmoon Files illustrates how the emergence of new memories is linked to changing social realities which generate new retrospective viewpoints and interest in particular topics. It also serves as a reminder of the fact that the cultural production of collective memory is caught up with struggles for the power of definition and for a voice in the public sphere: like other fields, it is fraught by struggles for hegemony and the contestation of dominant narratives (for more on this, see Radstone and Hodgkin 2003). The perspective from cultural memory studies shows that while such struggles may be politically motivated, they are nevertheless conducted using specifically cultural means – in this case, the archival recordings, the old photographs, the aesthetics of the uncanny, and the genre of the audio-visual documentary. These make it possible not only to tell the story but, as importantly, to shape its substance and potential impact. Using archival footage, photographs, and old sound recordings, The Halfmoon Files allows the voices of the dead soldiers from Rajasthan and Bengal to be heard for the first time in public: crackling and ghostly, both present and past, close by and very far away.

The dynamics of mediation and remediation The concept of mediation is crucial when describing how experience and archival traces are turned into shareable and shared representations. It is a complex matter, involving the interplay of various factors: materials and technologies (print, imaging, etc.) for inscribing and storing information; cultural forms and codes for shaping information into meaningful configurations; conduits and networks for circulating information and linking people through symbolic artefacts. Within the field of cultural memory studies, there have been important studies devoted to the elucidation of the material characteristics of particular media of memory and how their material qualities affect meaning-making and circulation: photography (see in particular Hirsch 1997), buildings and monuments (Huyssen 2003), embodied performance (Taylor 2003), film (Landsberg 2004), social media (Van Dijck 2007; Hoskins 2011), and text (see below). Together, such studies have shown how the choice of material (sound, image, or performance) and of platform (broadcast or interactive) is extremely important for the way a story about the past can be told and how it will connect people as members of the same mnemonic community. A monument located in a city-centre cannot move, for example, but since the image of that statue can, different media often work together in stabilizing and disseminating a particular story. In light of this, cultural memory studies has by now moved beyond the study of memory production in single media or in discrete artefacts in order to consider the interplay between media platforms. In line with what was said earlier about the importance of reproduction and recursivity to memory, mediation is now understood as being intimately linked to remediation. This term (introduced in Bolter and Grusin 2000 to describe what they saw as a structural feature of all media use) is broadly understood as the continuous translation of media content from older to newer media and from one platform to another, with a view to creating fresh effects of immediacy. This concept has been adapted to the study of memory in order to describe the intermedial dynamics that seems to be a necessary part of the intense societal investment which turns certain topics into high-profile ‘sites of memory’ (Rigney 2005; Erll 2007; Erll and Rigney 2009). Translating a story from print to movie to exhibition to memorial to a personal pilgrimage to that memorial ensures that the memory remains in circulation 69

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while the novelty of its new materialization ensures that it can continue to hold the attention of the public. Indeed, it is the recurrence of a story across ‘plurimedial networks’ (Erll 2008) which enables it to become shared by a widening circle of people, connected across space and time by their exposure to the ‘same’ story in different forms. In line with such reasoning, for example, a recent study has traced how the story of the Australian outlaw Ned Kelly (1854–80) migrated in the course of a century across newspaper, book, theatre, film, painting, and performance, with each remediation keeping his memory alive at the same time as it changed its meaning in a way that resonated with shifting identity politics and the attempts of competing stakeholders to define Australian identity (Basu 2012).

Memorability: models for remembrance As the case of Ned Kelly amply illustrates, collective narratives are produced in a politically charged discursive space which regulates what is important and sayable at any given time. The issue of ‘sayability’ is central to cultural memory studies since finding words and images to deal with certain painful topics is not the straightforward outcome of a willingness to address such topics, but goes hand in glove with the development of an expressive ability to do so. Research has shown that there is no pre-given connection between expression and experience; that the latter has to be mediated, not just through some communication technology, but also through the ‘languages’ available for organizing and presenting images of the past. That there is only a contingent relation between language and world is something we have known for a long time in linguistic theory, but perhaps because memory is always associated with a belief in its authenticity, this basic principle has only recently been transferred to the field of shared memory. The lack of a pre-given connection between events and the way we later talk about them means that certain ‘models of remembrance’ (Rigney 2005) or ‘memory schemata’ (Erll 2011a) have evolved that are applied to multiple situations. ‘Models’ is understood here as the changing repertoire of narrative structures, figures of thought, genres, and aesthetic styles whose application enables singular experiences and events to be publicly articulated in different material forms. Since such models are always in short supply, they tend to be copied and transferred from one context to another (on ‘scarcity’ and ‘recycling’, see Rigney 2005; on ‘travelling memory’ see Erll 2011b). To invoke again the example of Band of Brothers: this television series (itself a remediation of a 1992 book by Stephen E. Ambrose) uses a pars pro toto device, familiar from many works of historical fiction, which allows a general situation or movement to be depicted through the experiences of a select number of singular individuals with whom viewers or readers can empathize and with whose fate they become involved. In this way, the chaos of war is converted into a stable and coherent form, and hence into a memorable narrative. Seen in this way, the depiction itself can be said to have not only conserved, but to have actually produced memory. As is indicated by its regular occurrence in the above, ‘narrative’ is a key concept in cultural memory studies. It is generally assumed that recollections are stored and transmitted primarily through stories, even when these take the condensed form of a photograph. An important body of scholarship, originating in philosophy of history but now assimilated into cultural studies, relates to what has been called ‘the value of narrativity in the representation of reality’ (White 1987 [1981]). Behind these discussions is the idea that ‘narrativity’ is a cognitive scheme rather than a property of events; accordingly, that experiences are not in themselves stories, but become narrativized through the application of models of storytelling which help turn events into meaningful structures. The application of narrative schemata can occur at the level of plot (stories can be conceived as tragedy or comedy, melodrama or 70

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romance, and so on) or at the level of roles (stories can be organized around a hero-villain dynamic or, as has become increasingly dominant in post–World War II narratives, a victim-perpetrator one). Already in their very composition, then, narratives can be said to be ‘premediated’ (Erll 2007) by the memory of earlier stories which provide conditions of possibility for the articulation of new ones. What at first sight seem to be unique narratives are actually based on a sedimentation of earlier ones (witness the echoes of Shakespeare in Band of Brothers); the sense of singularity arises from the foregrounding of the specificity of the case against the background memory of similar occurrences. In keeping with what was said earlier about the importance of multiple platforms, the resonance with other narratives runs to a significant degree along intermedial lines. This can best be illustrated with reference to the workings of monuments as mnemonic media, since their condensed form means that they are particularly dependent for meaning on their interplay with representations in other media. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (2004) in Berlin, for example, consists of thousands of blank concrete blocks of differing sizes placed together in a labyrinthine mass, but the visitors who walk between those blocks carry with them the memory of stories, movies, photographs, and perhaps even examples of so-called Stolpersteine from their hometown, with which to fill the gaps and make sense of them in relation to the Nazi genocide. What has been said so far might lead one to conclude that there is always a model of remembrance that can be used to evoke the past. This is not the case, however. On the contrary, a particular concern of cultural memory studies has been the question of what happens when a topic is ‘unsayable’, that is, when it seems to resist any of the available templates even if it is deemed relevant. Not that actors are always aware of what they are missing. Sometimes it is only in retrospect, after a new model has emerged through the creativity of practitioners, that the absence of such a model becomes apparent. This can be illustrated by reference to the above-mentioned phenomenon of Stolpersteine (literally: stumbling stones), brass cobblestones placed ritualistically outside the former homes of Jewish victims of the Holocaust and engraved with their names and dates. Since the first stone, designed by artist Gunther Demnig, was placed in 1992, some 30,000 more have followed, the template virally spreading across German towns and into other European countries, and also spreading from the commemoration of the Jewish victims of the Nazis to other victim groups (see http://www. stolpersteine.eu/en/). Within a relatively short period, the idea of ritualistically placing a small brass cobblestone on the pavement has become a transnationally recognized template with which to articulate publicly the recollection of local victims of Nazism. The availability of this mnemonic model has not only provided a form with which to commemorate former fellow citizens, however, but also a stimulus for doing so: the availability of the template can be said not just to facilitate, but to generate these networked acts of remembrance at multiple locations. The case of the Stolpersteine involves the transnational spread of a very particular model relating to a European-wide event. Other examples of ‘travelling memory’ (Erll 2011b) are less specific in form, but they illustrate the same basic principle whereby new topics become ‘memorable’ by the adaptation of pre-existing models and languages of remembrance, each time with a slight variation.

Unspeakability and multidirectionality Running parallel to this interest in the emergence and spread of models that enable remembrance, another important strand in cultural memory studies has focussed in particular on the failures of public remembrance and the resistance offered to ‘sayability’ by the memory of vast 71

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injustice, especially but by no means exclusively, of the Holocaust. Of particular interest to scholars is the tension between the ethical imperative for society to remember and the limited cultural means we have for doing so – because gross lacunae in the archives mean that details are simply missing or because the extent of the suffering incurred defies our powers to imagine it. A key term in such debates (though not uncontested: see Radstone 2002) has been ‘trauma’. It is used to designate the ‘open wounds’ of the past: sites of suffering and violence which seem to fall outside our usual categories of understanding and which, being shocking and intolerable, do not lend themselves to existing templates without a betrayal of their essence. They are events which, although they are remembered vividly in the hearts and minds of their victims, nevertheless defy sayability in the usual modes of public recollection. They mark not only a rupture in experience but also in practices of cultural remembrance, indeed a failure of culture itself. And precisely because they have not been articulated and acknowledged in public (or ‘worked through’), they continue to affect victims as well as society as a whole since a failure to fully recognize and understand past injustice risks its being perpetuated in a different form (for a good summary, see Craps 2013). This realization has led to a substantial body of work on various forms of testimony and memorialization, how they reflect these dilemmas and, in some cases, find creative solutions to deal with them – even by way of radical formal experimentation (Suleiman 2006). This interest in traumatic memory has been particularly important in the school of AngloAmerican criticism, and has led to subtle readings of the narrative and aesthetic strategies developed by creative writers in dealing with the memory of colonialism and genocide (see for example Rothberg 2009; Craps 2013). I will come back to the role of the aesthetic in the next section. Suffice it here to call attention to a point that is too often overlooked in the social sciences (though, see Keightley and Pickering 2012): that creativity and imagination are needed if certain memories are to be made shareable at all. The concept of ‘multidirectionality’ (Rothberg 2009) has marked an important development in this concern with trauma and unspeakability, at the same time as it builds a bridge between the study of discrete texts and the broader dynamics of remembrance as outlined above. Central to the theory of multidirectionality is the idea, based on innovative research into the cultural history of post-war Europe, that the memories of different traumatic pasts are culturally co-produced: the memory of one set of circumstances provides a model which helps another to emerge into the public arena in an ongoing spiral of co-production from which an image of particular events and their broader context gradually emerges. Exploiting new archival materials and bringing together hitherto unconnected texts written in the 1950s and 60s, Rothberg shows how representations of the Holocaust have been modelled on the recollection of colonialism and, conversely, how recollections of colonial violence have been modelled on the Holocaust, with each twist in the spiral revealing new aspects of the past and new structural connections in the past and present between different types of injustice. Implicit in all of this is the recognition that mediated memories circulate transnationally as well as nationally, and that this provides them with the additional potential to reconfigure the borders between groups who have hitherto considered themselves unconnected (see also Rothberg 2011). One of the major challenges now facing cultural memory studies is to find ways of accounting for the role of singular artefacts within these broader multidirectional dynamics of mediation and remediation, canonization and contestation: Do certain artefactual carriers of memory have a greater impact than others? What are the game-changers which actually succeed in bringing a new collective narrative into circulation? Do the creative arts have a distinctive role to play in generating critical perspectives on dominant narratives and in articulating hitherto ‘unspeakable’ stories? 72

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Memory and aesthetics: the case of literature A significant part of the work done in the field of cultural memory studies is based on the assumption, fed by a long tradition of critical analysis, that the creative arts have an important role to play in the cultural production of memory in the modern period. The fact that many of our public discourses on the collective past are the product of stories that are not only mediated but also aestheticized needs little demonstration. War and Peace (1869), All Quiet on the Western Front (1929; a phenomenal success both as book and as movie), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Apocalypse Now (1979; itself a reworking of the 1899 novel Heart of Darkness), Schindler’s List (1993), Midnight’s Children (1981): the very mention of such titles should be enough to recall the importance of the arts in shaping ideas about the past and the extent of their often transnational mass appeal. Even if fictional narratives and the creative arts do not fit in with the dominant association of memory with lived experience, the interdisciplinary study of collective memory needs to take them very seriously indeed. Suffice it here to summarize just three salient points in current research. To begin with, considerable attention has been paid with the help of analytic traditions in narratology to the modes of remembrance characteristic of literary or filmic narratives: How do particular novels or movies construct their stories and engage the interest and emotions of their readers and viewers? How do they exploit the particular qualities of the chosen medium in performing collective memory? It has been shown that novelists and film-makers tend to adopt an experiential mode of narration, using singular individuals as the centre of consciousness in the story in such a way as to maximize the imaginability of particular events for later spectators and readers (Erll 2008). It has also been shown how the aesthetic qualities of the particular text or film can enhance involvement in the story and its capacity to ‘stick’ in the mind and hence become a recurring point of reference in discussions (Rigney 2012). The narrative, experiential, and aesthetic aspects of particular artefacts work together in the production of ‘prosthetic memory’ (Landsberg 2004), a concept which was first developed with specific reference to cinema but which has proven useful with reference to literature as well. It involves a memory which is not based in autobiographical experience but on exposure to vivid mediations (again Band of Brothers or War and Peace offer cases in point) generating empathy with actors in the past with whom one has hitherto not been affiliated. Even as this prosthetic memory is being produced, the story itself is providing a rewarding experience in its own right with aesthetic, emotional, and cognitive tradeoffs. It is these rewards which explain why certain stories can remain in circulation for quite a long time, generate new versions of themselves in other media, and travel sometimes well beyond the context in which they were originally produced. The formal and aesthetic qualities constituting the singularity (Attridge 2004) of particular art works also helps explain their role as catalysts in putting new stories into the public arena and in keeping them there as later points of reference (Rigney 2008; Rigney 2009). It has become generally accepted that the arts are an important source of innovation in memory culture: not only because of their huge social reach and cultural longevity, but above all because of their ability to articulate stories that have not yet been told and to bring them into circulation. Creative artists tend to be masters of a huge repertoire of cultural models and are experts in the realm of the unscripted. They have accordingly been key figures in the multidirectional emergence of memories of injustice: many recent novelists can be observed ref lexively negotiating a space between interested publics and the traumatic history and hitherto unarticulated experiences of marginalized groups (Craps 2013; Crownshaw 2010). But the role of fiction in articulating marginalized histories is 73

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not merely a post-war phenomenon: since at least the early nineteenth century, historical novels have time and again sought out topics that are socially relevant but which are not yet registered in official history or even inscribed in the archive (Rigney 2012). If vividly composed and well-acted narratives regularly bring new memories into the public arena, they themselves are often not the last word but rather the beginning of an intermedial dynamic which ensures that exposure to a topic is gradually intensified, prolonged, and extended to a broader constituency, and often contested along the way. In some cases, the afterlife of a historical fiction involves historians’ publicly challenging its veracity and offering alternatives. But this does not necessarily mean that true histories always succeed in displacing the prosthetic memory generated by the fiction since its aesthetic and experiential qualities may simply have made it more memorable and more accessible than the alternatives. The power of the aesthetic to make things memorable makes it all the more urgent to take imagination seriously, both for its misleading and its enabling qualities: after all, tourists to Krakow f lock daily to Schindler’s factory in a personalized performance of the movie. While vividly mediated fictions generate prosthetic memory, some works of literature and cinema have in addition an important ref lective component: they not only help produce memory but also use their aesthetic potential to produce critical ref lection on dominant memory practices (for the distinction between memory-productive and ­memory-ref lective works, see Erll 2011a). In that sense, the creative arts can be said to provide an important impulse to think at a metalevel about collective memory, how it works and what it means, and where it falls short or becomes reified and even morbid. The historically self-conscious work of W. G. Sebald (1944–2001), which often dwells on monuments, archives, and other mnemonic media in the course of the story, is often cited as an exemplar of such ref lexivity. But mention can also be made of Javier Cercas’ Soldiers of Salamis (2001), a novel about the Spanish Civil War which not only attempts to reconstruct the long-marginalized story of the Republicans, but in the process, uses playful devices to push the reader to think critically about lacunae in collective memory and the nature of heroism. Finally, mention must be made of the role of the creative arts as ‘mediators’, which connect people by virtue of their common engagement with the same story. As the international spread of a movie like Schindler’s List or a novel like Soldiers of Salamis demonstrates (the latter has been translated into at least five other European languages), fictional narratives have a broad appeal and, judging by patterns of distribution and translation, tend to travel relatively easily across national and linguistic borders. This means that they are also important agents in the cultural transfer of memories from one community to another, and in the building of imaginative bridges between communities through the workings of prosthetic memory. While a lot of the research done so far on collective memory has examined dynamics within national communities, recent work in the field of cultural memory studies indicates the need to consider also its transnational dimensions and the capacity of mnemonic practices themselves, not just to express existing relations, but to help reconfigure the boundaries between imagined communities (De Cesari and Rigney 2014). To give an example: the movie Katyn (2007; directed by Andrzej Wajda) not only helped to bring the victim-perspective on the massacre of Polish officers in 1940 into broad international visibility (the movie was nominated for an Oscar), but through its screening on Russian television in 2010 it also gave an important impulse to the process of reconciliation between Russia and Poland (while also provoking new debate in Poland on the politics of its depiction of the Germans). 74

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Perspectives for the future The current agenda of cultural memory studies is crystallizing around a number of themes, several of which have been touched on already. Three issues in particular deserve special mention. Firstly, there is need for a better understanding of the intermedial pathways, including digital and interactive ones, through which stories emerge into the public arena or fail to do so. Secondly, there is need for a better understanding of the processes whereby stories and identities are constructed with the help of media within frameworks that are both smaller and larger in scale than the nation-state (see also Brown et al. this volume). Thirdly, there is need for more longitudinal studies of the cultural dynamics of memory production. Understandably, most discussion in the field has concentrated on the period since 1945, when World War II generated an outpouring of memory practices, discussions, and a distinctive memory culture in which trauma, victimhood, and perpetratorship have been central. However, there is a danger of temporal foreshortening and an internalization of trauma discourses on the part of memory studies itself. This will need to be offset by comparative studies relating to earlier periods and other topics as well as to non-European cultures.

References Assmann, A. 2008. Canon and Archive. In: Erll, A. & Nünning, A. (eds.). Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter. Assmann, A. 2011. Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Assmann, J. 1995. Collective Memory and Cultural Identity. New German Critique, 65, 125–33. Attridge,  D. 2004. The Singularity of Literature. London: Routledge. Basu, L. 2012. Ned Kelly as Memory Dispositif: Media, Time, Power, and the Development of Australian Identities. Berlin: de Gruyter. Bolter, J. D. & Grusin, R. 2000. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Craps, S. 2013. Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Crownshaw, R. 2010. The Afterlife of Holocaust Memory in Contemporary Literature and Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan. De Cesari, C. and Rigney, A. (eds.). 2014. Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulation, Scales. Berlin: De Gruyter. Erll, A. 2007. Prämediation – Remediation: Der indische Aufstand in imperialen und post-kolonialen Medienkulturen (1857 bis zur Gegenwart). Trier: WVT. Erll, A. 2008. Literature, Film, and the Mediality of Cultural Memory. In: Erll, A. & Nünning, A. (eds.). Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter. Erll, A. 2011a. Memory in Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Erll, A. 2011b. Travelling Memory. Parallax, 17, 4–18. Erll, A. & Nünning, A. (eds.). 2008. Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter. Erll, A. & Rigney, A. (eds.). 2009. Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory. Berlin: de Gruyter. Hirsch, M. 1997. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hoskins,  A. 2011. Media, Memory, Metaphor: Remembering and the Connective Turn. Parallax, 17, 19–31. Huyssen,  A. 2003. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Keightley,  E. & Pickering, M. 2012. The Mnemonic Imagination: Remembering as Creative Practice. London: Palgrave. Landsberg,  A. 2004. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Olick, J. K. & Robbins, J. 1998. Social Memory Studies: From ‘Collective Memory’ to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices. Annual Review of Sociology, 24, 105–40. Olick, J. K., Vinitzky-Seroussi, V., & Levy, D. (eds.). 2011. The Collective Memory Reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 75

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Radstone, S. 2002. The War of the Fathers: Trauma, Fantasy, and September 11. Signs, 28, 457–59. Radstone, S. & Hodgkin, K. (eds.). 2003. Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory. London: Routledge. Rigney, A. 2005. Plenitude, Scarcity, and the Circulation of Cultural Memory. Journal of European Studies, 35, 209–26. Rigney, A. 2008. The Dynamics of Remembrance: Texts Between Monumentality and Morphing. In: Erll, A. & Nünning, A. (eds.). Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter. Rigney, A. 2009. All This Happened More or Less: What a Novelist Made of the Bombing of Dresden. History and Theory, 48, 5–24. Rigney, A. 2012. The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rothberg, M. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rothberg, M. 2011. From Gaza to Warsaw: Mapping Multidirectional Memory. Criticism, 53, 523–48. Suleiman, S. R. 2006. Crises of Memory and the Second World War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Taylor, D. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Van Dijck, J. 2007. Mediated Memories in the Digital Age. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. White, H. 1987 [1981]. The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Winter, J. M. 1995. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Part II

Cultural artifacts, symbols and social practices

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7 Social movements and memory Ron Eyerman

How movements remember Social movements are forms of collective action that aim to bring about social change. Movements can be progressive or reactionary but they all share an interest in changing the status quo, as they perceive it. Essential to any social movement is the formation of a collective identity, a means of constituting a “we” and informing the world what that represents. Collective identity is a source of inspiration for participants, as well as a means to recruit others. To be effective, social movements must demonstrate what Charles Tilly (2003) has described under the acronym WUNC, being Worthy, United, Numerous and Committed. The performative processes of collective will formation, such as mass mobilizations, invoke meaningful reference to the past (Eyerman 2006). Social movements draw inspiration and force by infusing themselves with history, referencing past movements and employing inherited ritual performances. In this way the past becomes present as it is embodied in new generations of activists. Individual participants in social movements are empowered through identifying themselves with history and the sense of making history. As collective action, social movements are equally empowered through historical reference. For example, right-wing movements might link their actions to fascism or Nazism, re-inventing the rituals and symbols of the past for present use. The same happens on the other side of the political spectrum, as leftwing movements adopt the symbols and tactics of previous leftist movements. Alternatively, social movements might use the past to establish claims to their own uniqueness, as, for example, a “new left” or “neo-fascist,” or a “new” social movement altogether. Such rhetorical claims add emotional force to movements by raising the stakes of their current practice, by connecting to history or by denying that connection. In either case, the past is present. At the same time, individuals within such movements are empowered with an added sense of historical significance. The Tea Party movement in the United States offers an example. At rallies and other demonstrations participants dress in costumes that draw upon founding American myths, bearing imagined uniforms from the rebel army that fought against the British. Traditional music is employed to the same end. The very name “Tea Party” makes reference to an historical protest event, what has come to be called the Boston Tea Party. In 1773, as the rebellion against 79

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British colonial rule was escalating, protesters boarded tea-bearing ships in Boston Harbor and cast their contents into the sea. The current Tea Party is a right-wing anti-tax movement that seeks to enhance its symbolic power through this historical reference (on the Tea Party, see Armey and Kibbe (2010)). The Tea Party movement has a manifesto, a practice made use of by many movements, in which its aims are articulated as propositions, yet it draws on history through its symbolism and reference to founding American documents. As movements become more established, their relation to history can become more structured, through the construction of a founding narrative. All nations and many social movements have founding narratives, stories that tell who we are through recounting where we came from. Such narratives form master frames and are passed on through traditions, in rituals and ceremonies, public performances that reconnect a group, and where membership is confirmed. Within this process, “we” are remembered and “they” are excluded. On the social interaction level, current social movements employ protest repertoires inherited from past movements. They march, chant, sing songs and bear placards, which recall as well as reference past movements. The occupy movement of the past years employed tactics used by the American labor movement, the civil rights movement and student protests from decades earlier, camping out in public spaces, and singing songs of social solidarity they inherited from these previous movements. The movement also drew on historic symbolism, as its online graphics recalled Native American struggles to bolster its claims (Barker 2012). Through such practices the past inscribes itself onto the present. Thus, much like the practices outlined by Connerton (1989), social movements ­remember through the iteration and mimetic reference mentioned above and also through commemorative performances. Social movements often stage their protests and other activities in historically meaningful locations and on days heavy with symbolism. The above-mentioned Tea Party uses traditional American holidays to background its protests. Labor movements around the world celebrate May 1, usually in public places of great significance. On these occasions the past is drawn upon to re-create a sense of common purpose, through remembrance. Founding narratives are recalled and reinvigorated, f lags are f lown, speeches are made and past struggles are recalled. Political parties borne out of social movements use such occasions to recall a less institutionalized, activist past. Connerton (1989:41) uses the example of Germany’s National Socialist Party of the 1930s to illustrate this. Other examples are plentiful. The Swedish Social Democratic Party celebrates May Day with marches full of red banners and f lags, recalling a past as a social movement and tempering the present image of a staid, bureaucratic organization grown stale after years in government. The American civil rights movement is brought to life each year on Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, a national holiday celebrated in most parts of the United States.

Memories of movements The memories of social movements circulate in societies through people, places and practices. The American civil rights movement offers a rich example of how the memory of social movements can impact national identity. The establishment of Martin Luther King, Jr., Day as a national holiday required a long process of negotiation, which included the tension between history and memory (see Hall 2005, Morgan 2006, Romano and Raiford (eds.) 2006). For a once-hated figure like King to become celebrated and included in the national pantheon necessitated a cleansing of his memory (Morgan 2006). The same can be said regarding the positive interpretation of the social movement of which King was part. Both King and the civil rights movement are now included in school textbooks as reflecting 80

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the best aspects of American society, examples of the realization of the American dream. King and the movement have become synonymous, with his 1963 “I have a dream” speech being equated with the American dream. It is not only school textbooks that have canonized King and frozen the civil rights movement in 1963. Mass cultural artifacts, feature films, television shows and souvenirs have also aided the process of blending history and memory. King and the movement have been institutionalized and incorporated into the American story. There are museums and heritage tours, official yearly celebrations, schools, streets and highways named after him. The ongoing struggle to determine the legacy of Nelson Mandela follows along the lines of Martin Luther King, Jr. Mandela and King are two of the most recognized black men in the new world of global celebrity. When Mandela died in 2013, he was honored in a funeral ceremony that attracted political leaders and celebrities from around the world. Included among the almost 100 heads of state or government were the American president Barack Obama and the British prime minister David Cameron. This was both ironic and significant, as it was wire-tapping by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that helped send Mandela to prison and the British government that had once branded him a terrorist. The American delegation included former presidents Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, as well as the media celebrity Oprah Winfrey. It is not by coincidence that the memorial ceremony for Nelson Mandela was held on the same day he had received the Nobel Peace Prize 20 years earlier or that it took place in Soweto. Both time and place were heavy with symbolism. In 1976, Soweto, a Johannesburg township, was the site of one of the violent incidents which catalyzed the anti-apartheid movement and the Nobel Prize awarded to Mandela was shared with F.W. de Klerk, South Africa’s last apartheid president. The events at Soweto are now commemorated in South Africa as part of Youth Day. The fact that Mandela had spent years in prison was mentioned in the orations along with his revolutionary past and his role in the anti-apartheid movement. The view of Mandela as a participant in a radical collective effort, however, was countered by the view of him as a heroic individual, a “giant of history, who moved a nation toward justice,” as Obama put it. Which of these two views will come to dominate the way Nelson Mandela is remembered is fairly easy to predict. On a more mundane level, shifts in both local and national political power make marking the landscapes of memory possible. Racially marked changes in local government in the cities and townships of Mississippi, sites of some of the most notorious acts of racial violence in the 1950s and 1960s, made possible the plaques that have been placed on highways and buildings to mark and commemorate some of these incidents. For example, the murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American brutally beaten to death for allegedly f lirting with a white woman in 1955, is now commemorated with a signpost at the site of the murder. The courthouse where his killers were tried and freed by an all-white jury is also marked with a plaque describing that fact. There are similar factors but different interests at work in such processes of memorymaking. The conf lation of a social movement with one individual and the canonization of that person requires a complex process of remembering and forgetting as well as a negotiated struggle for recognition. African Americans remain an identifiable minority in the United States, one that has long struggled for recognition and social justice. Social movements, such as the civil rights movement, have been central to that struggle. For this group and its struggles to be included in the dominant American historical narrative, to be included in school textbooks and presented in a positive light on commemorative occasions represents a tremendous success. Yet, this recognition came at a cost. The movement had to be cleansed of any 81

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radicalism and its leaders had to be vetted and made acceptable. History had to be re-written and memory purged and repressed. The process that made the placing of historical markers at notorious sites in the Mississippi countryside possible had some similarities to those carried out on the national level. The first was the passage of time, which not only soothed some raw emotions but also allowed many of those directly involved to age or die. As the intensity of the moment receded, forms of recognition and reconciliation became possible. Another similarity was the presence of carrier groups, those who refused to let memory die. In order to affect change, however, carrier groups must have access not only to memory but also to the means of its representation. Memory must be articulated and narrated in a compelling way before it can be transmitted to a wider public. Connected to this, the relative healing of time passing must be coupled with access. This process, too, involves degrees of selectivity, as to who gets to speak and what gets to be remembered. The combined process of remembrance and representation is further complicated by individual and collective trauma (Eyerman 2011, 2015). Horrific events, especially those that are experienced by relatively powerless individuals and groups, are intensely traumatic on two levels; the first being the experience itself and the second being the indifference of others. Recollection is doubly painful because of this, intensifying the impulse to repress and forget. As a result, articulation and recognition may be slow in coming. In addition to access, trust is a necessary component of this process of articulation, representation and communication. The civil rights movement itself provided a necessary basis for the articulation and recognition of individual and collective trauma. It was an essential carrier group in the articulation of traumatic memory and its communication to the wider society. Post civil rights movement generations of African Americans have carried this memory into the twenty-first century. As African Americans of newer generations have moved into positions of power in national, state and local governments, including in Mississippi, it became possible to memorialize the traumatic incidents experienced in the past. The American gay rights movement offers another example of how memory and history interact within social movements and their reception in the wider society. The founding narrative of this movement is now well established. It begins at a distinct time and place: June 27, 1969, in New York’s Greenwich Village. That date marks an incident in which a police raid of a homosexual bar, the Stonewall Inn, was met with forceful resistance by its patrons. The bitter conf lict that emerged has been mythologized under the name “the Stonewall Riots,” an event which is now commemorated around the world (Armstrong and Crage 2006). According to these authors, “President Clinton made the Stonewall Inn a national historic landmark…. It is common to divide gay history into two epochs—‘before Stonewall’ and ‘after Stonewall’” (Op. cit. 724). This point of origin and meaning has been challenged by historians and by movement activists alike. Historians point to the fact that Stonewall was not unique, nor was it the first such incident of forceful resistance by gays. Movement activists, however, point to the fact that there were several distinctive categories of people other than gay men who were present at the inn and active in resisting police. They claim that these groups have been marginalized by the now-dominant narrative of how this movement came to be. Armstrong and Crage suggest why Stonewall was selected as the point of origin: the violent conf lict with the police promoted a tough image that countered stereotypes and New York, especially Greenwich Village, carried a positive symbolic meaning in that it was the location of a powerful and expressive activist community. Another example of the power of carrier groups in the establishment of a movement’s founding narrative is that of Harvey Milk. Milk, one of the first openly gay men to hold public office in the United States, was assassinated in San Francisco in 1976 along with the city’s mayor, 82

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George Moscone (Eyerman 2012). At the time, Moscone was the better known of the two. Today, the state of California celebrates Harvey Milk Day and the city of San Francisco remembers his death with an annual march, while Moscone struggles to be remembered at all. Along with the Stonewall Riots, the legacy of Harvey Milk is central to the narrative of the gay rights movement. The longevity of Milk’s memory is directly related to the social movement with which he identified and in so doing helped identify. In the 1970s, Milk was an important figure in the attempts to mobilize around gay rights. He was an important figure in his lifetime and then again after his death. In death, he became a martyr to the cause and an emblematic figure in the continuous process of mobilization. The annual memorial marches are as much about this as about Harvey Milk—in fact the two became intertwined. The gay movement itself is a carrier of the memory of Harvey Milk, but it is also particular members of that movement who have seen to it exactly how he is remembered, most especially in a wider social context. While marginalized by mainstream society in the 1970s and 1980s, members and supporters of this group were making significant inroads into the sphere of cultural production, something that permitted access to mass media, including not only newspapers, radio and television, but also film, theater and the other arts. They were able to translate this access into means to narrative and project a more positive image of themselves and their movement. The figure of Harvey Milk, like the Stonewall Inn, became an important symbol in this project. As far as Milk was concerned, this culminated in a major Hollywood film released to mass acclaim in 2008, an event which helped the governor of California to reverse his decision and support the idea of a Harvey Milk Day. If we understand memory as social remembering (Misztal 2003), and as a contested struggle over the meaning of the past, then social movements are an important part of that struggle. Social movements make strategic use of the past and they are important social forces in carrying the past into the future. They are bearers and shapers of individual and collective memory.

Bibliography Armey, D. and M. Kibbe (2010) Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto New York: Harper/Collins. Armstrong, Elizabeth and Suzanna Crage (2006) “Movements and Memory: The Making of the Stonewall Myth” American Sociological Review  Vol. 71: 724–751. Barker, Adam (2012) “Already Occupied: Indigenous Peoples, Settler Colonialism and the Occupy Movements in North America” Social Movement Studies Vol. 11, Nos. 3–4: 327–334. Berezin, Mabel (2001) “Emotions and Political Identity: Mobilizing Affection for the Polity” in Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper and Francesca Polletta (eds.) Passionate Politics Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Boycoff, Jules and Eulalie Laschever (2011) “The Tea Party Movement. Framing and the U.S. Media” Social Movement Studies Vol. 10, No. 4: 341–366. Connerton, Paul (1989) How Societies Remember Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eyerman, Ron (2004) “The Past in the Present” Acta Sociologica Vol. 47, No. 2: 159–169. ——. (2006) “Performing Opposition or, How Movements Move” in Alexander, et al. (eds.) Social Performance New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 193–217. ——. (2011) The Cultural Sociology of Political Assassination New York: Palgrave. ——. (2012) “Harvey Milk and the Trauma of Assassination” Cultural Sociology Vol. 6, No. 4: 399–421. ——. (2015) Is This America? Katrina as Cultural Trauma Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Hall, Jacquelyn (2005) “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past” The Journal of American History Vol. 91, No. 4: 1233–1263. Misztal, Barbara (2003) Theories of Social Remembering Maidenhead: Open University Press. Morgan, Edward (2006) “The Good, the Bad and the Forgotten: Media Culture and Public Memory of the Civil Rights Movement” in Renee Romano and Leigh Raiford (eds.) The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory Athens: University of Georgia Press. Romano, Renee and Leigh Raiford (eds.) (2006) The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory Athens: University of Georgia Press. Tilly, Charles (2003) Collective Violence New York: Cambridge University Press. 83

8 Banal commemoration Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi

In the fall of 2013, Channel 2—Israel’s first (and economically very successful) commercial ­television channel—celebrated its twentieth anniversary. The cover story of a special September 2013 edition of the Israeli financial newspaper Globes was an interview with the channel’s four “founding fathers,” recalling constitutive moments from the early days of its operation. The long article was accompanied by six photographs, each of which represented one such moment in the biography of the channel. Two depicted embarrassing moments for the channel, three marked constitutive moments in Israeli popular culture, and one concerned news broadcasting. News in Israel, one should note, is a matter of extraordinary public interest, and the ratings for Channel 2’s news broadcasts are nearly always the highest. The photo marking news broadcasting that the Globes editors chose was from November 4, 1995, moments after Yitzhak Rabin was shot, reporting the Prime Minister’s death. The face of the journalist—a veteran newscaster who had covered innumerable events, including catastrophes, wars, and peace agreements, all with great aplomb—betrays his shock. The photo’s appearance in the context of Channel 2’s media celebration is an excellent example of banal commemoration; in a mundane way, as part of everyday life and certainly not in a calculated, formal or provocative manner, the photograph bears the potential of evoking, maintaining, and sustaining a memory. This presence of the past within the present is especially telling in respect of the memory of a “difficult past” (Vinitzky-Seroussi 2002). Difficult pasts are not necessarily more tragic than other commemorated past events. What makes them difficult to recall is that they involve moral trauma, disputes, tensions, and conflict. That was the case of Rabin’s assassination for Israeli society. My chapter focuses on this notion of banal commemoration, which I believe comprises two forms: top-down, and bottom-up. Instances of the banal commemoration of Yitzhak Rabin will serve as key (but not sole) illustrations, first because I have spent a decade studying the struggle over his commemoration and am more familiar with mnemonic challenge and narrative in this rather than any other example (see for example Vinitzky-Seroussi 2009); and secondly—and more importantly—the use of a case study involving a stressful and, controversial past for commemoration is a methodologically stronger way to address the significance of banal commemoration than one involving a benign and consensual event or person. Before I turn to the notion of banal commemoration per se, let me thus present briefly the case from which I will derive most of my illustrations. 84

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Yitzhak Rabin and his assassination In many ways, Yitzhak Rabin’s biography embodies the Zionist dreams, myths and ethos and the foundations of modern Zionist Israel. He was born in 1922 during the period of the British Mandate in what used to be called Palestine, the Land of Israel. He came of age in 1948, when he commanded a brigade that fought in the Jerusalem area during the fierce Israeli War of Independence (which the Palestinians refer to as Naqba, the catastrophe). He was Israeli Chief of Staff during the 1967 Six-Day War, at the conclusion of which the eastern and oldest part of Jerusalem and the West Bank of the Jordan River were captured from Jordan, the Golan Heights from Syria, and the Sinai Desert and the Gaza Strip from Egypt (collectively referred to as “the occupied territories”). In many ways Rabin was the closest to what we might call “the chosen son”—the ultimate “new Jew” that the Zionist movement sought to create. In September 1993, during Rabin’s second term of office as Prime Minister, Israeli and Palestinian leaders signed the Oslo Accords, officially inaugurating the political peace process aimed at concluding the bitter one-hundred-year conflict between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East. Rabin’s commitment to a process whose objective was to secure such peace was evident to his political supporters, who applauded it; but his opponents perceived any withdrawal from the occupied territories as a nightmare and the peace it portended as no less than a national disaster on many grounds. Thus, soon after the famous handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, at the White House in September 1993, Rabin became the primary target of an organized campaign of vilification by many elements within the Israeli Right, in which he was labeled a traitor. On the night of November 4, 1995, at the end of a demonstration supporting the peace process, the Prime Minister was shot by an Orthodox Jewish law student who belonged to the radical Right. Needless to say, commemoration of the event became a major social challenge for Israel’s riven society (for an elaboration, see Vinitzky-Seroussi 2009).

Banal commemoration and its inspirations The notion of banal commemoration has its roots in the 1990s critique of social memory studies emphasizing only the formal, festive, and intentional forms of commemoration. Research studies focusing on official ceremonies held on the Memorial Day for Fallen Soldiers, history museums or high school history curricula are prime examples. In his critique, Michael Schudson argues that “the past endures in the present not only through self-consciously framed acts of commemoration but through psychological, social, linguistic, and political processes that keep the past alive without necessarily intending to do so” (1997: 3). He suggests that mnemonic practices and artifacts that are self-consciously planned by various social agencies should be distinguished from those that are enunciated unintentionally, and that greater attention needs to be paid to the latter. Noteworthy as Schudson’s distinction and the resultant concepts are (he refers to commemorative versus non-commemorative public memory), they do not exhaust the entire spectrum of informal, non-intrusive, and mundane commemorations that occupy social reality and everyday life. Drawing a theoretical and analytical line between commemorative and non-commemorative forms of collective memory and commemoration solely on the basis of the presence or absence of intentions on the part of social agency runs the risk of ignoring the audience and the mnemonic environment we live in. And indeed, our daily life is rife with self-conscious as well as non-purposeful acts that nonetheless constitute commemoration, some of which are straightforward and 85

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outright while others are more subtle and inconspicuous. Moreover, collective memory and commemoration contain their own dynamics. Since they are not static elements but on-going processes that experience transformations and fluctuations, commemorations that begin as formal and intrusive can become mundane or vice versa: mundane and non-intrusive evocations that become a focus for social activity, go through formalizing processes and gain considerable space and presence in the public sphere. It is this unremarkable appearance of mnemonic practices and artifacts, together with the non-mnemonic times and spaces in which a commemorated event or person is mentioned—together constituting a mnemonic reality in which collectives live—which I refer to as “banal commemoration.” The term in itself is inspired by Michael Billig’s famous notion “banal nationalism,” which he defines as a way to introduce “ideological habits which enable the established nations … to be reproduced” (1995: 6). Billig himself was worried that we tend to ignore the unnoticed and unconscious aspects of nationalism—a phenomenon that he saw as a characteristic mainly of the well-established, complacent Western democracies. These prosaic, rather colorless practices are an integral part of nationalism—even when nationalism seems to be a “non-issue.” In fact, they are indispensable as they “help to maintain the everyday world as belonging to the world of nation-states” (Billig 2009: 349; see also 1995). Using this concept redirects our attention to the routine, unmarked, habitual ways in which citizens are reminded of their nation and, as in our case, of their past. The ultimate image of banal nationalism would not be “the f lag which is being consciously waved with fervent passion [but rather] the f lag hanging unnoticed on the public building” (Billig 1995: 8). Borrowing from his imagery, we could say that in studying banal commemoration, we would not be interested—or at least not exclusively—in the huge picture of Rabin displayed especially for a memorial ceremony in a state school or in Rabin Square during the official memorial ceremony; instead we would concern ourselves with the small picture that hangs all year long on the staircase between the second and third f loors of the school, accompanying the pupils on their daily climb up and down the stairs to class. By the same token, we would be interested in streets named after Rabin that pedestrians walk along as part of their daily routines between home and school, work or shopping, without paying much attention to the name. In some ways this is what Schudson had in mind when he wrote about non-commemorative public memory. At the same time, we would also be interested in occasional utterances made by “ordinary people” (as opposed to official mnemonic agents) who, by doing so, construct and sustain a memory. Thus the texture of banal commemorations comprises two forms. The first I will refer to as “top-down,” that is, those forms of commemoration that are planned in advance by agents of memory who have a mnemonic agenda in mind as well as the ability to carry it through.1 The second form of banal commemoration concerns the various convoluted, often curious ways in which past events and people are recollected; hardly intended as such, these kinds of reminiscences and referencing nonetheless do become mnemonic practices and thus also require our attention. This second form I will refer to as “bottom-up” banal commemoration.

Top-down banal commemoration Street names, plaques on buildings marking the fact that an important figure once lived or stayed there and the brass cobblestones inserted into Berlin and Vienna pavements to acknowledge the Jews rounded up from the addresses adjacent to those sidewalks during the Holocaust are three examples of top-down banal commemoration; behind each and every apparently mundane commemoration are agents of memory who initiate, 86

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organize, shape, maintain, and often fight for the incorporation of this non-intrusive commemoration into the everyday landscape. While nothing has been written on banal commemoration as such, the literature does recognize one main category of this top-down commemoration: street names. Indeed, it has been recognized that “the main merit of commemorative street names is that they introduce an authorized version of history into ordinary settings of everyday life” (Azaryahu 1996: 312; see also Azaryahu 2012). This of course marks not only what is important, but also what is not important and can thus be consigned to oblivion. This form of banal commemoration, involving the conduct of everyday life in the presence on an unmarked and unnoticed commemoration, is indeed intentional, having been produced through the efforts of agents of memory who applied to—and often contended with—the appropriate municipal or government committees and ensured that the name of the particular person or event bearing the specific memory be allocated to a street or a building; nonetheless, it is non-intrusive commemoration, as one can basically go through life without paying too much attention to the presence of that past, simply taking it for granted. Yet the potential for this passive commemoration to become active exists, as is understood by those in power who—for various reasons—may not be keen to memorialize a specific past. This was the case with the Jerusalem commemoration of the assassinated Prime Minister. Yitzhak Rabin was indeed buried in Jerusalem, in the official cemetery for the “Greats of the Nation” (the Israeli version of the American Arlington National Cemetery, if you will), but this was never perceived by his supporters as a commemoration either of him or of the assassination. Indeed, in the years after the assassination, many Jerusalem residents approached the Jerusalem municipality with suggestions for projects and sites suitable for a memorial. Mayor Ehud Olmert (who later became Israel’s Prime Minister) was far from enthusiastic about these initiatives; with a background in the political Right, and certainly while he was Mayor, Olmert opposed any outright commemoration of Rabin. His response to all these initiatives was always the same: “I have spoken with Leah Rabin [Yitzhak’s widow] and together we have decided that, in due time, we will discuss an additional and appropriate commemoration for Yitzhak Rabin in Jerusalem.” “Not a word passed between us, not a word,” countered Leah Rabin when I raised the question of Olmert’s comment (personal interview, December 30, 1997). He even rejected suggestions from his own city council; and at a public event in February 1998, when openly berated for this, he responded (quite angrily) that he wasn’t “in a contest to name every building and every street after Rabin. I don’t believe that this honors his memory. And I want to make a comment on the disproportion and vulgarity of this superficial competition [to memorialize Rabin]. And I say this because I don’t think I need to apologize” (meeting of Israeli Mayors, Van Leer Institute, Jerusalem, February 1998). But that was not the end of the matter. A few months later the Mayor toured the area of the Supreme Court in Jerusalem, near the site of a proposed government complex, and was asked by both the then Presiding Justice of the Supreme Court and by a former Presiding Justice: “And what about commemorating Rabin?” The laconic response Olmert made to angry residents and frustrated local politicians could not be tossed off so lightly to Justices of the Supreme Court; he pointed to one of the major thoroughfares in the area and said, “Do you see this boulevard? The main boulevard of the national government complex will be Rabin Boulevard.” And indeed, it was named Rabin Boulevard. It is worth noting that the area through which it passes is a cold and unwelcoming stretch of public, non-residential real estate; no one lives there and no one ever will. But the street sign is there, right above the intersection, silent, holding its breath. 87

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Banal commemoration of the sort described above can also include the innumerable Israeli television shots of the Labor Party meeting room in the Israeli Knesset, where a portrait of a smiling Rabin adorns the wall in front of the party leader’s chair. Silent and unexciting, the picture is always there. The existence of the picture is a trigger for a story that can be told, a memory that can be raised, a past that might be lost without such a reminder. Moreover, this seen-but-not-noticed commemoration also exemplifies the social and mnemonic potential of banal commemoration to become a focus of attention. On the fifteenth anniversary of the assassination, a member of the Labor Party mentioned that she would like to remove the portrait (for reasons beyond the scope of this paper). The attempt elicited tremendous resentments and, perhaps for the first time, generated interest in the portrait, ultimately creating a counter-effect that resulted in the Labor Party leader’s promise that the picture would not be replaced with any other and that Rabin’s portrait would remain in the Labor Party’s meeting room.2 It would be unreasonable to assume that in the near or far future anyone would try to remove the portrait, which has gained a degree of fame and a chance at a kind of immortality. In fact, this potential was well understood by one of Rabin’s personal assistants, who was himself an active and major agent of memory. Here is his account: I am a great supporter of naming streets [after Rabin], naming schools after him, naming hospitals, naming cemeteries, whatever you can think of. Because every street and every school and every community center often—not always, but often—turns out to be part of our daily existence and experience. So you would say that you are going to visit a friend on Rabin Street, and that you are going to the Rabin Community Center, and that you study at the Rabin School. It is not so important whether you know more or less [about Rabin], but [that his] name is being absorbed and internalized. (personal interview, January 4, 1998)

Bottom-up banal commemoration The second form of banal commemoration comes “from below,” not necessarily animated by any pre-planned activity aimed at commemoration. Referring to a past event or mentioning a person from the past in a conversation, quoting him or her as an example, an inspiration, as part of an anecdote, and so forth—these operate as mnemonic practices because they bring a specific past or a specific person to the foreground. Moments in which Rabin is incidentally mentioned illustrate this form of banal commemoration. When an Israeli newspaper interviewed French-Moroccan author Tahar Ben Jelloun about his new book, he concluded with the following remark: “to tell the truth, sometimes I sit and day-dream here, in front of this window, and imagine that Yitzhak Rabin is still alive” (Alfon 1999). For Israel’s jubilee fiftieth Independence Day, the Israeli daily Ma’ariv published a special article written by former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev; the accompanying photo shows Gorbachev with Rabin (Gorbachev 1998). Another Israeli daily, Yediot Aharonot, published an article about an auction in Florida with the headline, “Rabin’s jacket sold to the lady in the second row” (Shoval-Shaked and Mordechai 1998). The following Independence Day, Yediot Aharonot compiled its list of one hundred of the most inf luential Jews of the twentieth century, in which Rabin appears alongside Marc Chagall, Steven Spielberg, Henry Kissinger, and Yitzhak Perlman (London 1999). An Israeli fashion model and former beauty queen recalls how she was “shocked” to learn of Rabin’s assassination during the Miss Universe contest, adding that she believes that there is some merit to the conspiracy theory,3 and ending the interview by saying that she was thinking about entering politics herself. “My model is Yitzhak Rabin…. He was one of the people 88

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I admired the most” (Shilon 1998). Describing the election campaigning for chairmanship of the Israeli Bar Association in 2003, a few lawyers remarked that “there hadn’t been such incitement [between electoral camps] since the campaign against Rabin” (Globes 2003). In 2001, prominent Israeli journalist Sever Plotzker wrote that “[Benjamin] Netanyahu is the best Prime Minister Israel has had since Rabin’s assassination” (Plotzker 2001). What is interesting in Plotzker’s piece is his choosing to mention the assassination as a benchmark. Plotzker did not say that Netanyahu was the best Prime Minister since Rabin, or since the establishment of Israel, or since any other possible date; he very pointedly referred to the assassination, thereby recalling the event to public memory. After the May 2010 Gaza f lotilla raid, a senior military commentator criticized the Israeli Defense Forces’ handling of the affair by bracketing it with Rabin’s assassination as part of a more general process in Israel, what he called “a blockade of mindfulness” (Oren 2010). In November 2013, a bomb exploded in the car of a State Prosecutor; the following weekend edition of the weekly Sof-HaShavua included a long interview with the widow of a judge who had been shot dead some years before, with the cover lead-in reading, “When my husband was assassinated, people said it was like Rabin’s assassination. But what has the nation done since then?” (Amir 2013). A week later Arik Einstein, one of Israel’s most popular singers for nearly half a century, died suddenly at the same Tel Aviv hospital where Rabin had been pronounced dead; the outpouring of public grief, including spontaneous and later organized rallies in Rabin Square, reiterated in various ways Rabin’s assassination and the public mourning of eighteen years earlier (only without the rage that accompanied Rabin’s death). A senior Ha’aretz correspondent defined Einstein’s death as “an almostYitzhak-Rabin death” (Levy 2013). Covering the singer’s funeral, the headline of Israel’s most popular newspaper read, “You’ve left us, Friend” (Yediot Aharonot 2013); the headline paraphrased US President Bill Clinton’s famous remark made on the lawn of the White House at the end of his short response to the news of Rabin’s assassination: “Goodbye [or peace], Friend” [Shalom, Chaver]. Of the hundreds of songs Einstein had made popular throughout his very long and successful career, Yediot Aharonot highlighted the one Einstein had recorded in memory of the slain Prime Minister, titled “Goodbye, Friend.” A few years ago, I walked into a Tel Aviv shop just as a customer was expressing his astonishment at the news of the day: Jewish settlers had hurled rocks at the police forces attempting to evacuate them from their illegal settlement in the occupied territories. The saleswoman refused to be surprised and, nonchalantly rearranging some mugs and bowls on the shelves, casually remarked, “And who assassinated Rabin? A Jew.” In ways such as these, Rabin and the assassination are an inescapable part of everyday life in Israel, like Billig’s “unwaved f lag” (1995: 1a). Top-down banal commemoration certainly involves some prior planning, as may the bottom-up variety, because some of the apparently nonchalant recollections and reminiscences might not be totally spontaneous. The former beauty queen probably was less concerned with ensuring that the Prime Minister’s assassination was kept alive than with using it as an attention-getting device to earn respect. The lawyers who were taken aback by the intensity of emotions elicited by the Bar Association elections may have thought that the comparison with Rabin’s assassination was provocative, but they were in all likelihood not unduly concerned that the memory of the assassination be maintained per se. As far as the examples from the news media are concerned, even if the references to past events are intentional, “good journalism is defined as a story that incorporates a new development into a familiar (and thus consumer-friendly) framework” (Meyers 2007: 721). My personal anecdote about the exchange in the Tel Aviv shop is a totally unplanned mnemonic encounter, but all the instances cited above involve individuals who ended up “doing” commemoration. 89

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Social implications Banal commemoration has social implications. First and foremost, “banal” does not denote trivial or unimportant, or devoid of power and impact (Azaryahu 2012). In conflict zones, what might seem banal to one group may elicit anger and controversy among other groups, as the case was for Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland (Kuusisto 2001). Or, on the other hand, informal, subtle, and non-intrusive banal commemoration may be able to contain a memory that would otherwise generate protest and animosity. What might provoke anger, frustration, and tensions during the official Memorial Day for Yitzhak Rabin (see Vinitzky-Seroussi 2009) is often quietly accepted when it appears in a different temporal and spatial context. At the same time, however, banal commemoration may reflect or symbolize the waning of a memory and its increasing opaqueness and lack of focus. If a person or an idea amounts to no more than a street sign or, worse yet, depends solely on people’s associations and spontaneous recollections, it is very likely that such a person or event is on its way to the memory graveyard. Still, most agents of memory—as enunciated by Rabin’s personal assistant cited above—would probably prefer the persistence of a banal form of commemoration to no commemoration at all, since the mere existence of such symbols might possibly stimulate future questions and resurgent interest and awareness. In some ways banal commemoration is like an alarm clock set to an unexpected hour, waiting to ring and awaken the unsuspecting sleeper, as in the incident regarding Rabin’s portrait in the Knesset Labor Party meeting room. This is especially pertinent in zones of conflicts. The mass media is a crucial vehicle for the transmission of collective memory to wider audiences in general, and its role within the contours of banal commemoration is compelling. This is especially pertinent for bottom-up commemoration, the sort that is relatively unplanned and that can emerge from the context of entirely unrelated issues (see Schudson’s work on Watergate, 1992, 1997). If (as was usually the case in my research) a newspaper editor pulls two or three sentences out of an interview for a headline and they happen to refer to Rabin or to the assassination, then the media has effectively turned the unnoticed and the unremarkable into commemoration. Just as commemoration as a cultural form can extract and highlight what was heretofore merely another moment in an unnoticed historical chronology (Schwartz and Schuman 2005), thus making it special and worth remembering, so too the media can extract some pieces of information from a colorless story about a Florida auction or the death of an iconic singer and turn them into a mnemonic headline. Needless to say, the kind of editorial work carried out by the media takes into account how the editors view their readership: If they did not think a headline or caption referring to the assassinated Prime Minister would spark some interest in the article or in the paper in general, they would probably choose a different headline. In any event, commemoration is constructed and collective memory is maintained and even constructed.

Concluding remarks In this chapter I have tried to draw attention to commonplace, mundane forms of commemoration and to focus on the manifestation of the past in everyday life. As mentioned, banal commemoration encompasses both planned mnemonic artifacts that are barely noticed and are an integral part of our ordinary lives, as well as unplanned remarks and references that evoke events and people and save them from oblivion. Formal and informal commemorations are complementary processes that together— although not necessarily simultaneously—construct a complex mnemonic reality. Neither 90

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formal nor informal forms of commemoration are fixed or permanent entities, and the boundaries between banal and non-banal commemoration, albeit clear both on analytical and practical levels, are shifting and inconstant. Formal and well-planned commemorations may lose their audiences, relevance and centrality and transmute into ordinary and unimpressive reality, while mundane and non-intrusive mnemonic reality may suddenly attract attention and become a focal point and source of enhanced social activity and awareness. Thus, for example, much of the current argument surrounding Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (usually simply referred to as the Holocaust Memorial) revolves precisely around the fact that it is also home to worldly social activities (e.g., children’s hide-and-seek games by day, couples’ lovemaking by night), transforming a formal and sacred mnemonic site into a part of everyday life (Dekel 2009). By the same token, a radical and relatively marginal Israeli weekly newspaper (Haolam Hazeh—“This World”) has metamorphosed from no more than a vague memory to a glorified mnemonic position (Meyers 2007). Such changes are often affected by wider historical, sociological, and political conditions and always involve the active efforts or cessation of efforts on the part of agents of memory on behalf of the particular issue. Nelson Mandela, the former president of South Africa, passed away the day before I finished writing this paper. I neither had to wait very long nor search very assiduously to find a major article written by the former Israeli Ambassador to South Africa, the secondary headline of which read, “In 1993 [when he received the Nobel Peace Prize] Mandela told me that it was Rabin who deserved the award [instead of him] because of his leadership, charisma and humanism” (Liel 2013). Here again, Israelis had an opportunity to recall their slain Prime Minister, this time in the context of Mandela’s death. At the end of the day, our lives and our understanding of them are probably affected as much by formal and official moments and spaces as they are by informal, ordinary and what seem at first sight to be totally insignificant banalities. For a deeper understanding of knowledge in general, and the reality of collective memory and commemoration in particular, a closer look at the trivial and the banal is necessary.

Notes 1  For an elaborated discussion on the notion of agents of memory see Vinitzky-Seroussi 2009. See also Fine on “reputational entrepreneurs” (1996, 2001). 2  See, for example, the report online at www.nrg.co.il. 3  As in other cases of political assassination, there are those who believe that Rabin was the victim of conspiracy. The most elaborate version of this theory is presented in Chamish 1999.

References Alfon, Dov. 1999. “This book contains my anger.” Ha’aretz, January 20, Section D, p. 1 (Hebrew). Amir, Tal Ariel. 2013. “You forgot that a judge was assassinated in Israel.” Sof-HaShavua, pp. 1, 20–26 (Hebrew). Azaryahu, Maoz. 1996. “The power of commemorative street names.” Environment and Planning D (14): 311–30. Azaryahu, Maoz. 2012. Namesakes: The History and Politics of Street Naming in Israel. Jerusalem: Carmel (Hebrew). Billig, Michael. 1995. Banal Nationalism. London: Sage. Billig, Michael. 2009. “Reflections on a critical engagement with banal nationalism—Reply to Skey.” The Sociological Review 57(2): 347–52. Chamish, Barry. 1999. Who Assassinated Yitzhak Rabin? Jerusalem: Geffen (Hebrew). Dekel, Irit. 2009. “Ways of looking: observation and transformation at the Holocaust Memorial, Berlin.” Memory Studies 2(1): 71–86. 91

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Fine, Gary Alan. 1996. “Reputational entrepreneurs and the memory of incompetence: melting supporters, partisan warriors and the images of President Harding.” American Journal of Sociology 101(5): 1159–93. Fine, Gary Alan. 2001. Difficult Reputations: Collective Memories of the Evil, Inept and Controversial. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Globes. 2003. “He went to sleep as the elected head of the association.” July 1, p. 19 (Hebrew). Gorbachev, Mikhail. 1998. “A unique event in world history.” Ma’ariv, April 10 (Hebrew). Kuusisto, Anna-Kaisa. 2001. “Territoriality, symbolism and the challenge.” Peace Review 13(1): 59–66. Levy, Gideon. 2013. “It’s over.” Ha’aretz, November 28, p. 2 (Hebrew). Liel, Alon. 2013. “When Mandela called at 6 in the morning.” Ynetnews.com. http://www.ynet.co.il/ articles/0,7340,L-4462069,00.html (Hebrew). London, Yaron (editor). 1999. “The 100 most important Jews of the 20th century.” Yediot Aharonot, April 20, Independence Day supplement, pp. 22–23 (Hebrew). Meyers, Oren. 2007. “Memory in journalism and the memory of journalism: Israeli journalists and the constructed legacy of Haolam Hazeh.” Journal of Communication 57: 719–25. Oren, Amir. 2010. “To investigate before, not after.” Ha’aretz, June 6. www.Haaretz.co.il/hasite/ spages/1172541.html?=1 (Hebrew). Plotzker, Sever. 2001. “Bibi, Benyamin.” Ynet, August 14. www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,2-1016270,00/ html (Hebrew). Schudson, Michael. 1992. Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember, Forget and Reconstruct Our Past. New York: Basic Books. Schudson, Michael. 1997. “Lives, laws and language: Commemorative versus non-commemorative forms of effective public memory.” Communication Review 2(1): 3–17. Schwartz, Barry, and Howard Schuman. 2005. “History, commemoration and belief: Abraham Lincoln in American memory 1945–2001.” American Sociological Review 70 (2): 183–203. Shilon, Avi. 1998. “And the happy winner is: Eyal Golan!” Zman Tel Aviv, September 8, pp. 46–51 (Hebrew). Shoval-Shaked, Ilana, and Alon Mordechai. 1998. “Rabin’s jacket sold to the lady in the second row, and now to Dayan’s eye-patch.” Yediot Aharonot, February 6, weekend supplement, p. 24 (Hebrew). Vinitzky-Seroussi, Vered. 2002. “Commemorating a difficult past: Yitzhak Rabin’s memorials.” American Sociological Review 67: 30–51. Vinitzky-Seroussi, Vered. 2009. Yitzhak Rabin’s Assassination and the Dilemmas of Commemoration. Albany: State University of New York Press. Yediot Aharonot. 2013. “You’ve left us, Friend,” November 28, p. 1 (Hebrew).

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9 Organizational memories A phenomenological analysis Thomas S. Eberle

Let me begin with two observations: First, sociological memory studies usually investigate how collective memories are socially organized. The topic of organizational memories, however, does not figure so prominently in sociology. Second, in organization and management studies though, the term is firmly established. Its origin goes back as far as March and Simon (1958). While it became a strong topic after the groundbreaking essay of Walsh and Ungson (1991), it was soon overshadowed by the concepts of knowledge management and learning organization, where organizational memory was not anymore a topic in itself but something to take into account when organizations attempt to manage knowledge and ponder ways of learning most effectively. The goal of this essay is to treat organizational memories as a topic in its own right. Its relevance is obvious as modern societies are basically “organization societies”: They consist of thousands of organizations of all kinds. Organizations are a constitutive property of modernity and a main structuring feature of present-day societies. While the formal term organization sometimes gets applied to all kinds of historical entities (like in systems theory), I suggest here to consider organizations as a historically recent form: Organizations are a product of the European Enlightenment that disseminated the basic idea of rationality and the view of people as rational, self-responsible and free citizens. Accordingly, organizations may be characterized by the following features: 1. Free choice of (specific) goals; 2. free design of structures and processes; and 3. free entry and leaving of members. Organizations, in this sense, differ from previous historical forms, like aristocratic kinship, family business, guilds or monasteries: These institutions had no specific purposes but covered all aspects of life; their structures and processes usually had a long tradition and were often based in religion; and membership remained basically permanent. Although this is an ideal-typical description in broad strokes, it is uncontested that the rational type of organizations spread vastly during the last two centuries and proved, by and large, very successful. The large-scale organizations of industry and services would not have been possible without this new type of organization, where goals, structures and processes are shaped rationally instead of traditionally, making systematic use of technology and adapting f lexibly to changing environments. Even in China, for instance, the classic family business is increasingly replaced or at least complemented by large-scale organizations that recruit their workers and employees on the market. 93

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Organizational memories—sometimes also called institutional (Linde 2009) or corporate (Megill 2005) memories—are not just composed of individual memories and collective mnemotechnics, as communal memories in non-writing cultures, but include archives that nowadays mainly consist in electronic databases. Both kinds of repositories will be discussed, individual memories as well as organizational archives and databases. The plural is favored as there is not just a single memory, but there are always several memories in an organization. Using a phenomenological approach (cf. Eberle 2014), I shall investigate the different modes of “givenness” in the experience of the (re-)cognizing subject. Based on Maurice Halbwachs’s (1925/1994; 1950) basic distinction between history and memory, I will first consider how the history of organizations can be reconstructed on the basis of their archives and discuss some issues of organizational memories from the perspective of historical sociology. Then I will turn toward actually existing organizations with living people, in particular business companies, and scrutinize organizational memories on the individual as well as on the collective level. Subsequently I shed some light on how organizational memories are managed. Special attention is finally given to the interlinkage of memories and organizational spaces as well as to digital memories.

Researching organizational archives of reading societies My historical and sociological research on reading societies (Eberle 2009) may serve as an appropriate starting point to discuss organizational memories for two reasons: First, associations—or societies—are a perfect example of modern organizations; second, organizational archives are the crucial resource to reconstruct their lives.

Goals of reading societies Reading societies were, in Max Weber’s sense, “carriers” of the Western modernization process in two ways: They promoted new habits of reading and represented new social forms of organizations. During the 18th century, a significant change in the style of reading happened: A change from an intensive, repetitive reading of the same few publications (particularly the Bible, religious publications and calendars) to an extensive reading of new information. The soaring middle class, the economic and educational elite, was oriented toward the sciences and arts and demanded more and more information about all areas of knowledge and social life. This thirst for knowledge exceeded the potential of oral communication—written communication became a new social ideal (Engelsing 1974). The change in reading styles was paralleled by a change in the structure of literary production. The book market adapted to the demands of the new reading classes: In the course of the 18th century, Latin, the language of the scholars, was thrust aside by the national languages (English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, etc.), and theological literature was replaced by books that provided entertainment and general knowledge. A fundamental change of reading habits was also initiated by two new print products: journals and newspapers. Both set up new standards for written information and had an explosive quantitative growth in the second half of the 18th century—journals for a specialized audience and newspapers for a general audience (Dann 1981). The reading societies were one important element in the social organization of this cultural change. Their primary goal was to motivate people to read and to provide them with literature. Reading societies were a cultural invention of the 18th century and emerged throughout Europe in increasing numbers. And all of them pursued an educational goal: to spark people’s interest in “good” literature, in scientific knowledge and in general information about what was going on in the world (Engelsing 1974; Dann 1981). In his analysis of the 94

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social-structural transformation of the public sphere, Habermas (1989) points out that in the politically turbulent times of the 19th century, the reading societies constituted the bourgeois public sphere; they were the location where political discussions and debates took place. Later however, political debate moved to political parties whose organizational form proved to be more efficient on a national level than local reading societies, and journals and newspapers were complemented by new media, first radio, later TV and nowadays the Internet with blogs, forums and social networks. In the course of this development, most reading societies either died or restricted their functions to cultural and social activities (like providing literature and organizing cultural events and festivities).

Modern forms of organization Reading societies were part of the vast society movement that unfolded above all in the second half of the 18th century (cf. Im Hof 1982). At the end of the century, the whole of Europe—in particular France, Switzerland, Germany and Northern Italy—as well as European America were covered by hundreds of societies. Academies; scholarly and literary societies; reading cabinets; and charitable, economic, agricultural and patriotic-political societies were founded everywhere. These societies represented new, “modern” forms of organization in the spirit of the Enlightenment, featuring the properties mentioned above: 1. Free choice of (specific) goals; 2. free design of structures and processes; and 3. free entry and leaving of members. They were oriented toward the future, and their objectives were to improve and reform given states of affairs; they were based on voluntariness, co-determination and joint responsibility; they had a republican organization and formed a new social stratum between the old classes. All of these societies then can be characterized by two criteria: First, they had a formal structure; thus they are to be differentiated from informal, unorganized associations, as the French “salons,” the English “clubs” or the German “Zirkel” (circles) of all sorts. Second, they have to be distinguished from all religious communities, orders or brotherhoods: Those were lacking voluntariness and served another worldview than the Enlightenment. Comparative studies show that the objectives and formal structure of the new, democratic reading societies were very much alike (Prüsener 1973). The goals typically were providing literature and organizing social and cultural events for their members. To this purpose they usually maintained a library with books, a reading room with newspapers and journals, and even additional rooms for gatherings, lectures and social events; and many of them circulated reading folders. How these services, the general management tasks and the democratic control were best organized, was intensely discussed and put down in formal rules. In the course of time, the typical formal structures evolved that nowadays still are constitutive of societies and other formal associations: A managing committee with a president or chair and other members who had specialized functions (like a vice president, a treasurer, a secretary, a librarian, etc.), financial revisers and a general assembly of the members who elected the persons into these functions, determined the by-laws and controlled the proper course of affairs. The basic institutional properties and requirements are meanwhile put down in civil law.

Organizational archives as cultural memories As all of us are members of some (e.g., scientific) association(s), we all have typical knowledge of how such organizations are structured and how they work, and we all can report some personal, concrete experiences. Individual memories of the past are, however—as oral history substantiates—usually fragmentary, imprecise and from a limited time span. 95

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Jan Assmann (2008; 2011) therefore proposed to distinguish between communicative and cultural memory. The communicative memory in non-writing cultures does usually not cover more than 80–100 years, i.e. three to four generations, while cultural memory embraces traces of several thousand years. Cultural memory consists of all kinds of artifacts, not just texts but also paintings, musical notations, sculptures, pottery, tools, buildings, etc. Such objectifications exist in their material forms, but their meaning has to be reconstructed. Aleida Assmann (2006; 2011) suggests distinguishing memory from the act of remembering. Cultural artifacts constitute a social memory that bears myriads of latent meanings that can be interpreted and reconstructed if they catch the interest of a historian or social scientist. The same applies to organizational archives: They document some aspects of an organization’s life that may have been forgotten by the actually living generation, and constitute a social memory in the mode of potentiality that allows an interested researcher to rediscover the past of an organization and reconstruct, to some degree, its structures and social processes. Historical research on reading societies started only in the 1970s, and organizational archives were the primary resource. Phenomenologically, researchers face a documentary reality (Smith 1974) and have to deal with a number of issues: •• What has been preserved, by whom, and where? What got lost? •• How extensive and detailed are the archived documents? What information is missing? •• How objective are the chroniclers’ accounts? What information can be double-checked on the basis of other sources? •• How to make adequate sense of the archived materials? In the context of a larger research project, I reconstructed the history of two major reading societies in the city of St. Gallen, Switzerland, which contributed significantly to the local cultural life for an exceptionally long time: the Büsch Society (1836–1980) and the Museum Society (1789–1974, including its main predecessor). Both societies have perished; their organizational lives are past cultural realities that are not directly accessible anymore. Fortunately, the reading societies not only fostered reading, but they also practiced writing: Many aspects of a society’s life were documented in texts—there were not only the by-laws, the library decree or the bookkeeping, but also the minutes of the managing committee, the proceedings of the general assembly, the annual reports of the presidents, a members’ and a visitors’ book, correspondence and other documents. Most of these documents were produced in the context of daily business, not for historical documentation. Usually members’ interests embraced only a limited time span: the near past and the near future. It is therefore remarkable that both societies preserved their documents for such a long time; many organizational archives of associations and societies got lost, either completely or partly. The Museum Society, which was rather elitist and restricted membership to locally illustrious persons, cultivated a historical consciousness. It printed the annual reports, kept most of the relevant documents and handed the whole archive over to the state library when it disbanded in 1974. The Büsch Society, which was an organization of the lower and middle classes, just kept handwritten books with the board proceedings—as private property of the last president and his heirs. Most likely, these documents would have eventually got lost if I had not pursued this research project at that point in time: I managed to identify the elderly daughter of the last president, and when we met, I successfully convinced her to give the remaining documents to the state library because of public interest. The preserved organizational archives of the two reading societies permitted a reconstruction of many aspects of their past organizational lives—of the Museum Society in much more 96

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detail than of the Büsch Society—and answer several, sociologically interesting questions (cf. Eberle 2009). To make adequate sense of historical documents in the here and now is a well-known hermeneutic problem and requires, of course, to get acquainted with historical expert knowledge about the time periods in question. Scientific historical research differs often significantly from those historical accounts that were written by the association’s local chroniclers for the occasion of a society’s “big”—50th, 75th, 100th—anniversary. Even if such reports also refer to archival documents, they represent a different genre: As part of a commemoration, they contribute to shaping the association’s identity and (positive) self-image. As Halbwachs’s (1925/1994; 1950) distinction between memory and history points out, historical research proceeds with a different relevance system and attempts to separate fact from fiction and proof from speculation, and to abstain from value statements.

Organizational members’ subjective memories It obviously makes a big difference if we research an organization that has perished and whose life has to be reconstructed exclusively on the basis of archival documents, or if we explore an organization that is still alive. The most significant difference is that in the latter case there are concrete human beings that make up an organizational life. We can apply multiple methods of empirical research to investigate them; we can interview them or observe their working activities, their face-to-face interactions with others and their communications with absent persons by phone and computer, and we can do audio and video recordings of all observable practices. We can further document their work settings, their spatial arrangements, their working time and the rhythms of their work; we can analyze the technology involved in the different working processes, and elucidate the intricate networks of informal relations that complement and sometimes undermine the formal structures. We can research the emotional side of work life, see how organizational members are inspired, cheerful and well motivated but also how they are envious of and in conflict with others, how they are discouraged and sometimes feel mobbed. In other words, we can pursue an organizational ethnography and investigate organizational life in all its aspects and rich details (Eberle and Maeder 2011)—much of which is lost when only documents are left of an organization that has disappeared. An organizational reality is a social construction and can, according to Berger and Luckmann (1966), be analyzed in two, intertwined perspectives, namely as an objective reality and as a subjective reality. It is, on the one hand, objective in so far as everybody in the “natural attitude,” as Max Scheler called the common-sense perspective, accepts its existence and the fact that it has properties that can be observed and identified. No “normal” person would deny that corporations, such as Apple, Nestlé, Benetton or the European Central Bank, exist and that they can be empirically researched as social facts in Durkheim’s sense. And on the other hand, an organizational reality is subjective in so far as an individual actor perceives and interprets it on the basis of his or her biographically determined stock of knowledge, as Alfred Schutz coined the term (Schutz and Luckmann 1973). Individual actors will have different perspectives and different relevance systems depending on their biography as well as on their present social position: Insiders will perceive the organizational reality differently than outsiders, such as clients, public officials or the media. But insiders also have different experiences and views, for instance, if they work as managers or as accountants or as workers; the knowledge of organizational members is, in other words, socially distributed. Let us consider, before we move to the collective dimensions of organizational memories, how members’ subjective memories are organized. I am going to distinguish, in 97

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a phenomenological perspective, between subjective remembering and embodied routines. In acts of remembering we reconstruct past experiences and events. This is what most memory studies investigate. In embodied routines the memories are inscribed into our bodies; we do not remember them like past experiences but we re-enact them by doing.

Subjective remembering The phenomenological life-world analysis of Alfred Schutz provides, in my view, an excellent approach to elucidate the structures and workings of subjective knowledge without neglecting its social contexts. Schutz (1932/1967) tried to give Max Weber’s sociology a philosophical foundation. When Weber defined the task of sociology to interpret and explain the meaning (better: sense1) of social action, Schutz detected ambiguities and attempted to explicate what sense could mean, drawing on Husserl’s phenomenology and partly on Bergson’s philosophy of life. The final result of Schutz’s investigations were the Structures of the Life-World (Schutz and Luckmann 1973; 1989) that Luckmann called a protosociology and which Berger and Luckmann also used as basis of their sociology of knowledge approach (1966: part I). How are phenomena constituted in lived experience and how are they remembered from the past? Phenomenology analyzes the constitution of sense in acts of perceiving as well as remembering. Husserl chose the ego-cogito-cogitatum, the phenomena-as-they-are-experienced in subjective consciousness, as the most evident starting point for analysis. Our consciousness is intentional, i.e., it is always consciousness-of-something: We perceive something, think of something, dream something, remember something. Noesis and noema can only analytically be separated: The noesis consists in the acts of consciousness, the noema in the properties of the cogitatum. In perception both form a unity.2 Perception of socialized human beings is always more than the data of our bodily senses. We perceive phenomena as meaningful: I do not just see forms and colors, I see a “bird” sitting on a “branch” of a “tree.” The constitution of meaningful phenomena involves intricate achievements of consciousness. Apperception in passive synthesis means that we do not perceive forms and colors and then attach meaning to “things,” but we live in a symbolic universe and see “things” from the outset as meaningful. And we complement apperception by appresentation: We perceive a “house” although we only see the front of it, i.e., we “appresent” the rear side that we cannot perceive but that we know to exist. This way we “perceive” always more than we “actually” perceive. Phenomenology acknowledges the great importance of language in this process, but also investigates typifications on a pre-predicative, pre-lingual level—in contrast to semiotic and linguistic approaches. Subjective experience is always more and different from what is formulated in language (which is often not considered in empirical, even not in qualitative research). Perception concerns the present, memory the past. But the constitution of sense in subjective consciousness always takes places in the here and now, whether it concerns the present or the past. Consciousness is streaming; lived experience3 proceeds sequentially in inner time (which has often different rhythms than social time, like clock or calendar time). This implies that every present lived experience immediately becomes a past experience in the very next moment. In this regard, phenomenology distinguishes between retention and reproduction. Retention concerns the immediate past that is experienced as part of the present: If we forgot every word as soon we read or heard it, then we could never make sense of a sentence or utterance; we keep “in our ears” what has just been said (or in our minds what has just been read). Reproduction is a ref lective act, which is experienced as an act of remembering: We recall past events and make sense of past subjective experiences. 98

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While lived experience proceeds polythetically, continuously by incremental acts, we usually cannot remember experiences in such detail and reconstruct them monothetically, by way of (more or less generalized) typifications. A crucial point regarding subjective remembering is the ability of our consciousness to distinguish between fact and fiction. Schutz, following the idea of sub-universas of William James, proclaimed that we live in different realities, not only in the world of everyday life and pragmatic actions, but also in the dream world, in fantasy worlds (including literature, theater and medial realities) or the theory-world of social science. Deviating from James, he designated these realities not as ontological units but as finite provinces of meaning (sense) with a specific accent of reality. In everyday life, we may suddenly switch into daydreaming, or associations and reminiscences pop up spontaneously. But among all these manifold activities of consciousness, we usually can distinguish between what we have actually experienced in the real world of everyday life and what we only dreamt or fantasized. We may sometimes be wrong in regard to some concrete instances. But this basic capability is crucial for social life—persons lacking it are usually locked up in psychiatric clinics.

Embodied routines Embodied routines incorporate a different kind of memory; it does not consist in reflective acts of remembering, but is inscribed into our body. Phenomenology distinguishes between body—the body we have and that we treat as an object—and lived body, the body we are.4 Our bodies make our individuality apparent: Other people recognize our face when seeing us, or our voice when hearing us, and police can identify us by fingerprints and DNA. When acting, we are our bodies, we perceive with our bodily senses and our subjective consciousness constitutes meaningful phenomena. Most of our actions imply body movements; they are “embodied actions.” And the way we act, the way we move, the way we talk, our mimics, gestures and postures—they all express our “personality” (understood as a dynamic concept). Subjective consciousness and lived body form a unity. They cannot be separated; they are intertwined. The relationship between body and memory is therefore fairly intricate (cf. Hahn 2010). Anthropologists say humans need routines to relieve them from the burden of continuous decision making. Routines may have a long, cultural or even phylogenetic history, but they also have an ontogenetic learning history. When learning a new and complex activity as, for instance, handling a machine, full attention to every single operation is required while learning it. Once the working with that machine has become a routine, one can direct the attention nearly exclusively to the objects of work or even to additional things, like talking on the phone while handling the machine. The sequences of the necessary body movements are pursued automatically, or subconsciously. They are “inscribed” into our bodies. However, it would be inadequate to speak of “body memory” in this context. Embodied routines are practiced by a “lived body” that forms a unity of body and consciousness: Even the most automated routine requires a minimal amount of attention in order to be successfully performed and to avoid mistakes and accidents. Organizational members usually do not remember the learning history of an embodied routine while practicing it; and their attention is not directed to the practice itself, but to the phenomena they are dealing with (e.g., the objects of work, not how to do the work). Furthermore, they are often incapable to describe embodied routines in detail as they pay so little attention to them in their daily lives. There are two ways to explicate memories that are incorporated in embodied routines. On the one hand, one can pursue a phenomenological, 99

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constitutive analysis that deconstructs the routinized activity meticulously. On the other hand, one can research its genesis in learning situations sociologically.

Two kinds of memories We are obviously facing two different kinds of memories here: The first is a memory of past events and experiences that are reconstructed by acts of remembering; the second is a memory of how to do something that is embodied but unnoticed. In practice, both are intimately linked: In a study about a patient that suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, I observed how distorted both perception and memory can become. After awakening from an artificial coma of several weeks, the patient could not distinguish anymore between fact and fiction; between what really happened and what she dreamt or fantasized. When she lost her balance and fell to the ground, she could not remember how to get up again. When she went home, she could not recall how to cook or where the food and cooking equipment were. Both kinds of memories were severely damaged: the memory of “what” (her past biography) and the memory of “how to do” (to act). Both kinds of memories had to be rebuilt in a long process of re-learning: cognitive remembering as well as embodied remembering. For both, much conscious attention was required (Eberle 2013). On this background I suggest to use the term memory not only for remembering the past, but also for the phenomena of “embodied memory” (see also Tota, in this volume). Of course, one could restrict memory to remembering the past only and talk of knowledge instead regarding embodied routines. But as the case with the patient above demonstrates, practical knowledge can only be operational if our lived body remembers it. Remembering should therefore not be restricted to cognitive activities of reproduction, but include what our lived body remembers, including embodied, tacit and non-discursive experiences and skills. This implies that organizational memories consist not only in acts of remembering but also in embodied routines. In the next section, we zoom in on the social, collective aspects.

Organizational memories as collective memories What is organizational memory? Can organizations have a memory as individuals do? The term is endangered by anthropomorphism, as Walsh and Ungson (1991) state in their seminal essay. Is organizational memory just the aggregation of all organizational members’ individual memories? Or does it have a life of its own as a collective entity with emergent features? Let us discuss this in more detail.

Individual and collective memory The approaches of Max Weber and Emile Durkheim are often portrayed as classic antipodes between an individualistic and a collectivistic sociology, and many have attempted to achieve an integration, such as Parsons or Berger and Luckmann. In fact, neither of them is reductionist: Max Weber sets out studying the sense of social action but intends to describe and explain collective, historical processes of modernization; Durkheim prefers to study social facts “like things” and emphasizes the relevance of the collective, but he also researches how individual actors act. Halbwachs represents the Durkheimian, Schutz the Weberian tradition. Where do they meet? Halbwachs’s theory of collective memory (1925/1994; 1950) must be seen within the framework of two epistemological programs: First, following Comte, a clear separation 100

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between biology and sociology, with no “science of the subject” in between, and a positive science of “collective representations” as a homogeneous realm; and second, a social morphology (Egger 2003). Memory is always social and collective; all individual recollections, even of personal experiences, images or emotions, are part of collective representations. Durkheim’s collective consciousness resides in individuals, but there is no individual memory beyond collective memory. Collective memory provides the frames with which individual actors interpret their life-world, their present and past experiences. Recollections, individual as well as collective, are always reconstructions within collective frames of the present. Halbwachs studied the social construction of individual memory, the development of collective memory in intermediary groups (family and social classes) and collective memory at the level of entire societies and civilizations (Marcel and Mucchielli 2008). Social morphology, the second epistemological program, investigates the material forms and the spatial and temporal structures of collective life (e.g., an urban area), which are closely interlinked with collective memory (Halbwachs 1938/1970). Phenomenological life-world analysis pursues an analysis of how the sense of phenomena is constituted in subjective consciousness and how it is constructed in social interaction. It sets out with subjective experience, not with collective representations. But the social a priori is essential: We are born and socialized into a society and a complex culture, thus our biographically determined stock of knowledge is socially derived (at a certain historical time period). All the linguistic typifications and most of the subjective relevance systems evidently have a social origin. Even our embodied routines are predominantly social routines, which implies that also tacit, non-discursive layers of knowledge and memories are socially formed. In spite of their different epistemological approaches, the positions of Schutz and Halbwachs obviously have much in common. With “stocks of knowledge” at hand and “memory,” both use seemingly static concepts, but both have a dynamic view and consider remembering as a reproduction in the here and now. Concerning the relationship between individual and collective memory, however, it is crucial not to confuse two issues: First, whether individual memories are interpreted by help of collective typifications and frames; and second, whether individual memories are collectively shared. Already Durkheim observed that the traditionally shared, collective consciousness is endangered by the process of modernization: The more the functional division of labor advances, the more are individual memories socially distributed. Increasingly, grand narratives give way to small, local narratives. The more pluralistic a society is, the more variety exists and the more individuality can develop. Schutz (1932/1967) argues that because of cultural as well as biographical differences, mutual understanding cannot be more than an approximation. Intersubjectivity is not a given; it must be locally achieved in situated social interaction.

Collective dimensions of organizational memories Phenomenological life-world analysis has not only a subjective, but also an intersubjective, pragmatic pole. Remembering past events is not only an activity in subjective consciousness, it is as often a common, situated, sequentially organized social interaction. And embodied routines are often organizational routines that are interlinked and shared with other members, especially in business corporations. Actions, and especially social actions construct, or produce, social reality. Middleton and Edwards (1990) describe many instances of conversational remembering. How “collective” is conversational remembering? When participants agree on a certain verbal account of past events, an intersubjective consensus seems to be achieved, and the memory appears to be shared and “collective.” A phenomenological perspective is aware, 101

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however, that such accounts often do not coincide with individual memories. Deviant subjective memories are often not expressed in conversations, for several reasons: out of decency; to be considerate of the other; to keep a good mood; not to confront the other; not to appear as deviant; to keep one’s privacy; not to violate a local taboo; etc. Gabriele Rosenthal (forthcoming) found that young Israelis and Palestinians give different accounts of remembered events when being interviewed alone or in the presence of other family members; when others are present they do not deviate from the “official” family doctrine. A distinction between public and private memories is also crucial for organizations; there are subjective recollections that are either kept private or only shared with intimate friends or trustworthy colleagues. Individual memories in organizations are socially distributed. How a member experiences the organization depends on his or her social position. An entry-level employee in the production department, an administrative employee in the human resource department and a managerial-level employee in the marketing department all have distinct vocational knowledge and different relevance systems, mostly imposed by their jobs; their expertise and their perspectives on the organization are different. The larger an organization is and the higher the degree of division of labor, the more it becomes opaque. Immediate experiences are governed by the “logic” of one’s work and corresponding collaborative relationships. There are vast realms in large organizations that the majority of members have never directly experienced. Much of the cooperation in an organization with divided labor is organized by cues (Argote 2013: 90–91): A worker in the paint shop of a car manufacturer does not need to know how work is done in other places of the plant; he starts with his team to paint an auto body when it arrives from the wagon-maker. Areas that are not directly experienced may be “appresented” in form of “typical” knowledge, which is often of a general, abstract, anonymous and diffuse sort. Such typical knowledge of realms out of reach is conveyed by narrations, like stories, myths and legends, gossip and rumors. Individual memories of phenomena and events beyond direct subjective experience are shaped exclusively by such collective constructions, and these can take on lives of their own. Organizational memory does not only consist in collectively shared memory; it also comprises the total of individual memories plus archival memories. Individual memories are socially distributed and represent many different perspectives on an organization, and parts of them are private memories that are not communicated to others. But organizations also have a power dimension; certain collective memories are more dominant than others. This is not just a coincidental process, for organizational memories are managed.

Organizational memories as managed memories Organizations usually have a power structure with a clear hierarchy and established mechanisms of social control. A significant difference to many other forms of collective memories is therefore that organizational memories are managed. What can be managed and how? The management can hardly inf luence what organizational members remember and what they forget; individual memories cannot be managed. And it is as difficult to manage informal communication within an organization. There is a myriad of stories circulating in organizations, some reinforcing, others contradicting and contesting each other; some remain marginal, others prevail and some become dominant ontologies. For many issues, the management—by help of its professional staff in the communications and public relations department—proclaims and spreads an “official” version. And sometimes—e.g., if events happened that can easily be scandalized in the media, as in the case of illegal banking practices or an involvement in an environmental disaster—the management explicitly prohibits 102

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their employees from talking to outsiders about that issue and giving a deviant account. Such measures usually work—apart from whistle-blowers and secret leaks—because employees can be held accountable and be legally sanctioned for misbehavior. The management not only attempts to curtail and channel organizational members’ communications in some cases, but it also tries to get hold of individual memories. A crucial goal of knowledge management is that members share their knowledge with others, which requires communication. This warrants that the relevant knowledge is retained in the company when an employee quits. And here is the conf lict of interests: The value of a member is so much the higher, the more unique his or her competences are. The more work-relevant knowledge an employee keeps for him- or herself, the more dependent the organization is on this person. Externalization has therefore become a common knowledge-management strategy (Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995): Companies impose a dense reporting system on their employees. Many consulting firms, for instance, demand that their consultants enter any event that they observe in a client organization and that may possibly become relevant for future consultancy projects into a database where it is available to peer consultants. As this is a power struggle on the micro-level, employees develop their own micro-strategies to deal effectively with such requirements (that cannot include tacit, non-discursive knowledge anyway). Organizations construct documentary realities, and this increasingly electronically. As we found in the archives of reading societies, documents are usually not produced for historical purposes but for daily business matters. As photos, diaries and letters in family conversations, organizational documents help to trigger individual memories. Many interactions in organizations consist of making sense of specific documents, for instance, to reconstruct a “case” and solve a “problem.” In a management perspective, most of these documents and electronic data become obsolete once a business is accomplished; they only represent “past business.” The attention of managers is usually directed to solve immediate problems and meet the challenges of the near future; new knowledge creation seems more relevant than memories of the past. The task of management is to prepare the ground for the new and initiate change; memories though, as embodied routines and “old” mind-sets, tend to hinder change. Forgetting is an essential ingredient of knowledge management. Long-term archiving policies are therefore often not a number-one priority. In many companies they remain ill-conceived, while others develop quite sophisticated archiving systems. Organizational archives are expensive; they require not only space but must also be well organized to allow for retrieving data. The law requires that some crucial documents be preserved for ten years, especially bookkeeping and accounting data and legal contracts. What is kept and what is thrown away in the long run depends on management policies and established archiving practices. Industrial companies not only collect documents, but also own sometimes well-reputed archives that document the history of their products. A textile company in the city of St. Gallen, Switzerland, features an archive that has collected samples of all the textiles produced during the last 400 years, handcrafted as well as industrial. Every year, star designers from around the world visit this archive in search of inspiration. Many car manufacturers have similar collections of old-timers, which symbolize the progress of technology, design, materials, cost efficiency, environmental footprint, etc., and represent not only an important part of industrial history, but also contribute to the corporate image and the car cult.

Organizational spaces and memories Organizational memories are often tied to material objects and particularly to places and spaces. Spatial arrangements are constitutive features of organizations, and although this has always 103

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been considered as a “natural fact” in everyday experience, it has long been neglected in organization studies (as well as in social theory). But which conception of space is adequate regarding organizational memories? Management and organization theory have been much more preoccupied with time than with space; only recently, Kornberger and Clegg (2004) called for “bringing space back in.” In their extensive review of research on organizational spaces, Taylor and Spicer (2007) demonstrate that there is more research on this topic than is generally acknowledged; and they identified three different conceptions of space, each of which involves different methodological assumptions, key analytical concepts and protocols of data collection. The first is space as physical distance. It is based on Euclidian geometry and measures distances and proximity. It is often used in research of workplace layouts and of spatial dynamics of industries (e.g., clustering dynamics of firms around resources, competitors, networks and research facilities). The advantages of such research are that it makes an important practical contribution and shows that space makes a difference; in addition, space is easy to measure in this conception. Significant shortcomings of such approaches are that they disregard how actors perceive and experience distance and how they contribute meaning to space and that they ignore how spatiality is practiced. This is the focus of a second conception: Space as lived experience. Interpretive approaches of the cultural turn, such as organizational symbolism or organizational aesthetics, investigate how we experience spaces through our bodily senses and cultural frames and seek the stories that spaces tell (Strati 1999). Critics contend that these approaches disregard the material, physical and corporal aspects of space and lose sight of what the third conception picks as its central theme: Space as materialization of power relations. Using a Marxian framework, this research explains spatial configurations by practices of domination and control; however, it disregards all other aspects. Taylor and Spicer therefore suggest using the term organizational spaces as an umbrella construct that integrates the three conceptions of space, on the basis of Lefebvre (1991), as three analytically distinct dimensions. In my view, such an integration is much easier using the phenomenological life-world analysis, which considers perception and experience (in the sense of ego-cogito-cogitatum) as the basic level that founds the other conceptions. From early on, we experience our life-world as a material world, using our haptic sense to grasp and examine objects; later on, we “see” the materiality of things and do not have to continuously test it by touching everything. If our relevance system requires, we can also measure things using adequate tools; for architects, engineers and workers on a construction site, measuring physical distances is crucial. For organizational members in daily business life though, it is usually not. But they experience distance and proximity, depending on their relevance system, for instance, as helpful or cumbersome. And how they experience that physical distance is relative; for practical purposes the 80 km to a Swiss village in a mountain valley can be much more remote than 300 km that can be traveled on a freeway or in a high speed train. Furthermore, technical media such as phones or Skype have made physical distances even more relative: For which practices of collaboration is physical proximity really needed? In other words, Euclidian geometry is embedded in the life-world; measurable physical distance is just one perspective that suits certain practices while it proves too simple a construct for many other purposes. The same is true for power relations; they represent just one relevant dimension of organizational analysis besides many others, and they presuppose the lived experience of a meaningful life-world. As Halbwachs states in his social morphology, collective memory is closely interlinked with the material structures; both constitute the life-world. But in contrast to Halbwachs, phenomenological life-world analysis does not conceive of space as a positivist fact, observed and described independently of actors’ perceptions. On the contrary, 104

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space is always space-as-it-is-experienced. As previously discussed, subjective experience is not discretionary but includes the noetic achievements of consciousness as well as the material features of the noema (i.e., the perceived objects). Lived, collective memories always consist in experiences and reproductions in the here and now, and if they are tied to material objects and space, then this always means that they are tied to experienced material objects and experienced space. Spatial arrangements facilitate as well as restrict organizational processes, depending on the respective relevance systems. The ensemble of material objects, such as buildings, premises, machines, desks, computers, etc., trigger and support currently “lived” organizational memories, invoked by the actual practices of perception, experience and working. In the context of such practices, they also tell stories, often seen but unnoticed, and sometimes as parts of cultural, or social, memories that can be excavated and researched if someone is interested. Buildings often represent the architect’s ideas—factories for assembly lines, open-space offices for f lexible use—but spatial arrangements are time and again reorganized based on different ideas, sometimes in the same, sometimes in new buildings. And it often happens in practice that informal uses of space do not correspond to their originally planned use. In a nutshell, “lived memories” in organizations are often tied to material objects as they are experienced; but these material objects often comprise, like organizational archives, much more—knowledge that has been forgotten and has become part of cultural, or social, memory.

Digital memories While in management and organizational studies the term organizational memory is often subsumed to “knowledge management” and “learning organization” (cf. Argote 2013), the concept is often used in information and computer science. In this context, organizational memory is often reduced to the model of a storage bin, neglecting the distinctly human subjective experience of remembering as well as the specific social and historical contexts (Rowlinson et al. 2010). Digital memories are archival memories, not lived memories. They nevertheless deserve special attention as they become increasingly important and pose particular problems. Many of these problems are complex, others are meanwhile commonplace; I am going to focus on two that are particularly relevant in the present context. One major problem is obsolescence. After hundreds and thousands of years, we still can read hieroglyphs engraved in stone and letters written on vellum or paper, as these material artifacts lasted and as the cultural practices of reading and writing remained fairly stable. Many electronic files, however, cannot be read anymore because either the hardware or the software, or both, is no longer available. Charlotte Linde (2006) researched such memory questions at the NASA Ames Research Center, asking if we still remember how to go to the moon. It became a cliché question in knowledge management if NASA could rebuild Apollo and repeat its mission. But this is not the issue, because technology has much progressed since the last Apollo f light in 1972; nowadays one would do it quite differently. The real issue is how to find, retrieve and make sense of knowledge from Apollo missions that is still relevant (like the physics of a space f light). Such data were distributed across the organization, some could not be found and some could not be read anymore, and some were even detected at places outside of NASA (e.g., a film with the highlights of moon shot that was used by a film studio in Los Angeles for the demo of Pink Floyd’s album Dark Side of the Moon). Linde (2006: 14) concluded that plans for information lifecycle management in systems engineering requirements are needed as well as the archivist’s commitment to keeping digital data live. In practice, also at NASA, the most effective archiving material remains paper—because it lasts. 105

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Not only hard- and software obsolesce, also the modes of computational work change. Based on her ethnographic fieldwork with spacecraft engineers, software developers and science planners at the NASA-contracted Cassini mission to Saturn, Marisa Cohn (2012) describes how computational practices themselves get lost or retrieved, forgotten or remembered. The Cassini mission to Saturn was designed in the 90s, launched in 1997, and reached Saturn in 2001. As the spacecraft still f lies within the Saturn system, the operating team on the ground is continuously facing the challenge of updating the software to modern standards, but at the same time coming to terms with the spacecraft’s hardware and on-board software. There are codes that are still operational, but forgotten in the organization. Cohn demonstrates that the practice of computational work is an effortful process of letting go and crafting legacies and that some amount of work is inevitably lost in translation.

Conclusion On the basis of Halbwachs’s distinction between history and memory, I first pondered some issues of reconstructing an association’s former life on the basis of organizational archives (“cultural memory” in Jan Assmann’s sense). Then I turned to business companies and attempted to scrutinize organizational memories on the basis of the phenomenological lifeworld analysis. At its subjective pole, I concluded that individual memories do not only consist in subjective remembering but also in embodied routines (“embodied memory”). At its intersubjective, pragmatic pole it was agreed with Halbwachs that individual memories are socially derived and predominantly organized by collective typifications and relevance systems; in addition, most embodied routines have a social origin, too. The more important question, however, is how extensively collective memories are shared. The larger an organization is and the more advanced the division of labor, the more are individual memories socially distributed. This implies that many collective memories are only partially shared, some even contradicting each other. There is therefore not just one organizational memory, there is a multiplicity of memories within an organization. An ethnography of organizational memories has to research these multiple collective constructions, including the official versions proclaimed by the management. In addition it should take into account that organizational members keep—for good reasons—some of their memories private even when these are relevant for organizational work. Organizations have hierarchies and mechanisms of social control. The management of business companies engages more and more in knowledge and memory management. As managers usually orient more to the future than to the past, they are more interested in new knowledge creation than in memory. Their primary interest is, therefore, knowledge management, which attempts, for instance, to turn individual competences into socially shared, organizational competences by establishing externalization practices. Knowledge management also tries to get rid of lived memories that might hinder an initiated change process. As individual memories cannot be managed, the management often proclaims official versions and attempts to control organizational members’ communications; and often it tries to substitute established routines with new organizational ones. Finally, whether records are preserved or trashed depends on the long-term archiving policies of the management and the institutionalized archiving practices. Special attention has been given to the interlinkage of memory and organizational spaces as well as to digital memories. Space has long been a neglected topic in organizational studies, although spatial arrangements are constitutive of organizations. After reviewing different conceptions of space, a phenomenological conception of space-as-it-is-experienced was 106

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suggested, in line with my previous argumentation. The noetic-noematic unity of phenomena ensures that the materiality of objects, buildings, machines, etc., is accounted for but not separated from actors’ perceptions and practices, as it is in positivist epistemology. Memories relate to the material world accordingly. Digital memories deserve attention as they become increasingly important and pose particular problems. Many of these problems are complex; others are commonplace. One disturbing problem is obsolescence; data coded in old software and stored on old hardware that cannot be read anymore. Research at NASA, guided by the probing question of whether or not NASA could still f ly to the moon today, revealed that organizational archives can be quite dispersed even in a sophisticated organization and that much data cannot be retrieved if it is not stored on paper (which lasts). Another problem pointed out is that historically grown programs that are still operational include hidden codes that the organization has forgotten because the modes of computational work have changed. Remembering, subjective or collective, is always a reconstruction of the past in the here and now. To keep memories alive they must be repeated, in rituals, commemorations or ceremonies. In the long run, much of the communicative memory in organizations gets lost or becomes part of the cultural memory, not only in the form of archived documents but also in the form of material artifacts, such as premises and buildings. Both represent a social memory in the mode of potentiality and remain a resource of lived collective memories as well as of historical research.

Notes 1  Opposite to most English translations of the works of Max Weber and Schutz, I favor to translate the German term Sinn as “sense” instead of “meaning” as it is more accurate. 2  This way Husserl hoped to overcome the aporia of empiricism and rationalism. 3  The German words Erlebnis and Erfahrung have no equivalent in English. As in phenomenology, they constitute a crucial difference: They are translated as “lived experience” (Erlebnis) and as “experience” (Erfahrung) (Cairns 1973). “Lived experience” happens in the here and now, while “experience” means to make sense of certain past experiences. 4  Again, the German words Körper and Leib have no equivalent in English; phenomenologists translate them as “body” and “lived body” (Cairns 1973).

References Argote, L. (2013) Organizational Learning. Creating, Retaining and Transferring Knowledge, 2nd ed. New York: Springer. Assmann, A. (2006) “Memory, Individual and Collective” in R. E. Goodin and C. Tilly (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 210–224. ——. (2011) Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Assmann, J. (2008) “Communicative and Cultural Memory” in A. Erll and A. Nünning (eds.) Cultural Memory Studies: An International Handbook. New York: Walter de Gruyter, pp. 109–118. ——. (2011) Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance and Political Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Berger, P. L. and Luckmann, T. (1966) The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Cairns, D. (1973) Guide for Translating Husserl. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Cohn, M. (2012) “Life on the Way to Code: Memory Practices in Human-Computer Translation,” paper presented at The Arts of Memory: 5th Annual Interdisciplinary Memory Conference at the New School for Social Research in New York, April. Dann, O. (ed.) (1981) Lesegesellschaften und bürgerliche Emanzipation. Ein europäischer Vergleich. München: Beck. 107

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Eberle, T. S. (2009) “Reading Societies, Political Culture and Public Discourse,” Culture and Communication (3): 66–87. ——. (2013) “Regaining Sense-Connexions after Cerebral Hemorrhage.” Schutzian Research 5: 81–102. ——. (2014) “Phenomenology as a Research Method” in U. Flick (ed.) The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Data Analysis. London, Thousand Oaks, New Dehli: Sage, pp. 184–202. Eberle, T. S. and Maeder, C. (2011) “Organizational Ethnography” in D. Silverman (ed.) Qualitative Research. Theory, Method and Practice, 3rd ed., London: Sage, pp. 54–73. Egger, S. (2003) “Auf den Spuren der verlorenen Zeit. Maurice Halbwachs und die Wege des ‘kollektiven Gedächtnisses’” in M. Halbwachs, Stätten der Verkündigung im Heiligen Land. Eine Studie zum kollektiven Gedächtnis, Konstanz: UVK, pp. 219–268. Engelsing, R. (1974) Der Bürger als Leser. Lesergeschichte in Deutschland 1500–1800. Stuttgart: Metzler. Habermas, J. (1989) The Social-Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Hahn, A. (2010) Körper und Gedächtnis. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Halbwachs, M. (1925/1994) Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire. Paris: Albin Michel. ——. (1938/1970) Morphologie sociale. Paris: Armand Colin. ——. (1950) La mémoire collective. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Im Hof, U. (1982) Das gesellige Jahrhundert. Gesellschaft und Gesellschaften im Zeitalter der Aufklärung. München: C.H. Beck. Kornberger, M. and Clegg, S. R. (2004) “Bringing Space Back In: Organizing the Generative Building.” Organization Studies, 25: 1095–1114. Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell. Linde, C. (2006) “Remembering the Moon: Memory Issues in NASA’s Lunar Return,” talk given at the annual meeting of the Society for the Sociological Study of Science, Vancouver. Slides available online at www.cbprojs.com/published/?dl_id=11 (accessed 1 October 2014). ——. (2009) Working the Past: Narrative and Institutional Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marcel, J.-C. and Mucchielli, L. (2008) “Maurice Halbwachs’s mémoire collective” in A. Erll and A. Nünning (eds.) Cultural Memory Studies: An International Handbook. New York: Walter de Gruyter, pp. 141–149. March, J. G. and Simon, H. A. (1958) Organizations. New York: Wiley. Megill, K. (2005) Corporate Memory: Records and Information Management in the Knowledge Age, 2nd ed. Munich: K.G. Saur/Thomson. Middleton, D. and Edwards, D. (1990) “Conversational Remembering: A Social Psychology Approach” in D. Middleton and D. Edwards (eds.) Collective Remembering. London, Newbury Park, New Delhi: Sage, pp. 23–45. Nonaka, I. and Takeuchi, H. (1995) The Knowledge-Creating Company. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Prüsener, M. (1973) “Lesegesellschaften im 18. Jahrhundert. Ein Beitrag zur Lesergeschichte” in Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens, Vol. XIII, Frankfurt am Main: Buchhändler Vereinigung, pp. 369–594. Rosenthal, G. (forthcoming) “The Social Construction of Individual and Collective Memory” in G. Sebald and J. Wagle (eds.) Theorizing Social Memories: Concepts, Temporality, Functions. London: Routledge. Rowlinson, M., Booth, C., Clark, P., Delahaye, A. and Procter, S. (2010) “Social Remembering and Organizational Memory.” Organization Studies 31: 69–87. Schutz, A. (1932/1967) The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. G. Walsh and F. Lehnert. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Schutz, A. and Luckmann, T. (1973) The Structures of the Life-World, Vol. I, trans. R.M. Zaner and T.H. Engelhardt. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ——. (1989) The Structures of the Life-World, Vol. II, trans. R. Zaner and D.J. Parent. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Smith, D. E. (1974) “The Social Construction of Documentary Reality.” Sociological Inquiry 44: 257–268. Strati, A. (1999) Organization and Aesthetics. London: Sage. Taylor, S. and Spicer, A. (2007) “Time for Space: A Narrative Review of Research on Organizational Space.” International Journal of Management Reviews, 9(4): 325–346. Walsh, J. P. and Ungson, G. R. (1991) “Organizational Memory.” Academy of Management Review 16: 57–91.

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10 Memory, time and responsibility Carmen Leccardi

Introduction How much of the concentration camp world is dead and will not return, like slavery and the duelling code? How much is back or is coming back? What can each of us do so that in this world pregnant with threats at least this threat will be nullified? (Levi 1989: 20–21)

These were Primo Levi’s considerations on his experience as a concentration camp prisoner and survivor: an experience he did not view as part of the past, but wished to frame in terms of the present, and future, of Western societies; to highlight the central role of individual and collective responsibilities, past, present and future. Levi’s is an exemplary conception of memory and responsibility as inextricably intertwined forms of duration: two sides of the same coin. Memory becomes the intermediary for pondering the meaning of responsibility, not just in historic terms but also in personal terms. Levi’s memory is not a form of barrier, marking a dividing line that renders those outside of it extraneous, neither is he looking for activists or soldiers to enlist. His form of memory unites rather than divides: he addresses the whole of mankind, regardless of race, culture, age or social class. And in virtue of this universal perspective, this form of memory does not explore collective sins but individual responsibilities – personal responsibilities for our collective history. This chapter sets out to explore the relationship between memory and responsibility. Here both of these are interpreted as figures of time, closely intertwined with the idea of social continuity, and therefore capable of connecting the past and the future through the present. Memory, by definition the ‘custodian of time’, evokes social processes that concern both the construction of personal identity, by virtue of the sense of continuity that it ensures, and the capacity to engender forms of collective identity based on redefining the past in light of the needs of the present. Responsibility, as an ethical dimension structured around the idea of a continuous time that extends from the past to the future via the present, shares with memory the interactive nature, as well as an emphasis on choice and a tension towards the future. Both memory and responsibility regard the subject’s ability to recognize his or her own specificity, and at the same time, duration over time. And though these aspects might seem purely individual, they are both bound up not only with intersubjectivity but also with 109

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institutional processes. From an institutional point of view, for example, responsibility, like memory, represents the cornerstone upon which civic culture is built. Exercising memory, just like exercising responsibility, is also bound up with the dimension of power. The ways and forms in which, in a given social context, memories of the past or models of responsibility are transmitted, or conversely, suppressed, are directly connected to power. In terms of memory the power structures establish which memories are to be saved and which rejected; in terms of responsibility, these same structures play a decisive role in constructing and legitimizing certain models of responsibility. This chapter argues in particular that memory and responsibility have a shared frame of reference in the notion of duration – understood, à la Bergson (1922/1966), as the continuation of what no longer exists in what persists. Through duration, the appeal to the continuity of action and interaction made by both memory and responsibility is linked with the dynamic nature of change processes. After brief ly discussing the meaning of memory and responsibility in their relationship to duration on one hand, and ref lexivity and embodiment on the other, the chapter analyses the transformations taking place today in both memory and responsibility. The fragmented experience of time that characterizes the contemporary age, produced by an acceleration of social change and of time itself (Leccardi 2009; Rosa and Scheurman 2009) and, in parallel, the diminished ability of institutions to guarantee temporal continuity, challenges our capacity to safeguard social ties and, more broadly speaking, the pact between present and future. Paradoxically, this is not due purely to a weaker capacity for memory on a societal level, or because we fail to emphasize the importance of responsibility. On the contrary, the importance of memory is constantly evoked in public discourse, while eliciting people’s sense of responsibility is a salient leitmotif of our age. Nevertheless, memory is museified rather than being effectively transmitted, while the emphasis on individual responsibility covers up the demise of efficacious forms of integration and social protection.

Time and durée Norbert Elias (1993) has opportunely pointed out that time is a dimension that cannot be perceived by our senses. Unlike space, with which it jointly constructs human experience, time can only be ‘seen’ if there are indicators of it. Among the temporal indicators to which human beings usually refer – nature, their bodies, the clock or social rhythms – an entirely distinctive role is performed by subjective time, or inner duration. Investigated in philosophical terms particularly by Bergson (1922/1966) and Bachelard (1950/2000),1 duration concerns the constant flow of consciousness, the interweaving of individual instants in a continuous, open and mutable process of becoming. People therefore relate to time from within it. It is not, in fact, the mathematized and spatialized time of the clock that acts as their referent, but rather the continuity of existence, and the way the past extends into the present, which is in turn projected towards an indefinite future. This kind of duration relates to a notion of time that is qualitative and unpredictable as well as irreversible and f luid. Within its f low there is no possibility of repetition. Phenomenological sociology has made duration its particular concern and treated it within the meaning framework of the everyday life-world (Schutz and Luckmann 1973). This widening of scope has shifted attention from the inner dimension of durée to the forms of intersubjectivity that it makes possible. From this analytical perspective, the intersubjective structure of everyday life-time takes shape at the intersection among durée, natural times, biological times and social times.2 But it is especially thanks to Anthony Giddens (1984) that 110

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sociology has incorporated the concept of duration, adapted it to its paradigms and turned it into a tool for analysing social practices. Giddens distinguishes between two different dimensions of durée: duration in everyday lifeexperience, related to the continuous and repetitive time substantiated in routines, and the longue durée of institutional time. These two dimensions, investigated as expressions of the continuity of behaviours in social time-space, combine to constitute the life-time of the individual as irreversibly and inexorably moving towards death.3 The times of everyday life, of biography and of institutions jointly express historical becoming, understood as the temporality of human practices. In the analytical framework proposed by Giddens, therefore, durée acquires supra-­ individual significance and exists in relation to the dynamics of social reproduction. In particular, both the recursive durations of everyday life and the extended durations of institutions perform an essential role in protecting individuals’ capacity for autonomous action. They jointly furnish time and meaning frames able to reduce existential uncertainty by proposing forms of social continuity. The dimension of duration, continuation of what no longer exists in what endures, is based on this. Both everyday routines and institutional domains relate the past to the present, what has been to what is, and connect them to the future. As expressions of persistence, both routines and institutions precipitate and coalesce the interweavings between memory and society.

Memory as a form of duration The point of departure of any study on memory is the nexus that ties it to duration: our awareness of the flow of time, and of the change that this flow contains, is made possible by memory. Memory and durée, in fact, are closely interlinked. As Bergson writes: ‘To tell the truth, it is impossible to distinguish between the duration, however short it may be, that separates two instants and a memory that connects them’ (quoted in Rizzo 2000: 176). Without drawing on memory it would be impossible to perceive the passing of time, with its interweaving of continuity and change. It is in fact possible to experience the present as separate from the past only in so far as the contents of memory let us focus on the dimension of passage of the time that flows. The latter in turn implies that the past extends into the present and the present into the future. Indeed, we can experience the present as time traversed by the new only in so far as the contents of memory enable us to consider it as such. In sociological terms, the bond uniting memory and duration becomes particularly clear when we turn our attention to the processes by which people remember together: namely the complex mechanisms of interaction and communication with which memory is socially constructed and socially reproduced. These give rise to the societal processes by means of which memories are produced, imposed or alternatively erased, defended or rejected, and above all constantly transformed according to the needs and the identitarian demands of individuals and the groups they belong to (Halbwachs 1925/1980; Namer 1987; Jedlowski 2001; Middleton and Edwards 1990; Misztal 2003; Tota 2001; Zerubavel 2003). In short, the nexus between duration and memory emerges clearly if one looks at the work by and on the memory evidenced by the narratives and identities people use to represent themselves (Ricoeur 2004). Here ‘represent’ is used in the literal sense of ‘making oneself present’: a transformation of the specific past to which the memory refers, in a continuous present that acts as a bridge between the past and the future. Collective and social memories, in fact, spring from the dialectical relationship between past and present, upon which each time frame constructs the meanings that the other carries, 111

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and visibly bears the mark of. Though perhaps less visible to the naked eye, the intrinsic relationship between present and future is no less significant; for images of the future can be considered as frames that can be used to organize memory. Hence, although memory cannot exist separately from the future – memory, identity and temporal continuity are inextricably bound up with each other – we must not underestimate the crucial role that the ‘will for memory’ (Namer 1987) performs in fusing the past, present and future together to construct collective identity and political projects. In this regard, we can say that the time of memory is capable of unravelling the linear, irreversible time of history and knitting it back together again as a circular process in which the events of the past are relived in the present, reformulated and adapted to the needs of the community expressing that memory. Each of the two times, past and present, contributes to constructing the meanings of which the other is bearer, while visibly bearing its imprint ( Jedlowski 2001). The close bond between memory and duration becomes particularly visible when we turn our attention to generations. This is the case whatever our interpretation of generation: whether we consider generations from a Mannheimian point of view, within a theoretical frame of reference centred on the rhythms of social change and therefore focusing on the intersections between times of life and times of history (Mannheim 1923/1952); whether we view generations in terms of filiation, in accordance with the Greek etymology of the term (gènesis), as suggested in particular by ethnological studies; whether we see them as cohorts, namely sets of individuals who experience a specific event (birth, for example) in the same interval of time, and therefore on the basis of precisely measurable coordinates, as proposed in particular by demographers; or whether, finally, they are seen as socio-cultural phenomena founded upon a ‘common duration’ constructed on shared symbolic dimensions rather than the collective elaboration of lived historical experiences, as more recent sociological interpretations maintain (Attias-Donfut 1988; Turner and Eyerman 1999). In this respect, memory is indubitably a classic locus for ref lection on the connection between time and generations. This is so not only because the social definition of generation arises at the border between collective memory and history, but also, and especially, because the various generations can be considered as living memories. They embody different definitions and reconstructions of the past and temporal continuity in social settings. Their diverse memories, together with their representations of present and future, structure social time. For example, what Jan Assmann (2011) calls the ‘cultural memory’ – the set of symbols, signs, rituals and texts by which experience is objectified and transmitted – is strictly related to the generational dimension. So if a common cultural memory creates duration, identity and belonging, then what are the mechanisms that transmit or, conversely, block it?4 We have already observed that the memory of groups and, in a broad sense, communities develop with and through joint remembering. But this process is not constructed solely by a discursive consciousness or forms of ref lexive narrative. Everyday interactions give rise to forms of practical non-discursive consciousness, wrapped up in common sense and experienced unwittingly and involuntarily. The memory transmitted within this framework, and which Mannheim analysed in his essay on the generations (1923/1952), is transmitted and assimilated within the unproblematic and undisputed ‘natural attitude’ of everyday life (Schutz 1971). Memory as a form of duration is frequently handed down via the minute, almost unnoticed, and quotidian forms of ‘remembering together’ that characterize intergenerational relations within the family. For instance, when Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame (1988) refers to the family’s ‘long memory’, her intention is to direct attention to the transmission mechanism that lies below the threshold 112

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of awareness. The long memory is unwittingly carried forward by the members of a family. It consists largely of memories transmitted by previous generations and which due to close interaction have become an integral part of the thought itineraries of the family’s members; memories that lie beyond their deliberation, so to speak. This memory springs from interpersonal contact; it f lourishes through affectivity; it maintains itself over time as the custodian of ‘secrets’ unique to the family. Its normative function, together with that of mediating affects (Namer 1988), strengthens its feature of implicit instruction, a sort of tacit uncontested training handed down from one generation to the next. In our time, it is likely that the intergenerational transmission of forms of ‘projectual memory’, that is, memories comprising patterns of meaning able to connect the past firmly with the future, has weakened. It is also likely that the ‘will for memory’ (Namer 1987) is increasingly contrasted by the need for forgetfulness (Bauman 2001), bred by the excess of information and the speed of change. It can accordingly be hypothesized that the strength of this unnoticed transmission, which is perpetuated through inattentiveness and fuelled by reference to worlds that are affectively vital yet closed to the outside, becomes more and more relevant.

Responsibility The concept of responsibility has gradually changed within contemporary philosophy and sociology, acquiring unprecedented importance, among other things, due to the fact that both disciplines have abandoned the association between responsibility and duty. Assuming responsibility means that a person enters the domain of ethical choice (Pritchard 1991). Unlike duty, in fact, responsibility is a wholly individual option, the outcome of the individual’s fashioning of his or her irreducible subjectivity (Bauman 1993). Thus, the new lexicon of responsibility includes terms such as choice, autonomy, subjectivity, reflexivity, creativity, response, relation and intersubjectivity but also ambivalence and conflict. The semantic range of responsibility has been redefined mainly as the result of the spread of a post-Kantian ethical view that no longer centres on the idea of a moral law observed only by virtue of the rationality with which human beings are endowed; a view, consequently, that comprises not only the dimension of respect towards others but also that of involvement (including emotional involvement) in and for their welfare. In short, while in the present there is growing attention to the relationship between an agent and his/her actions, the aspect of the obligation of responsibility has grown peripheral. Greater importance is attributed to the personal identity of the actor, his/her intentions and motives, and the sense-horizon in which his/her action is embedded. Responsibility has become primarily a ‘response’ by the actor to him/herself (etymologically, ‘being responsible’ derives from the Latin respondeo). This analytical framework also comprises the temporal dimension of responsibility. When reconstructing the meaning of my actions now, I state what my actions were: what I had in mind at the moment when I acted constructs in the present the meaning of what I did in the past (Lucas 1993). The concepts of memory and identity are central to this process. In parallel, my action inexorably directs me towards the future. By means of my action I produce effects that I shall experience in the future, and for which I may have to answer in the future. By acting, I become responsible for the future effects of my present action. Responsibility understood not in functional terms, as the responsibility attendant on the exercise of a social role, is in fact constructed around the idea of a continuous time that from the past moves towards the future via the present. Here continuity arises from the subjective 113

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imprint that responsibility stamps on action or interaction, from its capacity to construct duration through social bonds. Nevertheless, the subjective sphere does not comprise the entire semantic range of responsibility. Alongside it lies what can be termed the institutional sphere, which concerns the ways in which responsibility is learned as an ethical code (Genard 1992). This second sphere requires us to focus on how over time, at the social level, a responsible person develops the public capacity, for instance, to educate others to civic and social responsibility. The focus of responsibility as the privileged ethical code of the world risk society (Beck 1998), in line with recovering extended temporal horizons which enable us to relate to the past and longer term, is increasingly the order of the day. The enormous leaps made by technology produce a temporal and spatial extension of our actions unknown in previous ages. In this framework, it is increasingly difficult, as it was for example at the zenith of modernity, to conceive science and technology as sturdy allies against uncertainty (Adam 1998). The precautionary principle as the ethical expression of the technological age can accordingly be considered one of the outcomes of the conjunction of responsibility and duration. In sociology, two phenomena in particular have drawn attention to this different concept of responsibility. The first, which the Shoah made tragically clear, relates to the limitations of the conception of responsibility embraced by early modernity, which was characterized by what Bauman (1998: 80) calls the ‘adiaphorization’ of action – the tendency of the bureaucratic management of social processes to neutralize the ethical meaning of action. The second, which is specific to contemporary modernity, is tied to new trajectories of biographical construction, increasingly less standardized, and increasingly founded on the self-definition of moral and social bonds. Both aspects call for us to focus on the subject and his/her moral sentiments and choices. At the same time, however, the relational character of responsibility, in which openness to the other and self-exploration combine, prevents this subjectivity from being represented in solipsistic terms.

Between reflexivity and embodiment In both the cases described, that of memory as the vehicle for assuming (or attributing) responsibility and that of responsibility actively nourished by memory, the idea of reflexivity is of central importance. It is through memory that reflexivity transforms what is known and adapts it actively and creatively to the needs of the present. For example, the work of the collective memory, based on processing and reconstructing the past with a view to constructing a hoped-for future, relates directly to the support that reflexivity, fuelled by interaction, gives to change. It enables knowledge and action to unite and support each other. This ‘collective reflexivity’ is not only crucial for the shared construction of judgements on the past; it is also necessary for evaluating actions in the present and prefiguring those in the future. The relation with ref lexivity is no less important for the individual’s memory. This relationship gives rise to the narrative dimension of memory structured by language and by interaction, through which the past is created ex novo. In the game of memory, the self-ref lexive process is a vehicle for interpreting and re-interpreting the self and the world. Whilst this process exposes the memory to permanent doubt and uncertainty, it also makes memory central to the construction of experience. With no less intensity, ref lexivity also generates responsibility conceived as the agent’s possibility to decide among different alternatives and, on this basis, accept liability for the consequences of his/her actions.5 Ref lexivity is likewise involved when responsibility is analysed as a relationship that the subject has with his/her own behaviour and moral beliefs. 114

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Here it is an expression of an ethical competence to generate both self-affirmation and intersubjectivity: someone who exercises responsibility ‘responds’ to the other while s/he interrogates and ‘responds’ to herself/himself. However, neither memory nor responsibility can be conceptualized solely within a dialogic and ref lexive framework. If, without our choosing, we can be ‘visited’ by memories – as Proust reminds us – we can also be drawn into the field of responsibility in ways that are unrelated to rationality and reciprocity. It is to Levinas (1987; 2003), and his post-rational ref lections on ethics, that we owe the notion of a responsibility due to a human act different from a knowledge act, deriving for example from the proximity that face-to-face relations can produce. Here the primacy of the cognitive dimension gives way to a being-for-the-other devoid of reciprocation, a way of expressing subjectivity that reverses both the idea of moral obligation typical of the Kantian tradition and the symmetry of the intersubjective relationship.6 Just as the ‘involuntary memory’ escapes the primacy of the will, so responsibility conceived as a primary structure of subjectivity escapes intentionality. According to Levinas (1969; 2003), the mere presence of the other gives rise to an obligation to ‘respond’. There is nevertheless a further level at which memory and responsibility as non-cognitive and non-ref lexive dimensions can be analysed. This level has to do with the embodied dimension of memory and responsibility. Paul Connerton (1989) argues that this dimension is crucial for understanding the processes by which groups preserve and transmit memory. The aim of Connerton’s analysis is to draw attention to an aspect of memory that is generally ignored. This concerns the form of memory unconnected to the linguistic practices and instruments with which traces of the past are preserved: from the alphabet to photographs, from modern information technologies to museums. The memory Connerton refers to passes directly through human bodies. According to Connerton, alongside inscribed practices of memory there is also a rich reservoir of embodied social memories that accumulate over time in our bodies. In an extratextual and extra-cognitive manner, our bodies act as vehicles for memory. Patterns of behaviour, gestures, the modulation of the voice, good manners or the deference rituals analysed by Elias (1978) directly concern the close relation between the body and social memory. Ritual performances, such as commemorations (Schwartz 1982; Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz 1991), during which bodies and their expressions are governed by formalized symbolic rules designed to evoke founding events and prototypical personages, transmit this type of memory. These embodied memory practices centre on the contents of the past to be transmitted to the present and future generations. From our point of view, they direct attention to how memory is constructed: in short, to how we remember through our bodies. Francisco Varela is also interested in the pre-ref lexive, implicit and embodied ways in which responsibility is exercised in the minute actions of everyday life. In his book on ethics (Varela 1999),7 Varela proposes an original summary of cognitive theories; Western philosophical approaches, such as phenomenology and pragmatism; and Eastern thinking. The result of this syncretism is a pragmatic path to ethical competence, an analysis of how responsibility is exercised that departs both from the approach grounded on universal principles inspired by moral obligation and the view (à la Levinas) that emphasizes the preontological and pre-intellectual aspects of ethics. The path proposed by Varela is based on a view of ethics as a kind of basic individual competence, a non-ref lexive, non-categorial and implicit expertise, centred on the capacity to deal with events immediately. Embodied in nature, this ability is expressed in everyday life in an ‘extra-intentional’ manner through a series of unexceptional actions that ‘respond’ spontaneously and immediately to the demands of the environment.8 Given the unobtrusive, 115

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common and pervasive nature of these actions, the exercise of responsibility that they embody tends to pass unnoticed, except when interruptions in ‘normal’ courses of action bring it to light. Varela’s notion of ethical know-how springs from the cognitive sciences, the embodied nature of knowledge and, in parallel, the ref lections on experience that originate from non-­Western traditions of thought (which seek to overcome the subject/object dichotomy). It explores the semantic field of responsibility and opens up new terrain. His analysis, like Connerton’s, illuminates not only the ref lexive nature of memory and responsibility, but also the embodied, extra-rational aspects.

The ‘illnesses’ of memory and responsibility The purpose of this rapid review is to highlight the elements that unify memory and responsibility as forms of temporalization of action and crucial dimensions of individual and collective identities. Moreover, by considering memory and responsibility together, it is possible to address some of the great civil issues of the new century: the destinies of social ties in the age of individualization; the construction of public discourse in a climate of increasing privatism; the transmission of cultural heritage from one generation to the next; the importance of fostering a culture of limits to safeguard the planet; and the rejection of violence as a means to resolve conflicts on the basis of a non-ideological and theoretically sound approach. An analytical awareness of this kind also has theoretical and empirical implications for the study of power dynamics in social contexts like those of today, characterized by high information density. If, as Melucci (1989) points out, power is no longer just control over the forms of behaviour but also over its preconditions, namely the codes and languages of action, then studying the practice of memory and responsibility may prove an effective way of identifying how such control is exerted today. There is insufficient space here to examine this assertion theoretically. Nevertheless, two examples of how this dominance is imprinted in memory and responsibility will suffice to convey its meaning. First, memory. The problem of our age is not just the difficulty of developing a collective memory when the present is absolutized, when urgency is part of everyday language, and when simultaneity is a normative ideal that threatens the sense of continuity (Hassan 2009; Rosa 2013). At the basis of many of the difficulties besetting contemporary memory, in fact, is not just a simple ‘lack’ of memory, but instead an excess of memories; or more precisely, an excess of discourses on memory. Western societies appear to dedicate an almost obsessive level of care to merely preserving traces of their past, a process related to the so-called museification of memory, a way of banalizing the past and its potentially destabilizing aspects. Here what counts is the de-contextualization of memory, its detachment from everyday life and its reduction into disconnected fragments. This kind of interest in preserving the past indeed appears inversely proportionate to the investment in transmitting memory between generations (Rampazi 2007). Actually, the responsibility of remembering seems to be placed entirely on archives (Misztal 2003: 105). The exponential growth of socially available memory driven by information technologies, its so-called virtualization, amplifies this tendency. Memory is thus both preserved and sterilized; it is deprived of its relationship with duration which gives it the constant potential to subvert power. In this regard, as Todorov (2010) emphasizes, in contemporary societies the transmission of memory is constantly subject to the two risks of sacralization or banalization. In the former case, the events or people remembered are petrified in a single and separate time-space that 116

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does not connect past and present. In the latter, the present is mechanically assimilated into the past, which consequently loses its specificity and, although apparently appropriated by social memory, is banalized and dumbed down. In short, the social destiny of memory in the twenty-first century bears not only the negative sign of the separation between individual memories and collective forms of memory, but it is also susceptible to the risks of hypertrophy and manipulation which prevent it from opening up to the future. Memory work, in which the processes of memory construction and construction of collective identity proceed synchronously, thus gives way to the selection of what is to be remembered on the basis of power reproduction. Or, in a different but complementary manner, it is replaced by totalizing memory politics that assert absolutized identities. These abuses of memory are f lanked by no less striking abuses of responsibility. Forced to come to terms with the individualization of biographies typical of the contemporary age (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002), responsibility has assumed a novel guise. It has become a new duty, incumbent on the individual towards him/herself no less than towards society, to identify constantly new biographical solutions for systemic contradictions. This new duty should be seen in conjunction with another obligation: the interiorization of forms of social exclusion and marginality as ‘natural’ phenomena, on the basis of a social philosophy that treats individuals as absolute masters of their fates regardless of societies and their inequalities. In this climate, as Martuccelli (2001: 236–237) puts it, a ‘conclusion follows automatically: always and everywhere, the individual must feel responsible for what happens to him/her and for what s/he does’. Whilst in recent years the insistence on responsibilization has been most evident in the world of work (consider the organization of the post-Fordist factory), it strongly structures the institutional system as well. However, its meaning is very different from the one formulated by modernity at its zenith. In that case, the appeal to responsibility assigned the individual a significant role in achieving a democratic project of economic growth and future governability. Today, in a very different social climate, the universalization of responsibility is instead characterized by a bogus form of equality among individuals; an equality that is no longer based upon general principles of social cohesion but instead used to compensate for the decline of social protection.

As a way of conclusion The foregoing discussion began by focusing on memory and responsibility as figures of time. We observed their semantic complexity and considered their reflexive and embodied stance, while appreciating their capacity to build and express sociality. In actual fact, memory and responsibility have similar social capacities to interrelate the dynamism of change processes, the need for continuity and intersubjectivity: there is no memory that is not produced in interaction; there is no moral responsibility that arises independently of the encounter with the other. The dialogue between them has always been intense. Never in the annals of historical and social memory have there been instances of memory that have not entailed some form of assumption and attribution of responsibility. Memory of the Holocaust is emblematic in this regard (Friedländer 1993; Levy and Sznaider 2005; Wieviorka 2006). In turn collective memory is nourished by taking responsibility for actions committed by one’s forebears or members of one’s community (Schwartz, Fukuoka and Takita-Ishii 2005); its transmission is driven by this sense of responsibility. Likewise, the battles for memory in civil life (Tota 2005; Zolberg 1996) not only demonstrate the unresolved tension between memory and history, but they also highlight the openness of the domain of responsibility to the 117

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demands raised by a culture of active citizenship. Conversely, it is impossible to reflect on responsibility without evoking the role of memory as a dimension based on responsible actors who accept liability for their actions, because they acknowledge the persistence of those actions over time. What, therefore, can be done to protect them and to sustain the open and democratic temporality that they express? The first step to be taken is developing the theoretical and empirical tools necessary to gain a deeper understanding of the crucial role that, together, memory and responsibility perform today: not only in terms of supporting social integration, but also when it comes to understanding new grammars of action.

Notes  1  On the differing views of Bergson and Bachelard on durée and its relationship with memory, see Russel (2005). On durée as temporal awareness, Husserl (1928/1990) remains a fundamental reference.  2  Schutz and Luckmann (1973: 47) refer to this set of temporal dimensions as ‘world time’.  3  In the modern age, death, as the limit of human time, entails a constant process of rationalization based on the finiteness of life-time. The central importance that modernity gives to planning the future and creating a life plan is a direct outcome of this process (Spencer 1982).  4  In an interview of some years ago, Victor Zaslavsky (2000) recounted how, during the Stalinist period, family history as intergenerational history was expunged, its roots hidden or erased. The shadow of suspicion fell on the generational past no less than on the individual past. The destruction of the most meaningful locuses of intergenerational memory – family archives, letters, photographs, the most intimate documents – shows how political power acts directly to establish the boundaries between memory and forgetfulness. More generally, it shows how family memory has both collective and social characteristics.  5  As known, this view derives from Weber’s ethics of responsibility (see Weber 1919/1994).  6  From this point of view, I constitute myself as a person through my responsible relationship with the other regardless of any recompense (see Levinas 2003). In Postmodern Ethics (1993) Bauman resumes and develops the account of responsibility proposed by Levinas, placing it at the centre of his redefinition of contemporary ethics.  7  This book, originally published in Italian in 1992, collects a series of lectures given at the University of Bologna in the early 1990s.  8  ‘Consider a normal day in the street. You are walking down the sidewalk thinking about what you need to say in an upcoming meeting and you hear the noise of an accident. You immediately see if you can help. You are in your office. The conversation is lively and a topic comes up that embarrasses your secretary. You immediately perceive that embarrassment and turn the conversation away from the topic with a humorous remark. Actions such as these do not spring from judgment and reasoning, but from the way we immediately deal with what is confronting us…. And yet these are true ethical actions’ (Varela 1999:5).

References Adam, B. (1998) Timescapes of Modernity: The Environment and Invisible Hazards, London and New York: Routledge. Assmann, J. (2011) Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Attias-Donfut, C. (1988) Sociologie des générations, Paris: PUF. Bachelard, G. (1950/2000) Dialectic of Duration, Manchester: Clinamen Press. Bauman, Z. (1993) Postmodern Ethics, Oxford: Blackwell. Bauman, Z. (1998) Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, London: Open University. Bauman, Z. (2001) ‘Identity in the Globalising World’, Social Anthropology, 9(2): 121–129. Beck, U. (1998) World Risk Society, Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, U. and Beck-Gernsheim, E. (2002) Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism and Its Social and Political Consequences, London: Sage. 118

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Bergson, H. (1922/1966) Duration and Simultaneity, New York: Bobbs-Merrill. Bertaux-Wiame, I. (1988) ‘Des forms et des usages. Histoires de famille’, L’Homme et la Société, 90: 20–38. Connerton, P. (1989) How Societies Remember, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Elias, N. (1978) The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners, Oxford: Blackwell. Elias, N. (1993) Time: An Essay, Oxford: Blackwell. Friedländer, S. (1993) Memory, History and the Extermination of the Jews in Europe, Bloomington: Indiana Press. Genard, J.-L. (1992) Sociologie de l’étique, Paris: L’Harmattan. Giddens, A. (1984) The Constitution of Society. Outline of a Theory of Structuration, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Halbwachs, M. (1925/1980) The Collective Memory, New York: Harper & Row. Hassan, R. (2009) Empires of Speed. Time and the Acceleration of Politics and Society, Leiden, Boston: Brill. Husserl, E. (1928/1990) On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, Dordrecht: Kluwer. Jedlowski, P. (2001) ‘Memory and Sociology. Themes and Issues’, Time & Society, 10(1): 29–44. Leccardi, C. (2009) Sociologie del tempo. Soggetti e tempo nella società dell’accelerazione (Sociologies of Time. Subjectivities and Time in the High-Speed Society), Roma, Bari: Laterza. Levi, P. (1989) The Drowned and the Saved, New York: Vintage International. Levinas, E. (1969) Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Levinas, E. (1987) Time and the Other, Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Levinas, E. (2003) Humanism of the Other, Urbana and Chicago: Illinois University Press. Levy, D. and Sznaider, N. (2005) The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Lucas, J. R. (1993) Responsibility, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Mannheim, K. (1923/1952) ‘The Problem of Generations’ in P. Kecskemeti (ed.) Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Martuccelli, D. (2001) Dominations ordinaires. Explorations de la condition moderne, Paris: Balland. Melucci, A. (1989) Nomads of the Present. Social Movements and Individual Needs in Contemporary Society, Philadelphia,PA: Temple University Press. Middleton, D. and Edwards, E. (eds.) (1990) Collective Remembering, London: Sage. Misztal, B. (2003) Theories of Social Remembering, Maidenhead, Philadelphia: Open University Press. Namer, G. (1987) Mémoire et société, Paris: Klincksieck. Namer, G. (1988) ‘Affectivité et temporalité de la mémoire’, L’Homme et la Société, 4: 9–14. Pritchard, M. S. (1991) On Becoming Responsible, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Rampazi, M. (2007) ‘Memoria, generazioni, identità’ (Memory, Generations, Identity) in E. Agazzi and V. Fortunati (eds.), Memoria e saperi (Memory and Knowledge), Rome: Meltemi. Ricoeur, P. (2004) Memory, History, Forgetting, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rizzo, M. (2000) Real Time and Relative Indeterminacy in Economic Theory in P. Baert (ed.) Time in Contemporary Intellectual Thought, Amsterdam: Elsevier. Rosa, H. (2013) Social Acceleration. A New Theory of Modernity, New York: Columbia University Press. Rosa, H. and Scheurman, W. E. (eds.) (2009) High-Speed Society. Social Acceleration, Power, and Modernity, Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press. Russel, C. (2005) ‘Fictive Time. Bachelard on Memory, Duration and Consciousness’, KronoScope, 5(1): 3–19. Schutz, A. (1971) Collected Papers I, The Problem of Social Reality, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Schutz, A. and Luckmann, T. (1973) The Structures of the Life-World, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Schwartz, B. (1982) ‘The Social Context of Commemoration: A Study in Collective Memory’, Social Forces, 61(2): 374–402. Schwartz, B., Fukuoka, K. and Takita-Ishii, S. (2005) ‘Collective Memory: Why Culture Matters’ in M. D. Jacobs and N. W. Hanrahan (eds.) The Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Culture, Oxford: Blackwell. Spencer, M. E. (1982) ‘Social Science and the Consciousness of the Future’, Theory and Society, 11(5): 683–712. Todorov, T. (2010) Memory as a Remedy for Evil, Kolkata, London, New York: Seagull Books. 119

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Tota, A. L. (ed.) (2001) La memoria contesa. Studi sulla comunicazione sociale del passato (Contended Memory. Studies on Social Communication of the Past), Milan: Angeli. Tota, A. L. (2005) ‘Counter-Memories of Terrorism: The Public Inscription of a Dramatic Past’ in M. D. Jacobs and N. W. Hanharan (eds.) Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Culture, Oxford: Blackwell. Turner, B. S. and Eyerman, R. (1999) ‘The Sociology of Generations’ in B. S. Turner (ed.) Classical Sociology, London: Sage. Varela, F. (1999) Ethical Know-How. Action, Wisdom and Cognition, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Wagner-Pacifici, R. and Schwartz, B. (1991) ‘The Vietnam Veterans Memorial: Commemorating a Difficult Past’, The American Journal of Sociology, 97(2): 376–420. Weber, M. (1919/1994) ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’ in P. Lassman (ed.) Max Weber. Political Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wieviorka, A. (2006) The Era of Witness, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Zaslavsky, V. (2000) ‘La Russia tra il desiderio di dimenticare e il bisogno di ricordare. Intervista a V. Zaslavsky’ (Russia between the Wish to Forget and the Need to Remember. An Interview with V. Zaslavsky), Palomar, 2: 11–16. Zerubavel, E. (2003) Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Zolberg, V. (1996) ‘Contested Remembrance. The Hiroshima Exhibit Controversy’, Theory and Society, 27(4): 565–590.

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11 Memories of the future Paolo Jedlowski

Introduction In neurological studies the phrase memories of the future is used to define action plans and expectations for the future that, once stored in the frontal and prefrontal cortex of the brain, can be reactivated—whether consciously or unconsciously—when facing situations that are similar to prior situations (Ingvar 1985). It is a memory that contributes to the more general ability to manage our life over time. As D. H. Ingvar (1985: 127) writes, “lesions or dysfunctions of the frontal/prefrontal cortex give rise to states characterized by a ‘loss of future’, with consequent indifference, inactivity, lack of ambition, and inability to foresee the consequences of one’s future behavior.” Some kinds of memories of the future exist also at a social level. Traditions and institutions may be considered as action plans and systems of expectations stored in societies. Some plans, some expectations, some images of a dreamed (or dreaded) future can also be recalled and discussed within the framework of multiple communicative practices. However, in social sciences, the concept of “memories of the future” has not been clearly defined yet. It rather indicates a perspective of study. As Barbara Adam and Chris Groves (2007: 217) write, it is “a perspective on the past that views it not as a collection of historical facts but rather as predecessors’ images, plans, visions, ambitions and concerns for the future, which either came to fruition or remained unrealized.” According to this perspective, memories of the future are recollections of what individuals and groups expected in the past ( Jedlowski 2013). It is a promising perspective but complex in its development. In fact, developing it implies the intertwining of two fields of investigations: one concerning memory and the other concerning future. Across the next pages, we will try to account for this intertwining, by pointing out the notions of horizon of expectation and futures past. Then, we will brief ly explore some contexts in which the memory of futures expected in the past appears in communication practices of different kinds (autobiographical narratives, nostalgia, criticism about the progress and ref lections about past utopias). In the end, we will observe some political aspects of the memories of the future in a broad sense: the recollection of futures imagined in the past may give new impetus to the ability to currently imagine the future; on the other hand, it can allow us to evaluate present plans and expectations in the light of what we know has happened to yesterday’s. 121

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Horizon of expectation Images of the future are projections: we cannot know what is going to be in advance. Memory, in turn, is an interpretation of the past lit up by the light cast by the present. Memory of the future is, thus, an intersection of projections. As for studies on memory, this volume presents a very rich overview of them. What we call memory is the field of a complex temporal dialectic: while on the one hand, the f low of life over time entails effects that condition the future, on the other hand it is the present that shapes the past, ordering and interpreting its legacy ( Jedlowski 2001). Any conservation of the past is also, simultaneously, the construction of it. This construction depends each time on the interests of the present and it is embedded within social frameworks (Halbwachs 1925) that back it up, thereby defining what is plausible, significant or due to be remembered. With respect to future studies, it is a growing yet very inhomogeneous field (Bell 2003). For our purposes, it is worth mentioning the distinction made by Niklas Luhmann (1976) between future presents and present future. The former are the presents that still have to happen: it is the future proper. The latter is the future that we imagine at present. This chapter discusses the present future, which is not only about “images” on the future, but also a complex set of expectations, partially formulated on the basis of past experiences, which contributes to confer meaning to the present and make choices that will produce the future. This set of expectations can be defined as a horizon: the horizon of expectation that is, more or less explicitly, implied in any moment of our life. Such horizon is referred to what is not yet, but, since it is perceived, it is part of now. As Luhmann (1976: 140) writes, “the essential characteristic of an horizon is that we can never touch it, never surpass it, but that in spite of that, it contributes to the definition of the situation.” This means that the expectations to which we refer in any present moment have a performing character: what we will do depends, at least to a given extent, on what we expect. A few decades ago, Robert K. Merton (1948) explored self-fulfilling prophecies, that is the fact that our beliefs of what we assume will occur inf luence reality. However, the principle is general: the present produces the future through the actions we perform, but the future, being anticipated in our imagination, produces the present, too, since the way we act is determined by our anticipations. The effectiveness of such anticipations depends on their emotional load: as Arjun Appadurai (2013: 287) writes, “the future is not just a technical or neutral space, but is shot through with affect and with sensation.” Affects and sensations contribute to the shapes of our anticipations and give them a part of their specific strength. Our ways to anticipate the future partly derive from the experiences we have had individually; however, collective experiences and discourses are important, too. As Appadurai highlights, the ability to project oneself into the future is a cultural one. Even aspirations that clearly are an individual aspect of the horizon of expectation have a social side. They correspond to what economists could define as “preferable futures,” but preferences are linked to the social relationships of individuals depending on their social status and are inf luenced by socially shared definitions of what is appropriate to aspire. Aspirations are not independent from our forecasts on probable futures. We do not aspire to something we believe will never happen (in such cases we talk about dreams, not aspirations). But also expectations on probable futures are not detached from what others imagine, foresee or assert around us. Aspirations and forecasts are discussed; represented in narratives; and evoked in moral, political, scientific and other kinds of discourses. We know that 122

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there are social frameworks of memory. But there are also social frameworks of the ways we imagine the future.

Futures past The concept of horizon of expectation stems from phenomenology (Husserl 1939). It is an aspect of the pre-understanding of the world we are living in, before any conscious judgment. Its most systematic applications have been developed in the theory of the reader’s reception of literary texts ( Jauss 1970), where it is demonstrated that no readers are devoid of expectations when facing a text: the understanding of it being affected by what the reader already knows about the author, about other texts written by the same and about the literary tradition encompassing the text itself. Something similar happens in our social life as well: our understanding of events and actions is mediated through expectations that are based on our previous experiences (Schutz 1959). However, expectations can be contradicted by new experiences. What is surprising becomes such, insofar as it does not overlap with an individual’s expectations. Thus, any new experience originates a reformulation of the horizon of expectation. This, in turn, means that the horizon of expectation changes across time. However, it is possible to keep a mark of the horizons of expectation considered in the past. Husserl (1964: 76) writes, “Every act of memory contains intentions of expectations whose fulfillment lead up to the present.” This means that what we know now about the course of future events and the way we interpret them have an inf luence on the image of the event we recall. But it also indicates that a given horizon of expectation was contained in any past moment, and the memory allows us to be in contact with this horizon. We can define this contact as the memory of a future past: of the present future included in past times, which contributed to give past experiences the meaning and the sense they had. It cannot be taken for granted that the memory of futures past is concretely activated. When Reinhart Koselleck wrote Futures Past (2004), he meant that for the people of modern times, the future past is almost mute: in modern times the horizons of expectation of the past increasingly tend to lose importance, since it is a feature of modernity itself to get rid of any acquired experience. In the Neuzeit, that is the modern time, “the difference between experience and expectation is increasingly enlarged; more precisely, … Neuzeit is conceived as neue Zeit only from the point at which eager expectations diverge and remove themselves from all previous experience” (Koselleck 2004: 270). Previous experience and horizon of expectation tend to dissociate each other in modernity (they are “no longer in correspondence,” as Koselleck wrote elsewhere). That is quite true. The ever-growing acceleration of the social time, expressing itself through a hectic rhythm of life, contributes to such dissociation. In situations of increasing uncertainty, plans become ephemeral and weaken the relationship between one’s past, present and future. An all-encompassing present seems to attract all the attention (Hartog 2003). However, this does not mean that the horizons of expectation of the past are blurred away. The point is, rather, whether or not the individuals wish to make them emerge; whether or not they feel the need or the curiosity to do so.

Memories of the future as a topic for scholars and ordinary actors Social scientists have good reasons to be curious about the memories of the future. As the futures that social actors imagined in the past were supported by some specific social 123

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frameworks, the focus on futures past is a tool that can be useful for the history of cultures, of social imagination and of mentalities. We can make history out of futures past and this, in turn, can enrich the overall historiography. But not only historians are involved. For social scientists, the issue of the sense that each of us attributes to our acting is hardly avoidable: however, part of the sense of anyone’s acting is related to the futures he or she expects. In fact, it is the whole social theory that can take advantage of what the memories of the future can teach. The human acting is oriented toward the “not-yet” (Adam and Groves 2007), but accounting for this aspect presents some particular difficulties, because the future lacks the tangible materiality needed for empirical study. However, the future that was present in the past is materially tangible insofar as we can study it through documents, testimonies, plans or memoranda, evidence of which has been kept over time. Politicians, entrepreneurs, architects, town planners and all those who have been responsible for social planning in the past have had certain expectations on probable futures, nurtured aspirations and sensed dangers, and have acted to produce some future presents. Even writers and filmmakers have imagined futures and depicted their probable, dreaded, desired or possible scenarios. The social memory bears evidence of these representations of the future and such evidence can be studied and publicly discussed. However, memories of the future are also present in several ordinary conversations. It is known that these are full of autobiographical narrative fragments ( Jedlowski 2000; Ochs and Capps 2001): in such narratives the memory of what was expected in the past appears continuously. Any retrospective definition of our identity normally includes questions and assertions about the futures that we once considered possible. Although the focus on the comparison between present and past is historically and socially variable, it is difficult to avoid negotiations between the plans conceived in the past and what has been achieved subsequently in the formation of a satisfactory identity. Such negotiation may take different forms. An example from the literature that is useful is Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (1860/61). This novel is obviously a mine for our study: the protagonist continuously modifies his own horizon of expectation across his life, and each time he is forced to elaborate the sense of this transformation. But, particularly illustrative for our reasoning is Mrs. Pocket, a secondary character. Her identity, in her discourses as well as in the discourses of those who know her, is continuously defined on the basis of her “poor grandpapa’s position.” Her grandfather was not a noble man, but he might have been, and therefore, she also might have been a noble. The fact that she did not become noble is marginal: apart from Dickens’s irony, the point is that the field of possibilities contained in the past became a consolidated element of her identity. This is just one example among countless others. But rarely is the comparison between the present and the horizons of expectation nurtured in the past totally absent in autobiographical narratives. Such comparison is the result of a large part of the process of reconciliation with one’s own history which is one of the most profound meanings of the autobiographical narrative.

Generations No autobiographical narrative is constructed in absolute loneliness. For its construction, a key role is played by the interlocutors (whether real or ideal) to whom the narrative is addressed and also by the countless influences generated by the historical and social contexts in which each life is lived. In this respect, particularly important is the generational location for both the formation of the horizons of expectation and for how the comparison between past and present horizons is processed in memory. 124

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In his classic essay on this topic, Karl Mannheim (1923) gives a definition of generation as a group of individuals who, in the crucial years of their formation, have experienced similar historical events and built a partially shared memory. But a generation is not only made up of a set of experiences and memories: it also elaborates its own horizon of expectation and constitutes itself in the divide with the horizon of expectation of the previous generation (see also Pennebaker and Banasik 1997). The possibility that different generational consciousnesses may develop is favored in modern societies by the rapidity of social change (Eisenstadt 2001). The generational differentiation is particularly marked when generational identities overlap with the rise of new social movements. In these cases it is evident how the horizons of expectation are formed at the intersection point of several histories: there are inf luences experienced in the various processes of socialization, and there are the outcomes of the reaction to changes in given historical contexts, but there are also active elaborations originally proposed in the cultural sphere by individuals and groups. Generation-based social movements are very often the promoters of new cultural codes outlining aspirations that challenge the hegemonic ones and will then be able to pervade the whole society (Melucci 1996). Participation in generation-based social movements usually takes place in the youth. However, the subjective importance of such participation may last for a long time. In the decades after the 1968 period, for example, the narratives of former activists continuously came to terms with past hopes and expectations, evaluated continuity and discontinuity and reacted to the discourses and reconstructions proposed by different actors (Cornils and Waters 2010). Narratives can also be markedly different from each other, but the subsequent identities of the former activists of the 1968 movements cannot avoid the task of reconsidering themselves by confronting, more or less critically, the present with the once-dreamed future (Passerini 2007). Not even subsequent generations can avoid coming to terms with such memories, regarding both the enthusiasm of that time and the outcomes and disenchantment following that period of social mobilization. The young people of the most recent Western generations seem inclined to nurture short-term expectations (Leccardi 2012), but the perception that such expectations are new depends, in any case, on the comparison with the expectations nurtured by their parents. In general, the relationships between generations largely consist of a recurrent comparison between expectations. This is particularly evident in the case of the offspring of migrants. In this case the generational divide is mostly provided by spatial and cultural processes. The future actively pursued by mothers and fathers determines the conditions under which their children will imagine the future in their turn; however, the latter live in a different context, where inherited memories are actively re-elaborated (Creet and Kitzmann 2011; Glynn and Kleist 2012) and where different expectations can and ought to be conceived. These are complex and hardly foreseeable negotiation processes between different generations. It can be true that “the reasons for leaving home can be as elusive as the objects of nostalgia” (Boym 2001: 329): but the descendants of the migrants have come to terms with the reasons of their fathers and mothers, with the memories of the futures they have refused and the futures that they sought, and the parents have to come to terms with what the situation they contributed to create means for their children.

Memories of the progress Sometimes, the comparison with the past crystallizes into a nostalgic idealization of the futures considered possible in the past. Nostalgia is a feeling investing a lost past with desire. Such feeling, 125

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however, can develop toward different orientations. Svetlana Boym (2001) distinguishes between two different kinds of nostalgia: restorative nostalgia and reflective nostalgia. The former suggests a return to the past, something like the reconstruction of an original or lost home. The latter accepts the loss, comes to terms with it and invites elaboration. As Boym (2001: 49) writes, “the two may overlap in their frames of reference, but they do not coincide in their narratives.” Ref lective nostalgia can have a critical function on the present (Atia and Davies 2010). The critical functions of memory have been taken into account in the social theory of the twentieth century, starting from the Frankfurt School’s theories until the contemporary cultural and postcolonial studies. In these approaches, a focus on the critical potentialities of memory combines with the discussion of the ambivalent aspects of the modern program and the concrete achievements to which the “progress” has led. This perspective is relevant within our discourse. The wider social framework where the expectations of any subsequent generation of Western countries, since the Enlightenment, have been conceived was actually provided by the idea of progress (Nisbet 1994). In the field of scientific and philosophical ideas, the triumph of progress is proper to the nineteenth century: afterwards the concept was increasingly criticized, at least by intellectuals; but, among common people, despite repeated disillusionment, the power and diffusion of the idea of progress stretched until the late 1970s. Today, the generalized faith in the future has given way to a more uncertain and threatening horizon of expectation. According to post-modern thought, progress is a “grand narrative” that has to be set aside. But, burying the past in oblivion may not be always useful. It seems more useful to ref lect on what the past horizons of expectation have meant and still mean. Such ref lection can be developed at least into two different ways. We can make reference to the promises of the past, talking about an “unfinished project” of modernity (Habermas 1985) or ref lect on the “consequences of modernity” (Giddens 1990). The first option makes reference to the Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno (2002: xvii), who write, “What is at stake is not conservation of the past but the fulfillment of past hopes.” The second option refers to the acknowledgment of the unintentional effects and unprecedented risks implied in the technological progress (the possibility of nuclear catastrophes, pollution, depletion of natural resources) and exhorts to develop new forms of ref lexivity capable of planning a different future (Beck 1986). In both cases what is at stake are exactly memories of the future: that is, the reconsideration of plans, dreams, aspirations, in a word of the horizons of expectation that have characterized modernity and have legitimized it to the eyes of those who acted in the name of it. The idea of progress can be re-designed, but in order to do so it is necessary to consider what past expectations have produced. As Pierre-André Taguieff (2004: 323) writes, “after the epoch of hectic and irresponsible transformation, whose destructive effects are now attested, the epoch of intelligent preservation could start, based on the consensual will to respect the past and manage the Earth.” Assertions of this kind correspond to an exhortation to learn something from the history of expectations cherished in the past. The memory of futures past is not only the contemplation of what we expected: it is also the awareness of how things actually developed. On the other hand, we should not forget how “progress” developed outside the Western world. The development of modernity in the West was, to a great extent, the result of unequal exchanges with many parts of the world. The memory of the future is also the memory of the futures designed by colonialisms. In the areas that underwent colonization, the expectations of the oppressed populations overlapped with the futures that other people imagined 126

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for them. This imposition protracted until the post-colonial period. As Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000: 39) notes, the policies that we still attempt to impose at an international level on the so-called developing countries share the fact that the future in such countries is considered to be “something which has already happened elsewhere, and which is to be reproduced, mechanically or otherwise, with a local content.” But also the resistance to this logic is interlocked with certain memories of the future: in the pre-colonial past or in the more or less explicit movements of resistance to colonialism, new movements can detect marks or fragments of other imagined futures and make reference to them. In any case, the future in the non-Western countries today seems to take shape in unforeseeable ways. The idea of progress sometimes can be conjugated in the past, such as in some African countries, as nostalgia of promises that independence roused but did not accomplish (Piot 2010). Today’s visions of future are hybrid constructions: the memory of the futures that some have imagined in the past can be challenged in the formulation of new expectations for others; it sometimes may lead to reconsider futures that had been excluded in the past.

Remembering utopia In his Theses on the Philosophy of History (1968) Walter Benjamin argues that any revolution is the heir of all the oppressed of history: it reminds them of the violence suffered and proposes their redemption. In this case, it is a memory of the future denied to the victims: our topic also presents an ethical aspect that should not be omitted. The memory of denied futures can also be an exhortation to a future justice. Benjamin (1968: 254) writes: “The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption.” Redemption is a theological concept, indeed. In a secularized lexicon, this makes reference to the relationship between memory and utopia. Ernst Bloch has specifically investigated this relationship in his book, The Principle of Hope (1986), which begins by quoting a series of conversations on the memory of the futures dreamed by ordinary people: such memories cherish the recollection of something that has been desired but never accomplished. Under certain conditions this recollection may be transformed into a sort of fuel for utopian projects of social transformation. The concept of utopia is not easily used today. In Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, where the word utopia first appeared in the sixteenth century, utopia had a spatial meaning: it was a desirable “elsewhere” located in an inaccessible space that was however contemporary to the present. Starting from the eighteenth century, the meaning of the word underwent a process of temporalization. The “elsewhere” moved to the future: it became the name of a longed-for society whose creation would have been possible by interrupting the historical continuum with a revolution. The current awareness of the totalitarian outcomes of the utopian projects of the twentieth century has resulted in skepticism toward the detachment of the concept of utopia from the imaginary space that it originally deserved. Nonetheless, the memory of the utopian impulses of the past can be useful. As Lewis Mumford (1962: 7) writes in The Story of Utopias, each society, besides the existing institutions, possesses in fact its own reservoir of potentialities, which utopias are in charge of exploring: “no society is fully awake either to its inherent nature or to its natural prospects, if it ignores the fact that there are many alternatives to the path it is actually following.” In such a perspective, the memory of the utopian futures imagined in the past may turn out to be precious to new paths of the future. It is the same leitmotiv of one of the most recent books of the topic, Archaeologies of the Future by Frederic Jameson (2005). The representations of utopia should be cautiously considered, 127

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however, they are a witness of the human capacity to cherish hopes able to criticize and transcend any present state of things.

Final remarks Memories of the future are the recollections of futures people expected in the past. What these recollections teach is that the future has never been imagined in a single way. But, showing that the past is a reservoir of possibilities, they suggest that the same is also true for the present. Today, some people in Europe talk about an “end of the progress” or even an “end of the future” itself. Such a perception depends on many factors. It is not the same in every part of the world (referring to it in Asia, South America or Africa could have no sense in some cases, and in other cases it would anyway have a different meaning than in Europe or even in the U.S.A.). In some respects, it is a crisis that questions the models of development from which modernity prevalently took inspiration, that is the action plans and expectations we have nurtured in the past. It may require a critical review of the notion of future itself: the abstract, measurable and void future that is conceived by the modern, economic and scientific thought should be replaced by a more concrete idea of future that is attentive to the consequences of actions and plans and characterized by a sense of responsibility (Adam and Groves 2007). Being responsible means both answering for the consequences of what we did in the past and considering the consequences of our current acting. On both sides, an intertwining of memory and anticipation is at stake. In any case, the future is the outcome of systemic relations among an endless number of factors; what is going to happen is everything but incontrovertible evidence: the assertions on that are ways to interpret what is in front of us. Since this interpretation will inf luence the course of actions and, therefore, the actual future presents, all of us struggle to spread the interpretation that is more convenient to us. We know that the definition of the past is always subject to conf licts and negotiations among different individuals and groups: the same is true for the forecasts and attitudes through which we look at the future (Andersson 2012). And it is true for the memories of the future, too: forgetting some once glimpsed possibilities may be used to weaken any criticism about the current social order. Obviously, memory starts from the present. The marks left by the past are selected, interpreted and reconstructed on the basis of interests, worries and identities of present individuals and groups. However, the marks of futures expected in the past are able in turn to address interests, worries and identities of the present in the light of what has been once considered possible. Indeed, the recollection of unfulfilled expectations and hopes may suggest melancholic attitudes to some. Like for some members of the white middle-lower class in today’s UK, referring to whom Paul Gilroy (2005) talked about postcolonial melancholy, that is not only the regret for a lost empire, but also a feeling of true aggressive depression, a feeling which is not far from the “sad passions” mentioned by psychoanalysts Benasayag and Schmit (2003) with reference to the subjective Western reactions to the current crisis. Melancholy is a memory that holds the future in check. But, for those who do not share this attitude, the memories of the future represent an exhortation to critically reconsider past expectations and renew the action.

References Adam, B. and Groves, C. (2007) Future Matters. Action, Knowledge, Ethics, London: Brill. Andersson, J. (2012) “The Great Future Debate and the Struggle for the World,” American Historical Review, 117 (5): 1411–1430. Appadurai, A. (2013) The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition, London: Verso. 128

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Atia, N. and Davies, J. (2010) “Nostalgia and the Shapes of History: Editorial,” Memory Studies, 3 (3): 181–186. Beck, U. (1986) Risikogesellschaft. Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne, trans. (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, London: SAGE. Bell, W. (2003) Foundations of Future Studies. History, Purposes and Knowledge, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Benasayag, M. and Schmit, G. (2003) Les passions tristes. Souffrance psychique et crise sociale, Paris: La decouverte. Benjamin, W. (1968) “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Bloch, E. (1986) The Principle of Hope. Translated by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Boym, S. (2001) The Future of Nostalgia, New York: Basic Books. Chakrabarty, D. (2000) Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Cornils, I. and Waters, S. (eds.) (2010) Memories of 1968: International Perspectives, Oxford: Peter Lang. Creet, J. and Kitzmann, A. (eds.) (2011) Memory and Migration. Multidisciplinary Approaches to Memory Studies, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Dickens, C. (1860/61) Great Expectations, reprinted 1993, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Eisenstadt, S. N. (2001) “Sociology of Generations” in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, Oxford: Elsevier Science Ltd. Giddens, A. (1990) The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press. Gilroy, P. (2005) Postcolonial Melancholia, New York: Columbia University Press. Glynn, I. and Kleist, J. O. (eds.) (2012) History, Memory and Migration: Perceptions of the Past and the Politics of Incorporation, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Habermas, J. (1985) Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne. Zwölf Vorlesungen, trans. (1990) The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Twelve Lectures, Cambridge: Polity Press. Halbwachs, M. (1925) Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire, trans. (1992) On Collective Memory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hartog, F. (2003) Régimes d’historicité:Présentisme et expériences du temps, Paris: Seuil. Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T. W. (2002) Dialectic of Enlightenment. Philosophical Fragments. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Husserl, E. (1939) Erfahrung und Urteil, trans. (1975) Experience and Judgment, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Husserl, E. (1964) The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness. Edited by Martin Heidegger. Translated by James S. Churchill. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ingvar, D. H. (1985) “Memories of the Future: An Essay on Temporal Organization of Conscious Awareness,” Human Neurobiology, 4 (3): 127–136. Jameson, F. (2005) Archaeologies of the Future, New York: Verso. Jauss, H. R. (1970) Literaturgeschichte als Provokation, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Jedlowski, P. (2000) Storie comuni. La narrazione nella vita quotidiana, Milano: Bruno Mondadori. Jedlowski, P. (2001) “Memory and Sociology: Themes and Issues,” Time & Society, 1 (X): 29–44. Jedlowski, P. (2013) “Memorie del futuro. Una ricognizione,” Studi culturali, 2 (X): 171–187. Koselleck, R. (2004) Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Translated by Keith Tribe. New York: Columbia University Press. Leccardi, C. (2012) “Young People’s Representations of the Future and Acceleration of Time: A Generational Approach,” Dirkurs Kindheits- und Jugendforschung, 1: 59–74. Luhmann, N. (1976) “The Future Cannot Begin: Temporal Structures in Modern Societies,” Social Research, 1 (XLIII): 130–152. Mannheim, K. (1923) ‘Das Problem der Generation’, trans. (1952) “The Problem of Generations” in Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Melucci, A. (1996) Challenging Codes. Collective Action in the Information Age, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Merton, R. K. (1948) “The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy,” reprinted (1968) in Social Theory and Social Structure, New York: Free Press. More, T. (1967) Utopia, in J. J. Greene and J. P. Dolan (eds.) The Essential Thomas More, New York: New American Library. Mumford, L.  (1962) The Story of Utopias, New York: Viking Press. 129

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Nisbet, R. (1994) History of the Idea of Progress, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Ochs, E. and Capps, L. (2001) Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Passerini, L. (2007) Memory and Utopia. The Primacy of Intersubjectivity, London: Equinox. Pennebaker, J. W. and Banasik, B. L. (1997) “On the Creation and Maintenance of Collective Memories: History as Social Psychology” in J. W. Pennebaker, D. Paez, B. Rimé (eds.) Collective Memory of Political Events, Mahwah, NY: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Piot, C. (2010) Nostalgia for the Future: West Africa after the Cold War, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Schutz, A. (1959) “Tiresias, or our Knowledge of Future Events,” Social Research, 1 (XXVI): 71–89. Taguieff, P.-A. (2004) Le sens du progrès, Paris: Flammarion.

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12 Housing spirits The grave as an exemplary site of memory Hans Ruin

At the outset of the section on ‘Spirit’ in The Phenomenology of Spirit (1977) Hegel describes how the human spirit over the course of its gradual externalization and realization falls apart into two separate ethical substances, as human law and divine law respectively (§445). Human law is the reflection of the creation of a universality embodied in the state, whereas divine law is connected to an experience of individuality as concretely manifested in the family. In the moral order of the state, the individual recognizes itself as a universal being under universal obligations, whereas the system of the family binds it to an inner, or as Hegel writes, ‘unconscious’ ethical order. In a surprising turn of the argument, Hegel then concludes that the obligation of the family members toward one another is concentrated in one particular act, namely the proper handling of the family member after his or her death, in other words: in burial. When a citizen dies, he or she reaches universal fulfilment as a member of the community. But from the viewpoint of the family, this death also makes it an ‘unreal impotent shadow’ (§451). The universality that we reach in death is, from the viewpoint of the deceased, a non-action, something only undergone and suffered passively by unconscious nature. It is in relation to this passive undergoing of nature’s course that the specific obligation of the family manifests itself, or as Hegel (§452) writes, the duty of the member of a family is on that account to add this aspect, in order that the individual’s ultimate being, too, shall not belong solely to nature and remain something irrational, but shall be something done, and the right of consciousness asserted in it. By providing a proper burial for its member, the family is then unconsciously carrying out the work of the rational universalization of spirit in and through death. What nature takes away from the individual in death, namely activity and initiative, the family members symbolically restore through a proper burial. Thereby they also transform a passive destiny into a consecrated act, restoring its member to his or her full universality as an individual across the threshold of destruction of its corporeal existence. Since destruction is inevitable, the work of the family vis-à-vis the dead cannot ultimately work against nature. Instead it will choose to fulfil the work of nature, but as a conscious and 131

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willing act. In the place of ‘every lower irrational individuality’ – which is Hegel’s euphemism for maggots and worms – it keeps the body from being dishonoured by such ‘unconscious appetites’ (§452). By laying the corpse to rest in the ground, and by covering it with earth, the family restores the humanity of the human in the face of blind nature. In Hegel’s account, the two forms of spirituality and legality occupy different places. Human law is connected to light and to the sky, whereas the divine law ties the individual to the earth and to the netherworld. In being bound by the divine law, the members of a family somehow are also bound to and by the dead, in relation to whom their obligations are articulated. Since these obligations are generally not articulated as such, but rather work as forces in relation to which the individual family members experience and perform their actions, they have the character of a call from the underworld, and thus constitute a kind of unconscious pact between the dead and the living. Throughout this argument Hegel is glancing toward one particular narrative, namely Sophocles’ Antigone. Its tragic heroine, Antigone, is mentioned in passing, both before and after the analysis, but her destiny guides the argument. She is the sister of a dead brother who is refused a burial as punishment for having conspired against the state. She challenges the state and the threat of a death penalty in order to give him a funeral, if only by symbolically strewing earth on his decaying body as it lies on the ground exposed to vultures and dogs. In and through her destiny we have probably the most powerful testimony from Greek and ancient literature of the compulsion experienced by family members to bury their dead, even at the risk of their own death. In the case of Antigone, the blind desire to give honours to her dead brother ultimately leads her to being buried alive. In Hegel’s interpretation her destiny bears testimony of the essentially tragic confrontation between two legal spheres, and thus two aspects of the spirit, namely that of the state and that of the family. Her sacrifice is thus inscribed in a kind of reconciliation of the spirit with itself.1 Hegel’s account of the compulsion to bury the dead provides the most elaborated attempt to forge what we could call a speculative, secular-philosophical theory of the meaning of burial. In his argument, the rite of burial is inscribed into a genealogical account of the rational development of spirit, at the centre of which is its movement toward greater freedom and universality. Confronted by the brute fact of death, the human being responds by a rite of burial, thus taking responsibility for the living-on of the dead other, for its ‘life’ after death. His analysis is not explicitly connected to a theory of memory or commemoration. Yet, its significance for memory studies is obvious. For the study of memory culture and for the techniques of memory and memorization, the grave and burial practices in general have always constituted defining examples. The very idea of ‘memorial’ often appears as essentially connected to the experience of death and thus of the irrevocable passing of time. The most charged and contested ‘places’ or ‘sites’ of memory are graves and burial grounds. For memory studies it is therefore important to ref lect on the general nature and meaning of burial, not just as an important example of memory culture, but in the final count as itself a way to understand cultural memory as such. For graves is not just one example among many of cultural memory practices. In the end they permit us to ask questions about the very origin of such practices, as the constitution of a ritually shared relation to the past, and thus as to the formation of historical consciousness and a sense of ‘tradition’. The practice of burial dates back to the earliest known traces of human culture. Indeed, the very birth of such a human ‘culture’ is often identified with precisely the first signs of this practice. Simple tools were used by hominids over a long period of time, the earliest traces of which date back to over two million years ago. Yet, burial sites are unique to Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals. Graves have been found that are indisputably as old as 90,000 years 132

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(with claims of even older sites). From the most part of this historical epoch there are, of course, no written sources that can tell us anything about the meaning of this practice or why it was first initiated. We are left with a question: Why did the early humans at one point in history begin to bury their dead? The normal response to this question was always to presume that so-called religious beliefs emerged, comprising a conception of an ‘after-life’. The archaeological evidence of bodies placed intentionally in the ground or in mounds or other spaces, perhaps surrounded by gifts, clothes, jewellery, and armoury, was taken to indicate that the people who performed these acts must have believed in the existence of ‘another world’. Unlike the tools found in graves, the practical purpose of which it would normally be possible to understand, the meaning and purpose of the grave itself as a cultural artefact was considered to be the effect of superstitious beliefs, the content of which it would then be the task of the researcher to recreate. From the time when there are written documents that give an account of the meaning and goal of burial, for example the early remains of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, there is material to build such an account, as they describe the journey and future of the soul for which the burial rites is carried out. Most studies of such ‘conceptions of the after-life’ take for granted that the rituals are shaped by a mythology that can be reconstructed on the basis of the written and archaeological evidence from the viewpoint of an enlightened position of the researcher and then used as an explanatory matrix for different cultural practices. Yet, behind this standard schema for interpretation of burial practices, there is a hermeneutical complexity that is usually not made explicit: namely, that the presumed meaningfulness of burial practices remains part of the researcher’s own life-world, as something that is not questioned, but simply enacted in different ways. This is illustrated in a poignant way by James Frazer himself in his Trinity lectures on The Fear of the Dead in Primitive Religion from 1933. His analysis recapitulates a huge material of various superstitious practices and conceptions of the threatening aspect of the dead across the world, speaking from the viewpoint of the sovereign distanced observer of foreign cultural practices. Yet, in the preface to the book, after having summarized the argument and presented his sources, he offers a eulogy for his dead friend and sponsor of the lectures, William Wyse, who through his foundation ‘has erected for himself a monument’ to which Frazer presents his lectures as a contribution. The scientific pursuit is thus transformed into a memorial for the dead whose names are thereby also preserved for the future. The point of this example is simply to illustrate that as humans we appear as the ones who pay tribute to the dead and care for their survival and, thus, for their memory through various and very diverse technical procedures, where the transition from ‘superstition’ to ‘reason’ is not as clear-cut at it may seem at first. The compulsion to bury the dead, also in the more extended sense of caring for their afterlife, appears as a hermeneutic horizon that unites present humanity with paleolithic man. The Hegelian account of the meaning of burial situates the rite at the intersection of individuality and collectivity. The individual cannot be secured from destruction, but this fated destruction can be made into a meaningful destruction if the community takes upon itself the work of nature. It sees in burial how human freedom asserts itself in and over nature. In its recapitulation of the words of Antigone, it also captures the sense in which burial is experienced as a call or demand from the underworld or from the dead themselves as carrying a sense of right or justice. It becomes an ‘ethical’ demand, in an experience of how the living owe something to the dead. On this very general ground Hegel can argue for the necessity of burial, some sort of burial, if only the symbolic spraying of dust on the corpse. By locating it at the centre of culture, as a necessary ritual, his account also brings together ancient 133

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and contemporary human culture as guided by a shared context, namely death and freedom, beyond any particular conception of afterlife. In this way it could be said to mark a first version of a secular theory of the meaning of burial. Still, the theoretical framework within which burial is interpreted remains shrouded in an abstract conceptuality and an already posited sense of the universal. To complement the Hegelian matrix, we need to take it back to an existential-phenomenological level, where the practice of burial can be interpreted more specifically in the context of a pre-theoretical life in being-with-others within a finite temporal horizon. For such a direction we can turn to the brief account that Heidegger devotes to the problem of burial in Being and Time (2010). In §47 of his magnum opus, Heidegger brief ly discusses the question of the dead other. When it has reached its completion, the other human being becomes a ‘no-longer-beingin-the-world’. This is the first phenomenal aspect of its being as dead. But how, he asks, should we understand its leaving the world? In one sense it is no longer here, but in another sense it is here, but now as the apparent thing of a being no longer alive. In the dying of others, Heidegger writes, the ‘remarkable’ phenomenon occurs, that can be defined as a sudden transition or ‘reversal’ of life to a ‘no-longer’ living. It is as if the end of life were suddenly the beginning of another type of being or entity, now in the order of a purely present entity, as corpse. But – and this is important – this conventional description of what takes place at the moment of death does not really capture the phenomenal character of this event. For it fails to capture the sense in which this being, as he says, still remains. It is not just ‘lifeless’, rather it is something ‘unliving’ (Unlebendiges). It is also in this form that it can become the object of concerns, such as funeral rites and cults. In these practices the mourners are still with the other, in the mode of care that is characteristic of being with others, and not the kind of care we devote to objects. A corpse is not taken care of in the same way as a lifeless artefact. People continue to be with them, in a world that continues to give meaning and significance to our peculiar mode of being with those no longer there, even though they have, as it were, ‘left it behind’. These ref lections basically sum up what Heidegger has to say about the dead other and how humans respond to this basic existential fact. As a general framework it complements the Hegelian analysis in important ways. Instead of insisting on the general logic of universalization, it focuses on what we could speak of as an ethical apriori, how human life is always lived as a being-with others, where the difference between the living and the dead constitutes a decisive limit, and yet is held together in experience, thinking, and ritual. The dead not only ‘call’ on the living from the other side of death – from a symbolic ‘underworld’ – but the living somehow continue to be with each other, also across the threshold of death. From the perspective of sociology, there was always a certain suspicion concerning the reach of such a philosophical-phenomenological analysis, where universal claims seem to be made on the basis of very limited examples. Peter Metcalf and Richard Huntington articulate this problem in their book, Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual (1991). Even though we are inclined to see death itself as universal event with universal emotional repercussions – notably horror and grief – Metcalf and Huntington remind us that we should be cautious in thinking that we can explain the differences in death practices in terms of one original general pattern, what they also refer to as ‘intellectualist’ interpretations. The sociological approach will be reluctant to confirm a general meaning as experienced by an ideal individual. Instead it will seek to ground the analysis on the interpretation of the collective practice itself, not its instantiation in individual practitioners, which could have many different meanings for different individuals. 134

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In the first chapter they pose the question: ‘What could be more universal than death? Yet what an incredible variety of responses it evokes’. This is followed by a macabre list of the many different ways in which humans in a variety of cultures throughout history have solved the problem of responding to the brute fact of death in practices and rituals. In conclusion they write: ‘The diversity of cultural reaction is a measure of the universal impact of death’.2 Is it then even meaningful to try to understand burial culture as one general phenomenon, or does the great variety of practices exclude a final generalization? If indeed it is meaningful to bring them together, by means of what concepts can it be done? What, in short, would it mean to truly understand them as examples of instances of one general phenomenon, and more specifically: how should this general phenomenon be designated? Such general methodological precautions are part of the general theoretical landscape in the humanities, and they have resulted in a number of clashes between Durkheimian sociology and Husserlian phenomenology over the years. They still surface in the theoretical tensions between cultural memory studies and phenomenological theories of memory, as demonstrated for example in Paul Ricoeur’s last work, Memory, History, Forgetting (2004), which contrasts Halbwachs’ (1992) theories with a more existential phenomenological approach. 3 In order to develop this trajectory, it is important to understand the phenomenological search for cultural universals not as a search for ‘explanatory’ schemata, but more as a way to enable the access, through a variation on multiple examples, to the general phenomenon at hand as a meaning that can presumably be lived and interiorized in different ways by different individuals. The Heideggerian approach to burial as in fact an extension of human social existence, and as a form of being-with, points in a similar direction as more recent work on the culture of death. Seen from this approach, there are no concepts that can simply be taken for granted, nor that of burial, not even that of death. Among cultural historians from the nineteenth century, there was a growing interest in gathering information about and reconstructing non-Christian beliefs in afterlife. An important example of this field of research is that of Nietzsche’s close friend, Erwin Rohde, who wrote Psyche: Seelencult und Unsterblichkeitsglaube der Griechen (Psyche. The Cult of Souls and Belief in Immortality among the Greeks), which was originally published in 1890. The early twentieth century marks the starting point for an attempt to study human responses to death from a more sociological and anthropological angle. An early important researcher in this field was Robert Hertz, who was a student of Durkheim alongside Maurice Halbwachs. Hertz died at the age of 35 in World War I and never f lourished as a researcher. Yet, before his premature death, he had published several studies, the most famous of which is a study of the practice of ‘second burial’, based primarily on findings from Indonesia.4 Both Hertz and Halbwachs took from Durkheim and his research on religion the idea of trying to map collective forms of consciousness, breaking away from what they saw as ‘intellectualist’ models, basing their interpretations on observable cultural practices, and focusing on the collective and how it determines the individual. The reception of Hertz’s work seems to have followed a similar trajectory as that of Halbwachs’. After being neglected during the first part of the twentieth century, it was gradually rediscovered and reworked from the 1970s onward. For Halbwachs this meant becoming the originator of cultural memory studies posthumously. Similarly, with the rise of a theoretical interest in death and burial culture, Hertz has gradually been incorporated as the forerunner of what is today recognized as the field of ‘death studies’ sometimes also spoken of as ‘thanatology’. It is a smaller academic field but in several ways similar to that of cultural memory studies for the way it unites a wide array of disciplines, archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians, but also architects. In recent years these two fields have also begun to 135

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merge, as in the study of so-called deathscapes, a neologism that picks up the idea of a site of memory, as also a site of death. Two works stand out as sources for the new interest in the culture of death and burial in recent years: Philippe Ariès’ The Hour of Our Death (2008) and Peter Metcalf and Richard Huntington’s previously cited Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual (1991). Ariès’ study is an impressive historical survey of the different ways in which man has responded culturally to the fact and enigma of death in the Western world from ancient times throughout the nineteenth century, mentioning Hertz’s work as one of its sources. Metcalf and Huntington also point to the work of Robert Hertz, in particular his essay ‘A Contribution to the Study of the Collective Representation of Death’. Another very recent example of the use of Hertz is the collective volume by Dorthe Refslund Christensen and Rane Willerslev, Taming Time, Timing Death: Social Technologies and Ritual (2013), which explores ways in which burial ritual both establishes relations to and shapes conceptions of time. It argues that we need to get beyond existential philosophy’s insistence on death as an absolute endpoint, and instead see it as a ‘continuation of sociality’.5 The interdisciplinary character of the growing interest in graves as cultural memory practice is also demonstrated very clearly in the collection Deathscapes: Spaces for Death, Dying, Mourning and Remembrance, edited by Avril Maddrell and James Sidaway and published in 2010. It brings together architects, geographers, art historians, anthropologists, and sociologists in the study of the places of death and burial as also places and sites of memory. The discipline traditionally most concerned with graves and burial is archaeology which was always heavily dependent on the information elicited from excavated graves. As a discipline, it still trains its future practitioners in the art of excavating burial sites and the proper scientific handling of such material. For this reason we have a wealth of knowledge of burial practices that was often also used to draw conclusions about religious practices, because they were considered to be mutually implicative, with burial being seen as the religious act par excellence. It is also in the discipline of archaeology that we can most clearly see the tendency toward a fusion of the study of death and burial and memory studies. Burial practices are then interpreted in the context not just of religious beliefs, but also in the context of how individual and collective memory is organized.6 In an article about Neolithic grave monuments in Britain, Vicki Cummings comments on this new orientation in archaeology. Graves and burial culture are explicitly explored as a culture of social memory practices, and as a form of mnemonics, seeing memory as ‘a social process, embedded in a specific cultural context’ (in Williams 2003:34). The very building of graves is therefore increasingly seen as the creation of ‘social memory’, the idea of which then begins to serve as a hermeneutic framework for an understanding of these artefacts. When we, for example, try to interpret the emergence of large stone chambered tombs from around 4000 BC in Britain, we have very little direct evidence to go on apart from the structures themselves. What was their purpose, what did they mean, and how were they experienced by the people who made them? In response to this riddle, Cummings presents an interpretation according to which its builders were creating ‘sites of memory’ and that ‘monumentality was considered the appropriate medium with which to inscribe social memories’ (in Williams 2003:38). In another article, ‘Rates of (Ex)change’, Chris Fowler suggests that the grave fields were ‘fields of memory’ (in Williams 2003:46). And Andrew Jones argues in his article, ‘Technologies of Remembrance: Memory, Materiality and Identity in Early Bronze Age Scotland’, that funeral practices and their different forms of materiality can be used as leads to interpret the ‘formation of subjectivities’, or identity creation, where the different forms of burial practices contribute to situating the individual in a social/historical 136

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space: ‘The examination of the specific nature of mortuary practices allows us to understand both how memories are materially expressed and how the mourners come to understand themselves and their place in society through this expression’ (in Williams 2003:65–85). This new way of reading the ancient burial monuments from the standpoint of collective memory studies is both compelling and promising. It permits us to access these structures in understanding by interpreting them from within a modern collective-sociological framework. Yet, in this new orientation in the exploration of burial culture the very meaning of ‘memory’ as well as that of ‘social’ or ‘collective’ is rarely thematized as such. It is as if what memory and social memory is, is simply taken for granted. It remains a theoretical challenge to develop a deeper account of how memory operates in the course of creating spaces for the dead. Here a philosophical and more specifically phenomenological exploration of the mortuary ritual could contribute to the models of interpretation that are used in this type of research. For such an expanded account of memory, memoralization, and the culture of death, it is also important to note the hermeneutical ref lexivity of the whole pursuit, both on an individual and a collective level. It is notable that several of the book projects in the field of death studies appear to have originated in personal experiences of loss and grief. This is not something that would usually surface in the analyses themselves, but rather in prefaces, where the personal motivation behind the publication project is discussed. People taking an interest in ancient and foreign rituals of death have often had reason to come to terms with such experiences in their own lives. And in several cases, the books – as was also indirectly the case of Frazer’s lectures – are even presented as memorials for a dead friend, spouse, or child. Also on a more collective level, we currently live through a cultural transformation, where the political and ethical meaning of burial grounds and the remains of the dead are obtaining a new role. In the context of this transformation, archaeology and cultural anthropology have been forced to confront their own cultural-political legacies in ways that were basically unnoticed in the time of Frazer. If the 1970s mark the beginning of an increasing scholarly interest in burial practices, and cultures of death, they also mark the emergence of ethical and political responses to the handling of bodily remains in museums and archives. The theoretical interest in death and burial culture has been accompanied by a re-emerging sense of piety vis-à-vis the dead, a politicization of bodily remains, and a shift in attitude towards public collections of skeletons. The first substantial discussions about this erupted in the mid-1980s, as Native American organizations in the United States demanded that the skeletons in the Smithsonian collection of Indian remains, all in all from over 15,000 individuals, be returned and reburied.7 Through these demands the bones were actualized again as the remains of dead human beings from a specific culture, after having been handled for centuries as historical artefacts and archaeological evidence. In the years that followed, the practice of displaying remains of corpses in museums, which up until then had been considered as an essentially uncontroversial practice, was increasingly questioned. In an era of post-colonial critique and identity politics, the issue of bones in museums became important political issues across the globe, with many remarkable examples of what could be called a re-sacralization of bones, as when the collection of Aboriginal bones from the Museums of Medical History in Berlin, which for a over a century were considered cultural-historical artefacts, were recently returned to local descendants during a ceremony resembling a small state funeral. These events all point to the disputed legacy of anthropology and archaeology and of the human sciences in general, in the displacement and destruction of the cultural memory of communities that have been explored for the sake of ‘historical knowledge’. 137

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Key institutions are now recognizing the claims of ‘descendants’ to rebury the bones of their ancestors, demonstrating a cultural shift in sensibility that stretches far into the scholarly community, transforming the ways in which it understands its own relation to cultures and remains of the dead. Also in order to understand this meta-scientific shift in cultural and ethical perception of the meaning of mortuary practices, it is necessary to think through in what way the relation to the dead contributes to the shaping of a sense of tradition and belonging for a specific community. One question that now deserves interpretation is: what kind of cultural artefact is a museum where bones are kept for the sake of historical memory? Is it the opposite of a burial ground, where the bones are kept for the sake of the sense of belonging and memory of the community, or is it in fact a strange kind of ‘second burial’ for the sake of a memory that no longer belongs to the descendants of those buried, but instead for a global historical community in the making? And if this is the case, then where do the bones rightly belong? These are questions with no easy answers, but with increasingly urgent implications. In the last and final section of this overview, I would like to sketch brief ly what a phenomenology of grave could amount to. What kind of object is a grave? What is the core meaning of this artefact, and what kind of intentionality is involved in its constitution and surrounding practices? Where should such a ref lection begin if it is not only to reinstate itself in the Hegelian framework as an extension of reason and freedom? And how can we avoid taking the idea of memory and memorial for granted as a basic framework? We would need to pursue at this point a more thorough survey of the different ways in which burial, or to be more precise, the care of the dead, has been articulated across different cultures and historical epochs. But in the present limited context this cannot be carried out. I will restrict myself to a few further general ref lections and remarks, in the direction of a more fully elaborated phenomenology of being-with-the-dead underway. The grave marks the passage between the living and the dead, and as such also the first known form for articulating an experience of pastness. The grave is a primordial site of memory in the sense of a technique for the keeping of a life that is no longer. The role and function of the grave is not just to provide an externalized representation of the deceased but of somehow housing the other, providing a room – in a metaphorically extended sense, not restricted to burial space – among the living for those no longer there. The grave is not just something external; it is also an outer symbolization of the peculiar interiority that still ‘holds’ and ‘carries’ the dead other within itself. We can therefore interpret the interplay between graves and memorial practices around the dead, as both contributing to shaping what we also speak of as ‘historical awareness’. We do not need to posit the existence of an articulated belief or myth of another world in order to understand burial practices. On the contrary, from the existential hermeneutic perspective we can interpret the emergence of ‘spirits’ and the spiritualization of existence as an extension from a culture of caring for the dead. The grave is a technical artefact made in response to an experience of loss, and in the service of a keeping. As such it is a mnemo-technics in an original form. It provides us with a primary datum of an externalized experience of time and of time passed. In and through the grave, the living demonstrate a care for a life that is no longer. It is an artefact created around bodily remains, but it is not for them as such, but instead for what they bear witness of, namely the living spirit. Thus, the grave is also the site of the spiritual, in all its different forms and interpretations. In the end, the grave is not a house for corpses, but a vehicle for spirits of the once living. In its concrete practice, the caring for the dead implies a recognition of the dead as ethical subjects, to whom one stands under an ethical obligation. And in relation to the dead, the 138

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living can experience themselves as just a f leeting passage in relation to the larger world of the dead. It is also through the creation of such spaces and sites for the deceased ‘spirits’ that there is ‘spiritualization’ of man, through a deepened interaction with death as a caretaking of that which is no longer visible and tangible, but in relation to which one still lives.

Notes  1  For a compelling interpretation and modern usage of the Sophoclean drama, see also the contribution “Antigone in León: The Drama of Trauma Politics” in this volume by Alejandro Baer and Natan Sznaider.  2  Metcalf & Huntington 1991: 24.  3  Ricoeur 2004: 120ff.  4  Translated to English by R & C Needham, Death and the Right Hand (1960).  5  Christensen & Willerslev 2013: 5.  6  This is the case in Meredith Chesson (ed.), Social Memory, Identity, and Death: Anthropological Perspectives on Mortuary Rituals (2001), and in Living through the Dead: Commemoration in the Classical World, edited by Maureen Carroll and Jane Rempel (2010). Maureen Carroll also wrote Spirits of the Dead: Roman Funerary Commemoration in Western Europe (2006). Another book in this large and growing field is Valerie Hope’s edited volume Memory and Mourning: Studies on Romans Death (2011). An important source for this whole re-orientation in archaeology was Richard Bradley’s influential The Significance of Monuments (1998), which also inspired Archaeologies of Remembrance: Death and Memory in Past Societies (2003), edited by Howard Williams. 7  Repatriation of Indian Human Remains: Efforts of the Smithsonian Institution (2013), edited by Laurent B. Daville, offers more information about Native American remains at the Smithsonian. See also the New York Times article ‘Museums Confront Skeletons in Their Closet’ (www.nytimes.com/2013/05/25/ arts/design/museums-move-to-return-human-remains-to-indigenous-peoples.html?_r=0), about many examples of how museum collections are now being scrutinized for what they keep of human remains in their archives. Another book that provides a good analysis of current ethical and political problems surrounding burial and skeletal remains is Duncan Sayer’s Ethics and Burial Archeology (2010).

Bibliography Ariès, Philippe (2008) The Hour of Our Death, transl. H. Weaver (New York: Vintage). Bloch, Maurice & Parry, Jonathan (1982) Death and the Regeneration of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University). Bradley, Richard (1998) The Significance of Monuments: On the Shaping of Human Experience in Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe (London: Routledge). Carroll, Maureen (2006) Spirits of the Dead: Roman Funerary Commemoration in Western Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Carroll, Maureen & Rempel, Jane eds. (2010) Living through the Dead: Commemoration in the Classical World (Oxford: Oxbow Books). Chesson, Meredith ed. (2001) Social Memory, Identity, and Death: Anthropological Perspectives on Mortuary Rituals (Naperville, IL: American Anthropological Association). Christensen, Dorthe Refslund & Willerslev, Rane eds. (2013) Taming Time, Timing Death: Social Technologies and Ritual (Farnham, UK: Ashgate). Daville, Laurent B. (2013) Repatriation of Indian Human Remains: Efforts of the Smithsonian Institution (New York: Nova Science Publishers). Frazer, James (1933) The Fear of the Dead in Primitive Religion (London: Macmillan). Halbwachs, Maurice (1992) On Collective Memory, transl. L. Coser (Chicago: Chicago University Press). Hegel, G. W. F (1977) The Phenomenology of Spirit, transl. A. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Heidegger, Martin (2010) Being and Time, transl. J. Stambaugh (Binghamton: SUNY Press). Hertz, Robert (1960) ‘A Contribution to the Study of the Collective Representation of Death.’ In Death and the Right Hand, by Robert Heinz and transl. R. and C. Needham (Glencoe, IL: Free Press). Hope, Valerie ed. (2011) Memory and Mourning: Studies on Romans Death (Oxford: Oxbow Books). 139

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Kerrigan, Michael (2007) The History of Death: Burial Customs and Funeral Rites, From the Ancient World to Modern Times (Guilford, CT: Lyons Press). Lewis-Williams, David & Pierce, David (2005) Inside the Neolithic Mind: Consciousness, Cosmos and the Realm of the Gods (London: Thames & Hudson). Maddrell, Avril & Sidaway, James eds. (2010) Deathscapes: Spaces for Death, Dying, Mourning and Remembrance (Farnham, UK: Ashgate). Metcalf, Peter & Huntington, Richard (1991) Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Ricoeur, Paul (2004) Memory, History, Forgetting, transl. K. Blamey & D. Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Robben, Antonius ed. (2004) Death, Mourning, and Burial: A Cross-Cultural Reader (Malden, MA: Blackwell). Rohde, Erwin (1890) Psyche: Seelencult und Unsterblichkeitsglaube der Griechen (Tübingen, Germany: Mohr). Sayer, Duncan (2010) Ethics and Burial Archeology (London: Duckworth). Taylor, Timothy (2005) The Buried Soul: How Humans Invented Death (London: Beacon Press). Williams, Howard ed. (2003) Archaeologies of Remembrance: Death and Memory in Past Societies (New York: Kluwer).

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Part III

Public, transnational and transitional memories

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13 Globalization and/of memory On the complexification and contestation of memory cultures and practices David Inglis

Introduction Over the last twenty years, both ‘memory’ and ‘globalization’ have become widely used buzzwords in many social spheres and the focus of burgeoning academic industries. Therefore it is no surprise that recently there has been a spate of calls to shift the terrain of memory studies away from the level of analysing national cultures only or mostly and towards considering the relations that pertain between collective memory formations and ‘globalization’ (Creet 2011: 9; Assmann and Conrad 2010; Phillips and Reyes 2011; Gutman et al. 2010; Erll 2011; Radstone 2011; Anheier and Isar 2011; Sundholm and Veliou 2011; Sundholm 2011). This is not an easy task, for there exists a wide variety of competing ways in which to define the term ‘globalization’. These range from panegyrical descriptions of the supposed benefits of globalized neo-liberalism (Friedman 1999), through Marx-inspired analyses of the depredations wrought by global capitalism (Sklair 2002), sociological analyses of globalizing social relations stretching planet-wide (Giddens 1990) and the undermining and reconfiguration of national and other borders through processes of ‘cosmopolitanization’ (Beck 2002), political scientific understandings of the reworking of territories and sovereignties (Scholte 2000), to culturalist accounts of both the apparent rise of new forms of globally oriented consciousness (Robertson 1992) and of radically hybrid cultural formations (Hannerz 1996). There is absolutely no consensus among the various major accounts of globalization, except for one thing – most, if not all, centre around the claim that ‘trans-national’ phenomena have become ever more powerful and influential since at least the 1970s, where ‘trans-national’ refers variously to forces, processes, institutions and structures which, by going across, above, below and through hitherto relatively stable national borders, render the latter ever more porous and flexible in complex ways, including having the effect of national states endeavouring to control in political, economic and cultural ways borders that nowadays cannot be fully controlled and policed. Thus despite the multiplicity of rival accounts of globalization, and despite the differing definitions of what ‘trans-national’ means and implies in those accounts, nonetheless any attempt to think through what the relations between ‘globalization’ and collective memories may be, it would be wise to define the issue in this way: What sorts of things are involved in the trans-nationalization of memory? Are there transnational memory formations, and if there are, then what do they involve, how do they come about, and how do they operate and with which consequences? 143

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Phrasing things this way helps us get beyond facile and generalizing caricatures both of globalization and of what is taken as the so-called global age or age of globalization – terms which unhelpfully imply that the current period is totally historically unprecedented. When such glib phrases are used, they can encourage equally superficial understandings of contemporary culture’s memory-making capacities, where we all supposedly live in an ‘era of forgetting’ (Elshtain 2008) or conversely in an ‘epoch of remembering’ (Olick 2003). Such broad claims do not help us to understand more precisely the specific mechanisms involved in the relationships between trans-national phenomena and memory phenomena. This issue is especially acute because even a cursory survey of the contemporary world shows that the changing constellations of memory, identity and heritage are nowadays ‘myriad and infinitely varied’ (Nora 2011).

Towards a typology of trans-national processes and memory To gain some analytical purchase on these issues and to get beyond some of the rather unsophisticated understandings of globalization that have bedevilled the recent ‘globalization and memory’ literature, I suggest that a reasonably comprehensive (but inevitably non-exhaustive) list of issues thrown up by the examination of the relations between the trans-national and collective memories involves these matters (building on typologies partly outlined by Halas 2008, Juenke 2007): 1) There is a need to recast analytic frameworks of memory studies so that they can adequately encompass the trans-national level, while not relinquishing the national level that they have hitherto been primarily oriented towards, and recasting the understanding of the national such that what is usually taken as the ‘internal globalization’ of national cultures can be taken account of (Beck 2002). 2) A distinction must be made between inter-national processes to do with memory – such as the controversies over memorials to war dead between the Russian and Estonian states – and trans-national memory processes, where national states and the memory cultures they cultivate are just one of the types of institutional actors involved in memory construction (Bell 2009). There are many such non-state actors, including NGOs and other civil society entities, but one influential type is truth and reconciliation tribunals, which both have complex relations to the particular states the recent histories of which they have been set up to deal with, and which play in front of putatively global audiences that are concerned with the now global, if contested, regime of human rights and the international legal apparatuses that seek to enforce it (Kurasawa 2009). 3) The planet-wide spread of memory discourses, both over longer and shorter historical periods and the increased politicization and contestation of memory worldwide (Halas 2008). As Bell (2009: 348) puts it, today ‘memory politics is a truly global phenomenon’. 4) Globalization can be seen both to proliferate and complexify particular memory formations, including national ones, both due to its own complexity, and due to its production of forms of uncertainty, risk and disturbance of settled routines, new forms of memory being reflections upon and responses to such states of affairs. 5) When globalization is conceived of as ‘glocalization’ – that is, as complex and iterative blendings of more global and more national (or regional) components – then one can examine how memory formations are being glocalized or hybridized, as a result of factors such as mass migration, trans-national media and the restructuring of quotidian forms of social practice and consciousness (Robertson 1992). 144

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6) The globalization (or trans-nationalization, or cosmopolitanization) of memory itself – that is, the construction of new, globe-spanning and ‘cosmopolitan’ memory formations that exist beyond and are irreducible to national, state-controlled forms of memory and that are based around chronologies that may differ markedly from the senses of history promoted by nationalist myth-making. Such cosmopolitan forms of memory can either a) be constructed by institutions that have trans-national dimensions or at least pretensions (e.g. the European Union’s attempts to frame common ‘European’ memory, or the United Nation’s attempts to construct a shared ‘world’ heritage) or b) be more non-institutional and diffuse in nature, such as what some analysts argue is the trans-national, cosmopolitan nature of global Holocaust memory discourses and images (see below). In the latter sort of case, among the prime agents of memory construction are often globally present media organizations, which have the capacity to forge and disseminate icons that take on planet-spanning significance, although these will be understood and used in different ways in different contexts, including national ones (Levy and Sznaider 2002). 7) If globalization is construed as involving the routinization and augmentation of trans-border information flows, whereby national populations become potentially less beholden to the forms of memory construction promoted by state actors and other national elites, then globalization can be seen as providing the conditions of possibility for the generation of new types of anti-memory and counter-memory (Zerubavel 1995). Taken together, all of the factors just listed suggest that trans-national processes can unsettle established memory regimes, especially national state-sanctioned ones, and can involve the production of new forms of remembering, forgetting and nostalgia, as well as novel modes whereby different types of actors select what to remember (Schwartz 1982), and thus the generation of new forms of solidarity and division as mediated through memory processes. In recent calls for the ‘globalization’ of memory studies, it has become commonplace to criticize previous analytic frameworks for being too centred on the nation-state and national forms of memory. This criticism echoes a broader critique in the globalization literature ranged against the allegedly myopic ‘methodological nationalism’ of the twentieth-century social sciences (Beck 2002). Thus Astrid Erll (2011) criticizes both Maurice Halbwachs, taken as part of the first generation of memory studies, and Pierre Nora, taken as representative of the second generation, for tying collective memory too tightly to the nation-state. In such criticisms, the ghost of Durkheim is berated for creating an intellectual context in which memory seemed ‘naturally’ to be primarily about group solidarity and such solidarity was assumed to be co-extensive with the nation-state and its territory. Erll calls for a third, properly trans-national (or trans-cultural) stage in memory studies, in which cultural formations that exceed the nationstate – such as global consumer culture, music and sport – are interrogated for their memory-creating functions. Such a perspective leads to a focus on forms of  ‘travelling memory’, the ‘trans-culturality’ of memory formations, and the ‘incessant wanderings’ of the content, forms and media of memory across borders. On this sort of view, recent history has come full circle: the trans-national communicative forms of eighteenth-century cosmopolitan elites, which were obliterated by nineteenth-century nationalism’s subordination of communications – and therefore collective memories – to state-centred institutions, have reappeared in the late twentieth century, especially after and due to the end of the Cold War, in the guise of new sorts of cosmopolitanism and trans-national memory, which now embrace both elites, ‘ordinary’ people and subaltern groups (Lebow 2008). Such a situation demands ‘a form of comparative thinking that, like memory itself, is not afraid to traverse sacrosanct borders of ethnicity and era’ (Rothberg 2009: 17). 145

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While mostly this sort of position is applied to understanding memory construction and dissemination over the last several decades, it can also be applied to the analysis of thousands of years of inter-cultural influences, mapping how relations between empires affected how memory was already ‘globalized’ to some extent within pre-modern political entities (Assmann 2010). This in turn mirrors attempts within globalization studies to narrate the history of globalization not as involving only recent decades or centuries but rather several millennia of complex relations between different civilizational formations (Inglis 2010).

Hyper-globalism and the persistence of the national As Martell (2007) shows, over the last twenty years or so, globalization theory has tended to develop in waves, with the typical positions of the early 1990s taking a ‘hyper-globalist’ view, which alleged that globalization was a relatively unitary process whereby national and regional differences were erased in favour of the construction of globe-spanning homogeneous economic, social and cultural complexes. More recent globalization theory, written in light of the more ambivalent, contradictory and complicated conditions that have pertained across the world since the early 1990s, tend to eschew such a position, in favour of highlighting the complexities of globalization, understood as a much more multi-dimensional and unpredictable set of processes than it was hitherto. As memory studies has turned its attention to trans-national processes, it has both drawn upon some of the hyper-globalist positions of the early 1990s and in some ways reproduced them. At the starkest, one can define memory and globalization as dyadic opposites, as Jan Assmann (2010) does when he equates memory with group identity and concomitant senses of difference from other groups, and globalization with cultural diffusion, the blurring of boundaries, and the bridging of differences between groups. This seems like an overly restrictive definition of both key terms, closing down opportunities for seeing how each can interpenetrate the other. Less starkly, but still problematically, a standard narrative can be discerned in much current memory literature, whereby it is stated that ‘before’ the current highly globalized epoch (which most authors seem to locate as starting in the 1980s), national memory cultures were relatively stable because state officials, elites, intellectuals and national journalistic establishments could effectively control flows of communication, meaning-making and memory construction (Stepnisky 2005). In such a social environment, national memory was relatively stable because it was to a large degree embodied, engrained into the habitus of most citizens (Connerton 1989). The bond between individual, society, state and nation was made possible by national memory and reproduced the latter over time. But now in more ‘global times’, identities of groups and individuals are in flux (Appadurai 1990); cultures are becoming ever more hybrid; people all over the world are encountering otherness constantly (Gergen 1991); and images of both the planet itself and distant others are constantly peddled by globally oriented media to the degree they saturate consciousness (Szerszynski and Urry 2006). In this situation of constant uprooting of older certainties and existential securities, nationally based memory cultures are undermined (Stepinsky 2005), through globalization processes that promote ‘disparation’ (Bellaigue 1999), that is, the dissolving of older memories (either of a folk cultural or state-sanctioned sort), often involving their replacement by inauthentic and rootless ersatz substitutes fostered by the trans-national, especially American, media. Given that the media have the power to endow collective memory with its substance, time-frame and its sense of eras and to edit and re-edit what counts as mnemonically significant (Dayan and Katz 1994), then the fact that they now habitually reach across national borders is of special significance. In and through the media’s ‘instant everywhere’ (Fraser 2000), there is an erosion of the 146

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state’s ability to maintain a unified framework of national memory (Nora 1989). Thus ‘national traditions and historical pasts are increasingly deprived of their geographic and political groundings’ (Huyssen 2003: 4). Misztal (2010: 35) summarizes this hyper-globalist understanding of globalization’s powers to destroy national memories thus: [With] the death of time and distance … a global society is characterized by forgetting as we are overloaded with information … the fluidity, rootlessness and speed with which images, messages and people travel lead to the growing loosening of the links between memory and identity. Yet we might plausibly ask in response: who are the ‘we’ being talked about here? For it is an axiom of many recent writings on globalization that there can only ever be a complex interplay of (what are conventionally taken to be) the ‘global’ and the ‘local’, with each constantly reconfiguring the other (Beck 2002). As such, it is a simplification to think that some unitary ‘globalization’ simply has the power to sweep away before it older forms of belonging and memorizing. And it is a mistake to think that such a process has the power to affect different sorts of people in different parts of the world in precisely the same ways – thus there is no simple or single ‘we’ that the passage above could plausibly refer to. Instead, the hyper-globalist account of sweeping change needs to be relativized to yield a more nuanced sense of how memory interfaces with specific globalization processes. One way of doing this is to say not simply that memory can be put to use by actors as a form of resistance to globalization – as hyper-globalist authors such as Augé (1995) have noted – but that when actors believe that their customary local, regional, national or other sort of lifestyle is in danger of being uprooted by what they conceive of as ‘globalization’, then memory can be wielded as a weapon against the perceived juggernaut of global forces (Castells 2000). A case in point here would be the Slow Food movement, first founded in Italy in the 1980s, in which a leftist intelligentsia conceived of certain changes in Italian eating habits as being due to American-led globalization and acted to preserve what it imagined to be authentic regional culinary heritages (Petrini 2007). It is therefore not that globalization simply ‘created’ this sort of memory politics, but rather that what was imagined to be globalization was used as a resource against which to institutionalize practices that were thought to be on the verge of being forgotten (Nora 1989). One can also relativize the hyper-globalist account of change by insisting on a focus on specific processes rather than one supposed all-embracing one, with an eye for the possible ambivalences and unintended consequences of such processes in particular locales. For example, the ‘importance of space in shaping memory and memory in shaping space’ has often been noted (Blunt 2003). One can analyse spatial change through a hyper-globalist lens, showing how a proliferation of ‘non-spaces’ – globally homogeneous locations, such as airport lounges, shopping malls and multiplex cinemas – can displace older forms of place that are memoryladen for particular people (Augé 1995). One can understand these non-spaces as involving the neo-liberal commodification or wholesale destruction of memory spaces (Hidalgo 2012). But such spaces are never simply empty of meaning; rather, they can be colonized by actors whose uses of them can very much go against the grain of what their designers intended, creating new possibilities for memory construction. Similarly, certain sites of memory, even commoditized ones subject to makeovers by the heritage industries, can upset the ‘aseptic new of globalized styles’ of architecture (Hidalgo 2012: 199). This suggests that contemporary cityscapes are not just homogeneous non-spaces devoid of any memory affordances but that they are also in part palimpsests, made up of multiple layers of materials and practices, potentially productive of retaining older or generating newer forms of remembrance, reconciliation and the political 147

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recognition of certain groups by others (De Jong and Rowlands 2008: 133; Della Dora 2006; Cochrane 2006). Such a focus insists not on generalities but on particularities – on the specific forms that ‘globalization’ takes or is thought to take by actors. Applied to the trans-national media, such a focus insists that a particular media product may be watched in all sorts of places but that its reception will vary from one context to another. As Rothberg (2009: 15) points out, even an ‘event’ as globally iconic as the 9/11 attacks was viewed and thus remembered in very different ways, depending on who does the viewing and remembering. Again the point is that claims about globalization’s allegedly uniform nature and homogenizing effects do not stand up to empirical scrutiny. A further objection to any hyper-globalist account of globalization is that the early 1990s understanding of global forces it relies upon was far too extreme in its assumptions about the withering-away of the nation-state’s powers, economically, politically and culturally in the face of globalization (Hirst and Thompson 1999). Analysts who claim that the nation-state is alive and well can make arguments akin to those of the theorist of nationalism, Anthony D. Smith (1995, 1996). For him, globalization does not create a uniform global culture which abolishes or strongly undermines national forms of identification and thus memory, because ‘a timeless global culture answers no living needs and conjures no memories. If memory is central to identity, we can discern no global identity in the making’ (Smith 1995: 24). For Smith, the key equation for understanding human existence is this: ‘no memory, no identity; no identity, no nation’ (1996: 383). Consequently, a ‘flat’ global culture has no appeal, or resonance with, most people. ‘Humanity’ in the abstract has no memory nor rituals, the essential aspects of human social life. It is still the national state that is the most powerful provider of these. Nation-state forms of ritual, thinking and memorizing remain more salient and more powerful than an ‘artificial and standardized universal culture [that] has no historical background, no developmental rhythm, no sense of time and sequence … alien to all ideas of  “roots,” … [This] global culture is fluid, ubiquitous, formless and historically shallow’ (1995: 22). Consequently, national memory will continue to sustain any onslaughts from a global, mediated, consumer-brand driven culture. The superficiality or thinness of non-national, putatively cosmopolitan cultural formations is emphasized by other authors, such as Calhoun (2007). One can also point to situations in which elites have made a great deal of effort to invigorate national myths, as in the case of the myth-making engaged in by the Putin government in Russia. Nationalist myth-making can also upset or undermine the attempts by trans-national elites to create forms of memory beyond national borders. The case of state-sponsored commemorations in the early 2000s of the Warsaw Uprising shows how nationalist mythologizing of historical events can challenge, deliberately or not, other memory projects, in this case EU attempts to create more harmonious relations between the ex-combatants Poland and Germany (Halas 2008). And in other national contexts, we can see memory as a terrain upon which more cosmopolitan and more ‘hot’ nationalist visions of the present and future are played out. It therefore seems that in some places hyper-nationalist ‘predatory identities’ (Appadurai 2006) are as much possible under globalizing conditions as are more pacific and cosmopolitan visions of the present and past. By the same token, access to information from outside the national context can allow in resources that encourage more public scepticism towards or direct challenging of official historical narratives – as was the case when one of Claude Lanzmann’s Holocaust documentaries was shown in Poland (Lebow 2008). Arguments concerning the persistence and durability of national cultures and memories are themselves open to question. They are potentially guilty of a misplaced substantialism, misrecognizing national formations as ontological substances rather than as constituted out of reiterated 148

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practices and re-enactments. In other words, a nation exists only insofar as people within it keep believing in and performing it, a position that suggests that so-called national cultures are markedly more permeable, revisable and open to ‘external’ influences than the kinds of views above allow for (Olick 2003). One might also object to such views on the grounds that they ignore how national cultures have become ever more internally complex and contradictory, due to a range of trans-national influences, from migration to mass media, impinging upon them (Levy and Sznaider 2002).

The trans-nationalization of memory and its mechanisms Regardless of the outcomes of the debates between hyper-globalists, proponents of the persistence of the nation-state and those skeptical of the nation-state’s capacity any more to contain and police memory, it remains the case that trans-national processes are increasingly being focused upon by scholars as the locus whereby memories are created and played out at the present time. This raises the question of how best to conceive of the trans-nationalization of memory, or, more precisely, the trans-national mechanisms whereby memory is forged, lived and contested (Erll 2011). At the most basic level, one can consider the ‘international circulation of ideas’ (Bourdieu 1999), whereby certain images and the emotional responses associated with them circulate through complex networks between variant national contexts. Building on this, one can argue that the trans-national production and experience of memory involves a ‘multi-actor commemoration field’ (Bell 2009: 352), involving the interaction of different sorts of actors (governments, intelligentsias, NGOs, civil society groups, bloggers, ‘ordinary citizens’, among others), each with their own agendas and modes of memory. The appearance of such a field in turn may be thought of as ‘due to intensified global movements of people, knowledge, and capital [that] have engendered particular social spaces for transnational actors to engage in practices of memory that diversify and transnationalize history in new and distinct ways’ (Schwenkel 2006: 5). Analysis of such phenomena involves looking at a broad array of diverse sites and locations, and the relations that pertain between them – locations could be physical (such as official national memorial sites, tourist locations, media production centres) or virtual (websites, blogs and other ‘immaterial’ and to a certain degree ‘context-free’ locations) (Kennedy 2013: 340). Schwenkel (2006) suggests that the sorts of memory-making processes that happen within and especially between such nodes increasingly involve ‘recombinant history’, that is memory construction which interweaves diverse national memory traditions into novel formations with emergent properties irreducible to the more national materials from which they were woven. This has notable affinities with Rothberg’s (2009) notion of ‘multi-directional’ memory and memory-making. Taking issue with views that understand memory traditions of particular groups as mostly sealed off from the traditions and experiences of other groups, Rothberg sees multi-directional memory forms as ‘subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing’ (2009: 3). Thus groups that claim to possess particular memory traditions ‘do not simply articulate established positions but actually come into being through their dialogical interactions with others’ (2009: 5). This can lead to the recognition of surprising commonalities between apparently separate memory traditions: ‘what looks at first like my own property often turns out to be a borrowing or adaptation from a history that initially might seem foreign or distant’ (2009: 5). Rothberg’s historical research shows that such intermingling of memory is not restricted to the post–Cold War world. Instead he finds that early post-world war II processes of memorializing the Holocaust operated in dialogue with contemporary discourses of decolonization in Africa. In this sense, Holocaust memory was constructed in hybrid ways 149

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from its beginnings. It has become commonplace in recent years to claim that Holocaust memory is the pre-eminent trans-national, cosmopolitan form of memory, due to its capacity to capture imaginations within and across many, if not almost all, national contexts (Levy and Sznaider 2002). The Holocaust can be invoked today in multiple contexts because of its apparent universality. But what Rothberg shows is that Holocaust memory itself is part of a much broader set of trans-national borrowings and mutual influences between different groups. It is part of an ongoing set of ‘restless rearticulations’ making up ‘visions that can [potentially] construct solidarities out of the specificities, overlaps and echoes of different historical experiences’ (2009: 16). For example, public discussion of the Holocaust can trigger memory debates about other tragic and/or controversial events, such as discussion in France about the legacies of the Algerian War. Multi-directional memory formations are thus trans-national both in terms of their genesis and in their capacity to travel across borders, opening up new possibilities for reflection and polemic. Kennedy (2013) finds that multi-directional memory processes can lead to both forms of forgetting and also re-discoveries. Thus in contemporary Australian cinema, representations of the 1960s both subordinate certain aspects of Australian experience to American themes and iconic reference points (e.g. the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.), but also ‘enable other stories and memories to be brought into public visibility’ (2013: 339), such as the plight of aboriginal children forcibly separated from their parents by the White authorities. If one were to identify the precise mechanisms whereby trans-national forms of memory are created, disseminated and in turn transformed, then one would certainly have to include the media, tourism, migration and diaspora as major issues. We saw above that the trans-national mass media can be construed of as undermining national or local forms of memory. But this ignores their productive capacities. They can generate forms of emotion and feeling that can reach across borders, creating new communities of affiliation and remembering (Landsberg 2004). The dramatic media can also represent conditions of trans-national memory and promote public awareness thereof, as is shown in Sundholm’s (2011) consideration of a range of recent European films. In the same vein, it is too simplistic to see the tourist industries as unequivocally destroying communities and their habituated modes of remembering. Schwenkel’s (2006) study of the trans-national production of contemporary Vietnamese tourism shows a productive tension between US and Vietnamese understandings and representations of Vietnam War sites and shows how such sites provide resources for the otherwise marginalized in Vietnamese society – artists, gays, youth – to engage in counter-readings of official memories of the war. Once again we see that the putatively destructive forces of globalization can be productive of hybrid forms that are not simply ersatz replacements of more ‘genuine’ modes of remembering. Clearly processes whereby populations become more ethnically mixed and where individuals have less of a strong sense of what constitutes ‘home’, must be heavily involved in the creation and experience of trans-national memories. Indeed Creet (2011) argues that ‘migration rather than location is the [quintessential] condition of memory’ today. Even if this is overstated, it is indubitable that migration creates new subjectivities and thus novel orientations towards the past, often hybrid in nature (Ramji 2006). For theorists of diaspora, the latter condition both undermines and creates senses of home and origins. As a lived condition of constant inbetween-ness, it involves the ‘entanglement of living here and remembering/desiring another place’ (Clifford 1994: 311). Migration and diaspora facilitate or demand more fixed senses of ‘the homeland’ and more fluid negotiations of who one is and where one has come from. As Chamberlain and Leydesdorff (2004: 228) put it, migrants, ‘perhaps more than many people, are made by their memories of their birthplace, their homeland, those left behind – interruptions in 150

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their life narratives that require resequencing, remodelling and reinterpreting as the newcomers incorporate and surpass their pasts’. However, such negotiations of memory and identity are often highly influenced by national contexts, both of the country left behind and the country one has arrived in. Levitt (2003) shows that what migrants do and do not remember about their homeland seems to be structured often by state activities, both in the homeland and in the destination country. BenEzer’s (2002) study of migrants to Israel suggests that some people are actively encouraged, or compelled, to forget their prior histories in order to deal effectively with the present. And Panagakos’ (2004) analysis of second and third generation Greek-Americans returning to Greece depicts the pathos of possessing nostalgia for a homeland that seems not to exist when one arrives in it for the first time. It is worth mentioning here the recent boom in constructing memorials to the victims of forced migrations, such as the Africans shipped to the New World in the slave trade. Years of silence have recently given way in light of museums that commemorate the trans-national spaces of the ‘Black Atlantic’ (Araujo 2012). Finally we can note the role of expatriates in the memory politics of their homelands. Members of the Armenian diaspora have been notably successful in helping to create a sense of Armenian identity and history for an ethnic group deprived of a single state. Analogously, Lithuanian expatriates engaged in a relatively successful redefinition of the Soviet past, by dubbing the events of the Stalin period as a genocide, the so-called Baltic Holocaust. As a result of such reframing, the European Parliament in 2008 adopted a resolution to create a European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism. Mälksoo (2009) sees this as an enlarging of the collective memory of Europe by subaltern groups; one can also see it as simply a successful nationalist redefinition of the putatively cosmopolitan historiography of the Soviet period. The European Parliament’s acceptance of this framing of the past has been fiercely contested by such groups as ethnic Russians living in the Baltic republics, whose memory culture regards the Red Army as a liberator and not an oppressor. In these memory disputes we are again very far away from any sense that ‘globalization’ simply undermines or neutralizes older ‘inter-national’ sorts of memory disputes. Instead the latter are stimulated and reconfigured by ongoing political dynamics, themselves part of, and possessing the capacity to shape, ‘globalization’ processes over time.

Cosmopolitan memory So far we have examined trans-national memory dynamics, which involve the interpenetration of the memory forms of different groups. But is it possible that truly ‘global’ memory formations now exist, in the sense of memory formations that have pertinence all across the world? Are there world, global or cosmopolitan forms of memory that operate with global frames of reference (Stepnisky 2005)? At least two possibilities present themselves here. In the first place, it has been noted that over the last thirty years or so, there has been a notable spread of heritage projects all across the globe, including in the developing world, that aim to ‘preserve’ what are taken to be the most valuable or typical forms of the history of particular groups (Lowenthal 1998). One can locate as part of these broad ‘heritiagization’ processes UNESCO’s MOW (Memory of the World) collective memory project, which endeavours to preserve those forms of material culture that it defines as very important constitutive features of human civilization as a whole. Utilizing online and digital preservation methods, ‘the central aim of the venture is to project the “fragile” and “irreplaceable” documentary heritage that constitute the recorded MOW’ (Stepnisky 2005: 1397). Authors such as Stepnisky (2005: 1396–1398) see this project as a potential force for promoting 151

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global unity, as it presents the ‘shared’ heritage of ‘all humankind’ to a global audience. This new type of cosmopolitan memory can potentially create a new awareness of globality and the interconnectedness of all humans across the planet, enhance new forms of solidarity and support the cultivation of norms that allow for the effective spread of human rights across the planet (Misztal 2010: 38). However, such views seem rather optimistic given the apparently endless series of political and ethnic cleavages around the world. Moreover, the cultural forms that are preserved by the project are themselves inevitably drawn from national, regional or civilizational cultures and are presented as such. Consequently, the project seems to involve a collection of diverse cultures whose difference from each other seems more marked than their alleged commonality. That the archive constitutes some kind of global or cosmopolitan memory seems like wishful thinking. At best, the archive is performative: it seeks to bring into existence – a putatively global memory – that which it claims already exists and which it merely represents. Perhaps a more compelling case for the existence of a memory formation that is truly global in reach is that made by Levy and Sznaider (2002). Their account of the emergence of ‘cosmopolitan memory’ from the 1960s onwards draws upon Ulrich Beck’s (2002) insistence that the social sciences must move beyond ‘methodological nationalism’ – a focus on nation-state political, social and cultural formations – towards embracing a ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’ which discerns both globalization processes that transform national cultures and trans-national dynamics that entail ever more complex intertwinings of more global and more local elements. National culture and nationhood are constantly being reworked, in light of such factors as global human rights regimes, worldwide markets, mass migration, trans-national civil society movements and the production of many new forms of cosmopolitan affiliation and identity which upset older senses of national citizenship (Beck and Levy 2013). In light of these sorts of processes, Levy and Sznaider say it is now possible to discern ‘the distinctive forms that collective memories take in the age of globalization’ (2002: 87). Transnational memory cultures are both cause and consequence of the ‘cracking open’ of nationstate cultures and territories and involve the decoupling of ‘collective memory from national history’ (2002: 89). More ‘global’ concerns become part of everyday local life. Across the globe, ‘national memories are subjected to a common patterning’, such a patterning involving the combining of more global with more local and national elements (2002: 89). This entails not the end of national memory cultures but their transformation into more complex entities. Memory becomes transformed so that it involves ‘both nation-specific and nation-transcending commonalities’ (2002: 92). Under such conditions, memories can be held and valued by people outside of the original group that had them. The pre-eminent example of such cosmopolitan memory formations involves the Holocaust. In line with other authors, Levy and Sznaider regard the Holocaust not just as a pan-European memory formation but a more broadly trans-national one, operating as both a source of universal moral norms and global icon (Assmann 2010). Holocaust memory can be understood as ‘a common and non-partisan issue in the international arena, one of very few that all countries can unite towards’ (Dreyfus and Stoetzler 2011: 70). It ‘reaches beyond issues of national identity and sovereignty to the universalizing, supranational ethical imperatives increasingly associated with the “lessons of post-Holocaust morality” in the West’ and elsewhere (Alexander 2009: 69). Other such ‘iconic’ and ‘universalising’ memory formations might include those concerning the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall (Zerubavel 1995), the 1960s and the Vietnam War (Kennedy 2013). The genesis of the Holocaust’s position as a cosmopolitan memory culture comes with the end of the Cold War, which led to a generalization and expansion of human rights discourses. The construction in the US of the Holocaust as a traumatic event for all Americans, not only Jews, also boosted its trans-national reach, as 152

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it ceased to be defined as a solely ‘Jewish’ memory. Popular media then played a role both in expanding its geographical reach and in defining it as a partly decontextualized set of symbols of good and evil in general. In the 1990s the Holocaust became a central part of a pan-European memory-scape, as it was promoted as such by EU officialdom. At the same time, claims as to the need to avoid ‘repeating the Holocaust’ were invoked during the wars in the Balkans, with the Serbs represented as being ‘like Nazis’. The idea of the ‘Lessons of the Holocaust’ is both based upon and expressed through trans-national, mediated, decontextualized Holocaust memory. The Holocaust becomes a universal moral touchstone in an age of great uncertainties and risks. It has the potential to produce new solidarities stretching across and beyond national borders. Huyssen (2000) summarizes these points: It is precisely the emergence of the Holocaust as universal trope that allows Holocaust memory to latch on to specific local situations that are historically distant and politically distinct from the original event. In the transnational movement of memory discourses, the Holocaust loses its quality as index of the specific historical event and begins to function as metaphor for other traumatic histories and memories. The global circulation of the Holocaust as trope at once decenters the event of the Holocaust and certifies its use as a prism through which we may look at other instances of genocide. The power of Holocaust memory to generate and underwrite particular actions and institutions should not be underestimated. According to Levy and Sznaider (2004), it has come so much to saturate the consciousness of people in many countries that the phrase ‘Never Again’ has taken on the status of unquestionable verity. Such phraseology can be used to legitimize humanitarian interventions by some states in others. Holocaust memory provokes the further spread and elaboration of human rights discourses. The International Criminal Court exists as an embodiment of the principles established at the Nuremberg trials, the first post-war institutionalization of Holocaust memorializing. Holocaust memory has played an important role in the institutionalization of truth and reconciliation commissions around the world that seek historical truth as a path towards enshrining human rights (Teeger and Vinitzky-Seroussi 2007). The practice of witnessing past crimes and traumas has become institutionalized globally, such that ‘the transnationalization of bearing witness is becoming constitutive of the practice itself rather than merely supplementing it’, for witnesses perform to a (theoretically) global audience, the pattern for such practices being strongly shaped by the practices initiated at Nuremberg and later trials, such as that of Eichmann (Kurasawa 2009: 93). Thus Holocaust memory has helped create a situation whereby ‘[w]itnessing trauma [has] become … the modern means against the old fear of suppression or forgetting’ (Levy and Sznaider 2005). In this light, Holocaust memory can help undermine the reproduction of nationalist mythology, which stimulates racism or possible genocide. This is because Holocaust memory encourages ‘increasingly self-reflexive form[s] of globalized memory’ (Levy and Sznaider 2002: 100) freed from the naturalized categories of the nation into generalized, decontextualized symbols with universalizing affordances. These encourage national self-criticism, not self-aggrandizement. While national(ist) memory looks to the past, such cosmopolitan memory forms look to the future, for it is thought that the Holocaust ‘might happen to everyone’ (2002: 96). Universalizing victimhood and responsibility, Holocaust memory suggests that genocide ‘can happen to anyone, at anytime, and everyone is responsible’ for preventing it (2002: 101), thus generating and helping to police the operation of cosmopolitan moral principles. Nonetheless, while most authors writing on such topics stress the universality of Holocaust memory’s moral affordances, Levy and Sznaider insist that while the term ‘Holocaust’ and some 153

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of what it implies have become ‘sacred’ for most people, it is yet not ‘one totalizing signifier containing the same meanings for everyone’ (2002: 92). This is in line with Ulrich Beck’s claim that cosmopolitan cultures are never simply globally uniform but involve complicated mixings of the more global and more national or local. Despite this caveat, Levy and Sznaider’s account has still been subjected to the criticism that it seems rather too optimistic about the nature and consequences of cosmopolitan memory in general, and Holocaust memory in particular (Misztal 2010), especially as the latter’s norms may be less globally present than Levy and Sznaider admit: people in the West, especially political elites, remember Kosovo but not Rwanda, as Margalit (2002) puts it. Moreover, they seem to underplay both the degree to which national states can use Holocaust-based imagery for self-interested purposes (Dreyfus and Stoetzler 2011) and the ambivalences involved as to how Holocaust memory is deployed within national political and civil spheres (Macdonald 2005).

Conclusion In this chapter, I have reviewed the various possible ways of thinking about the relationships between globalization and memory. Just as there is no simple or widely agreed upon definition of globalization, so too is there no simple or uncontroversial manner of understanding the relations between global forces and memory cultures. The main ways of thinking in this regard are a) globalization undermines or destroys national and local collective memories; b) national memory cultures remain strong, because nation-states remain the primary modes of social organization; c) trans-national memory cultures are today being produced by a wide range of mechanisms; d) truly global ‘cosmopolitan’ memory formations have emerged over the last few decades, with important novel ramifications for thought and practice. All of these positions have value and can be based in empirical evidence. But as some of them contradict one another, a reasonable conclusion to reach is that all of them contain some truth about how memory works at the present time, but none of them can explain everything about such matters, and all must be relativized so that they are not understood as absolutist claims but rather as simply highlighting facets of a complicated global reality. Moreover, it is not surprising that those who promote a trans-national or global turn in memory studies tend to assume that the older analytic frameworks in memory studies must now be wholly outmoded for the purposes of studying global or globalized memory. It is noteworthy how dismissive some authors are of the Durkheimian tradition that leads to the pioneering work of Halbwachs. Yet such dismissals of the Durkheimian school as simply and naively ‘methodologically nationalist’ ignore the fact that the later Durkheim was himself a sophisticated theorist of globalization, whose account of the genesis and operation of trans-national moral culture contains many potentially productive insights for trans-national or global memory studies (Inglis 2011). And it is within that analytic register that we can locate Halbwachs’ (1941) study of the topography of early Christian communities, which takes as its empirical object a pre-modern and therefore pre-national, and in some senses trans-national and trans-ethnic, memory community. Both this study and Durkheim’s account of globalization suggest new readings of classic works, interpretations that can both ground and further develop in compelling ways the analysis of trans-national, cosmopolitan and global memories. As so often happens, one caricatures the classical authors at one’s own peril.

References Alexander, J. (2009) ‘The Social Construction of Moral Universals’, in J. Alexander, M. Jay, B. Giesen, M. Rothberg, R. Manne, N. Glazer, E. Katz and R. Katz (eds.) Remembering the Holocaust: A Debate, New York: Oxford University Press 154

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Anheier, H. and Isar, Y. R. (eds.) (2011) Heritage, Memory and Identity, London: Sage Appadurai, A. (1990) ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’, Theory, Culture and Society, Vol. 7, pp. 295–310 Appadurai, A. (2006) Fear of Small Numbers, Durham, NC: Duke University Press Araujo, A. L. (2012) ‘Transnational Memory of Slave Merchants: Making the Perpetrators Visible in the Public Space’, in A. L. Araujo (ed.) Making Slavery Visible in the Public Space, New York: Routledge, pp. 15–34 Assmann, A. and Conrad, S. (eds.) (2010) Memory in a Global Age. Discourses, Practices and Trajectories, New York: Palgrave Macmillan Assmann, J. (2010) ‘Globalization, Universalism, and the Erosion of Cultural Memory’, in A.  Assmann and S. Conrad (eds.) Memory in a Global Age. Discourses, Practices and Trajectories, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 121–137 Augé, M. (1995) Non-Places: Introduction to the Anthropology of Super-Modernity, London: Verso Beck, U. (2002) ‘The Cosmopolitan Society and Its Enemies’, Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 19, No. 1–2, pp. 17–44 Beck, U. and Levy, D. (2013) ‘Cosmopolitanized Nations: Re-imagining Collectivity in World Risk Society’, Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 30, No. 2, pp. 3–31 Bell, D. (2009) ‘Introduction: Violence and Memory’, Millennium, Vol. 38, No. 2, pp. 345–360 Bellaigue, M. (1999) ‘Globalisation and Memory’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 35–43 BenEzer, G. (2002) The Migration Journey: The Ethiopian Jewish Exodus, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Blunt, A. (2003) ‘Collective Memory and Productive Nostalgia: Anglo-Indian Home-Making at McCluskieganj’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Vol. 21, No. 6, pp. 717–738 Bourdieu, P. (1999) ‘The Social Conditions of the International Circulation of Ideas’, in R. Shusterman (ed.) Bourdieu: A Critical Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 220–228 Calhoun, C. (2007) Nations Matter: Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan Dream, London: Routledge Castells, M. (2000) ‘Materials for an Exploratory Theory of the Network Society’, The British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 51, No. 1, pp. 5–24 Chamberlain, M. and Leydesdorff, S. (2004) ‘Transnational Families: Memories and Narratives’, Global Networks, Vol. 4, No. 3, pp. 227–241 Clifford, J. (1994) ‘Diasporas’, Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 9, No. 3, pp. 302–338 Cochrane, A. (2006) ‘Making Up Meanings in a Capital City: Power, Memory and Monuments in Berlin’, European Urban and Regional Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 5–24 Connerton, P. (1989) How Societies Remember, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press Creet, J. (2011) ‘Introduction: The Migration of Memory and Memories of Migration’, in J. Creet and A.  Kitzmann Memory and Migration: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Memory Studies, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. 3–27 Creet, J. and Kitzmann, A. (2011) Memory and Migration: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Memory Studies, Toronto: University of Toronto Press Dayan, D. and Katz, E. (1994) Media Events, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press De Jong, F. and Rowlands, M. V. (2008) ‘Postconflict Heritage’, Journal of Material Culture, Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 131–134 Della Dora, V. (2006) ‘The Rhetoric of Nostalgia: Postcolonial Alexandria between Uncanny Memories and Global Geographies’, Cultural Geographies, Vol. 13. No. 2, pp. 207–238 Dreyfus, J.-M. and Stoetzler, M. (2011) ‘Holocaust Memory in the Twenty-First Century: Between National Reshaping and Globalisation’, European Review of History, Vol. 18, No. 1, pp. 69–78 Elshtain, J. B. (2008) Sovereignty: God, State and Self, New York: Basic Books Erll, A. (2011) ‘Travelling Memory’, Parallax, Vol. 17, No. 4, pp. 4–18 Fraser, J. T. (2000) ‘Time, Globalisation and the Nascent Identity of Mankind’, Time & Society, Vol. 9, No. 2/3, pp. 293–302 Friedman, T. (1999) The Lexus and the Olive Tree, New York: Farrar Gergen, K. J. (1991) The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life, New York: Basic Books Giddens, A. (1990) The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge, UK: Polity Gutman, Y., Brown, A., and Sodaro, S. (eds.) (2010) Memory and the Future: Transnational Politics, Ethics and Society, London: Palgrave Halas, E. (2008) ‘Issues of Social Memory and Their Challenges in the Global Age’, Time and Society, Vol. 17, No. 1, pp. 103–118 155

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Halbwachs, M. (1941) La Topgraphie Legendaire Des Evangiles en Saint-Terre, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France Hannerz, U. (1996) Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places, London: Routledge Hidalgo, E. B. (2012) ‘Argentina’s Former Secret Detention Centres: Between Demolition, Modification and Preservation’, Journal of Material Culture, Vol. 17, No. 2, pp. 191–206 Hirst, P. and Thompson, G. (1999) Globalization in Question: The International Economy and the Possibilities of Governance, Oxford: Wiley Huyssen, A. (2000) ‘Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia’, Public Culture, Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 21–38 Huyssen, A. (2003) Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press Inglis, D. (2010) ‘Civilizations or Globalization(s)? Intellectual Rapprochements and Historical WorldVisions’, European Journal of Social Theory, Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 135–152 Inglis, D. (2011) ‘A Durkheimian Account of Globalization: The Construction of Global Moral Culture’, Durkheimian Studies, Vol. 17, No. 1, Winter 2011, pp. 103–120 Juenke, C. (2007) ‘Conceptualising “Collective Memory in the Global Age” – Theoretical Frames and the Example of Civil War Memory in Contemporary Spain’, conference paper, London: LSE Centre for the Study of Global Governance Kennedy, R. (2013) ‘Soul Music Dreaming: The Sapphires, the 1960s and Transnational memory’, Memory Studies, Vol. 6, No. 3, pp. 331–344 Kurasawa, F. (2009) ‘A Message in a Bottle: Bearing Witness as a Mode of Transnational Practice’, Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 26, No. 1, pp. 92–111 Landsberg, A. (2004) Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture, New York: Columbia University Press Lebow, R. N. (2008) ‘The Future of Memory’, The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 617, pp. 25–41 Levitt, P. (2003) ‘“You Know, Abraham Was Really the First Immigrant”: Religion and Transnational Migration’, International Migration Review, Vol. 37, No. 3, pp. 847–873 Levy, D. and Sznaider, N. (2002) ‘Memory Unbound: The Holocaust and the Formation of Cosmopolitan Memory’, European Journal of Social Theory, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 87–106 Levy, D. and Sznaider, N. (2004) ‘The Institutionalization of Cosmopolitan Morality: The Holocaust and Human Rights’, Journal of Human Rights, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 143–157 Levy, D. and Sznaider, N. (2005) ‘The Politics of Commemoration: The Holocaust, Memory and Trauma’, in G. Delanty (ed.) Handbook of Contemporary European Social Theory, London: Routledge Lowenthal, D. (1998) The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press Macdonald, S. (2005) ‘Commemorating the Holocaust: The Ethics of National Identity in the 21st Century’, in J. Littler and R. Naidoo (eds.) The Politics of Heritage: The Legacies of Race, London: Routledge, 2005, pp. 49–68 Mälksoo, M. (2009) ‘The Memory Politics of Becoming European: The East European Subalterns and the Collective Memory of Europe’, European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 15 No. 4, pp. 653–680 Margalit, A. (2002) The Ethics of Memory, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Martell, L. (2007) ‘The Third Wave in Globalization Theory’, International Studies Review Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 173–179 Misztal, B. A. (2010) ‘Collective Memory in Global Age: Learning How and What to Remember’, Current Sociology, Vol. 58, No. 1, pp. 24–44 Nora, P. (1989) ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations, Vol. 26, pp. 7–25 Nora, P. (2011) ‘Foreword’ in H. Anheier and Y. R. Isar (eds.) Heritage, Memory and Identity, London: Sage Olick, J. K. (2003) States of Memory: Continuities, Conflicts, and Transformations in National Retrospection, Durham, NC: Duke University Press Panagakos, A. N. (2004) ‘Recycled Odyssey: Creating Transnational Families in the Greek Diaspora’, Global Networks, Vol. 4, No. 3, pp. 299–311 Petrini, C. (2007) Slow Food Nation: Why Our Food Should Be Good, Clean, and Fair, New York: Rizzolli Phillips, K. R. and Reyes, G. M. (eds.) (2011) Global Memoryscapes: Contesting Remembrance in a Transnational Age, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press 156

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Radstone, S. (2011) ‘What Place Is This? Transcultural Memory and the Locations of Memory Studies’, Parallax, Vol. 17, No. 4, pp. 109–123 Ramji, H. (2006) ‘British Indians “Returning Home”: An Exploration of Transnational Belongings’, Sociology, Vol. 40, No. 4, pp. 645–662 Robertson, R. (1992) Globalization, Social Theory and Global Culture, London: Sage Rothberg, M. (2009) Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press Scholte, J. A. (2000) Globalization: A Critical Introduction, Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan Schwartz, B. (1982) ‘The Social Context of Commemoration: A Study in Collective Memory’, Social Forces, Vol. 61, No. 2, pp. 374–397 Schwenkel, C. (2006) ‘Recombinant History: Transnational Practices of Memory and Knowledge Production in Contemporary Vietnam’, Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 3–30 Sklair, Leslie (2002) Globalization: Capitalism and Its Alternatives, Oxford: Oxford University Press Smith, A. D. (1995) Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era, Cambridge, UK: Polity Smith, A. D. (1996) ‘Memory and Modernity: Reflections on Ernest Gellner’s Theory of Nationalism’, Nations and Nationalism, Vol. 2, No. 3, pp. 371–388 Stepnisky, J. (2005) ‘Global Memory and the Rhythm of Life’, American Behavioral Scientist, Vol. 48, No. 10, pp. 1383–1401 Sundholm, J. (2011) ‘Visions of Transnational Memory’, Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, Vol. 3 Sundholm, J. and Veliou, A, (2011) ‘Introduction to the Dossier on Transnational Cultural Memory’, Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, Vol. 3 Szerszynski, B. and Urry, J. (2006) ‘Visuality, Mobility and the Cosmopolitan: Inhabiting the World from Afar’, British Journal of Sociology. Vol. 57, No. 1, pp. 113–132 Teeger, C. and Vinitzky-Seroussi, V. (2007) ‘Controlling for Consensus: Commemorating Apartheid in South Africa’, Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 30, No. 1, pp. 57–78 Zerubavel, Y. (1995) Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press

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14 The afterlife and renaissance of the Plastic People of the (twenty-first-century) Universe Continuity and memory in Bohemia Trever Hagen Introduction In the autumn of 2009, countries across Europe were poised to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the transition from communist party-state governments to multi-party elections in the former Eastern Bloc. During November of that year, there was hardly a newspaper that did not display an iconic image of crowds tearing apart the Berlin Wall.1 On 17 November, the day that marks erstwhile Czechoslovakia’s “Velvet Revolution” in the Valdštejnský Palác at the bottom of the hill from Prague Castle, former President Václav Havel (2009) gave tribute to a diverse list of nearly two hundred deceased individuals, who, in the grim 20 years between the Soviet occupation [of 1968] and the November coup [of 1989], [were] gradually forming the background of emerging independent initiatives…. In different circumstances, in a different way, their work followed the work of freedom fighters from earlier decades. Havel continued on, naming a select group of individuals, including several names of the selflabeled Czech Underground collective and members of the oft-quoted persecuted musical ensemble of the Underground, The Plastic People of the Universe, the impetus for the creation of Charta 77 (Charter 77).2 Havel believed these individuals had, through their various activities that circumscribed the information blockade, subsequently shaped “the process of building democratic conditions” in the 1990s. Havel’s tribute, given to the Czech senate under the conference title “Journey from the Shackles,” presented a model of public remembering framed by notions of freedom, independence and struggle. In that same month, in a café across the Vltava River from the castle, just outside Prague’s Old Town, Ed Vulliamy (2009) of The Guardian newspaper sat down with Vratislav Brabenec, saxophonist for The Plastics, to discuss this “journey from the shackles” over the past two decades. Brabenec gave him an earful: A revolution is supposed to change things. But what has changed? … It doesn’t matter whether the system is communist, fascist or capitalist: the creative people are the creative 158

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people and the shits are the shits. The poets remain the poets, and the politicians are fucking politicians. Brabenec—a former prisoner during the communist era, Charter 77 signatory and exile— could clearly benefit in terms of social and symbolic capital by incorporating public memory paradigms, as Havel puts forth, into an autobiographical narrative. In fact, on 17 November 2011, the Czech government officially recognized anti-communist resistance and, contingent upon proof (e.g. petition signature), the government will give 100,000Kč (approximately $5,500) as award. Thus the questions provoked here are numerous: why does Brabenec resist the plot structure of Havel’s public memory? Why reject the “mnemonic synchronization” of 1989 as embodying transformation (Zerubavel 1996: 283)? What is, then, Brabenec’s mnemonic community and what does this rejection do? The narrative discourses of Havel and Brabenec—performed under distinctly different constraints—translate experiences of the communist era into meaningful realities for variant collectives (groups, nations, transnational unions). Brabenec shows us an ontologically secure model of remembering that is anchored by the body (e.g. defecation), art (e.g. the metered form of poetry) and politics (e.g. actors within systems of governance); or more simply put: “the shits are the shits, the poets are the poets, the politicians are the politicians.” Such a model, inscribing and inscribed by experience, creates an othering pathway of constitution for sociolinguistic relational pairs, such as of underground/establishment. Similarly, Havel extends a relational pair of totalitarian past/democratic present through his model of remembering (cf. Kopeček 2013). Each model discloses conventions in East Central European post-communist memory politics: Havel’s speech act performs the convention of articulating resistance as a necessary affirmation of the country’s path and past from “the shackles” (cf. Mark 2010); Brabenec, however, offers an anomaly to the public commemorative expectations of the 1989 revolutions, drawing on conventions of the Underground collective (Wagner-Pacifici 1996). While Havel speaks of a liminal event (revolution) between communism and democracy, Brabenec entertains the idea of the constancy of structures within historical processes (fascism-communism-capitalism). These two divergent models of remembering act as mnemonic boundary objects between how collectives have framed communism-as-event and communism-as-structure, offering indexes for expectations and performing the work of identity maintenance. The aim of this chapter is to trace how social groups and nations use relational pairs that emerge from models of remembering in order to manage everyday life and historical identity in the present. Focusing primarily on The Plastics and the Underground, this chapter examines how the “afterlife” of practices from the past “bear their weight in the present” (Fine and McDonnell 2007; Goffman 1981: 46). As this chapter shows, these past practices only retain meaning in that the present social conditions are perceived to (re)constitute those practices as meaningful; thus a rebirth, or a renaissance of meaning in the afterlife.

Relational memories in (post) communist realities There is no shortage of authors who rightly reject binary formulations in their analysis of the multiplex of social and cultural phenomena in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc (cf. Yurchak 2006; Grant 1995). Yet it is useful to think of relational pairs—for instance, underground/establishment, totalitarian past/democratic present—as generative resources for those, such as Brabenec and Havel, who use them to narrate biographies, and similarly how 159

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many East Central European state institutions have developed such relational conventions in order to legitimate post-1989 governments (cf. Mark 2010). What might these historically reductionist views offer in terms of everyday life management? The language of “establishment and underground” (the English terms used and appropriated by those in the Underground since the early 1970s) is a trope that, while existing in opposition, “goes together” to organize experience and communal sense for its users (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Sacks 1972). Sacks (1972) proposes the idea of a “standardized relational pair” for attributes of relationships that are typically known, understood or common-sensical (e.g. parent-child). Within a particular historical and social context, though, “standardized” must be omitted from the concept as the quality of the relationship, such as establishment-underground, is anything but clear. Thus the question arises as to how the trope, and its relational state, is constituted. Like memories, relational pairs in terms of analysis may distort pasts and events yet sort ­realities. Within the field of memory studies, we often find such pairs in the form of past/ present and remembering/forgetting. Such pairs are taken from precisely these public testimonies displayed above—oppression/freedom, communism/democracy. It is memory work that mediates and constitutes these relational pairs not as factual representations of histories but rather as material for the telling and doing of reality coherency-work, 3 calling upon an intellectual and emotional availability and response on behalf of social imaginaries (Ricoeur 1981) to an otherwise complex region of nations and history of East Central Europe. Esbenshade (1995: 73) succinctly describes this complexity as “the conundrum of East Central European memory.” He outlines the ubiquity of counter-narratives and countermemories existent within East Central Europe that ran parallel or against communist-era, state-sanctioned forgetting and historical whitewashing; indeed, dissidents’ counter-narrative claims of truth-representations of nations’ pasts were often not only forms of resistance in themselves but were also the “anchors of opposition.” Partly the complexity of these narratives arises from the region’s 20th-century history, described as a “double past”—­referring to the experiences of Nazism and Stalinism (Niven 2003; Rousso 1999). James Mark (2010: xiii) discusses the particularity of the region’s institutional memory practices for remembering “dictatorships” as far more present and widespread than one sees in “Italy, Portugal, Spain or Germany.” Mark analyzes memory practices associated with a “working through” paradigm of East Central European4 governments as being part of the “unfinished revolution”; meaning that current memory paradigms propagated by post-communist elites and “institutes of national memory, history commissions, lustration bureaux, museums and commemorative memorials” have sought to complete what they see as the failure to extinguish communists’ and reformed communists’ political survival post 1989 (2010: xii–xiv). Clearly this is not an easy task to discern for any nation-state, its governments or publics, particularly when the state of the nation itself is unclear. For example, extending the historical scope beyond the 20th century in the Czech Republic helps to show a pattern of external forces, uprisings, defeat and betrayal5 for an otherwise self-­proclaimed progressive and democratic national consciousness, which has thus agitated a perplexed self-ref lection on the experience and state of the Czech nation (Tucker 1996). This being the promise of “the historical mythical narratives of Western Europe and North America [that] tells how the ‘good’ Protestant, liberal-democratic, and capitalist nations survived, succeeded, and prospered…. [They] will be among the ‘winners’ in history…. Czech history does not fit this myth.” (Tucker 1996: 197–198). It is this wider historical narrative and its inconsistencies within transnational archetypes of development that problematizes and frames the 160

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contestations in the opening quotations from Havel and Brabenec of communism-as-event and communism-as-structure. Developing a similar account of the question of Czech national historical consciousness’s place in contemporary society, Bryant outlines the case of a samizdat6 text written in 1987 in Czechoslovakia, Czechs in the Modern Era: An Attempt at Self-Reflection.7 In the early 1990s, this text came to be the center of public disputes and debates as to how national history and consciousness were represented and narrated, how resistance and dissent were moralized during the communist era and after, and how these points came to function in the 1990s political field (the time of Bryant’s writing). Part of this dispute arose from then-President Havel’s moral philosophy, “living in truth,” which entailed that human action should be guided by a “sense of responsibility to the rest of humanity” (Bryant 2000: 38). Such a philosophy was considered an antidote to the perceived view that many in Czechoslovakia’s post-1968 normalization period had uncritically accepted the form of communism without much regard to the content. Therefore they were “forgetting how to remember” the history of the nation (one supposedly characterized by progressive ideals) in an era shaped by politicized historians producing a public sphere of “a-historicalness” (Bryant 2000: 37). Thus a point of contestation within the 1990s political culture of Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic was how dimensions of dissident thought often painted the population (those who weren’t “living in truth” during normalization) as “unthinking,” “mechanical,” in “dehumanized conformity” (Bryant 2000)—this condition of late socialism Havel termed “post-totalitarian,” meaning that more than just coercive measures of oppressive state apparatuses, the state entered into people’s actions, rendering them meaningless. In 1990, when Havel addressed Czechoslovakia as its democratically elected leader, he spoke of the “moral contamination” of the country that needed to be purged (Bryant 2000). This inward-looking retribution that Havel and dissidents-turned-politicians sought in the early 1990s proved bold yet difficult for a public that either did not share a philosophizing account of the past nor maintained a selfperception of being immorally complicit in the former communist regime. Given these complexities of representation, it proves theoretically and empirically productive to examine how memory-in-practice filters muddy substantive debates and experiences into performative categories of relational pairs that aid in contemporary post-communist everyday life management. These are everyday realities that relational pairs sort out and simultaneously uncover the struggle over political implications.

Underground continuity and expectation In 1968 a group of teens from Prague settled on the name The Plastic People of the Universe for their psychedelic rock ensemble. Originally borrowed from a Frank Zappa lyric that taunted the “plastic people” of a translocal mainstream culture, the early Plastics provocative concerts were characterized by togas, make-up, pyrotechnics and English phonetic-sounding lyrics. The name now, however, signals a meaningful experience of a structural pattern across political and economic systems. Brabenec states “the Plastic People are still the Plastic People” (qtd. in Vulliamy 2009) suggesting that the relationship between politics, culture and the musical ensemble The Plastic People has remained after the 1989 revolution, locked in a relational continuum between underground and establishment. Officially disallowed to perform in public in Czechoslovakia’s post–Prague Spring normalization period because of their music and performance style, The Plastics journeyed underground, building a parallel world from where they could f lourish. During these years in

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the early 1970s, a collective of like-minded individuals began to emerge around The Plastics (cf. Hagen 2011). This parallel world, or habitat we could say, generated new opportunities for people who endeavored to develop and maintain a particular way of life. The crafting of aesthetic and social structures in the Underground afforded relational social and cultural practices based on rejection of perceived noxious, oppressive and unwanted materials associated with the social and cultural life of normalization. The Underground offered, in other words, a place for potential transcendence of, and thus temporary immunity and relief from, “establishment.” Havel recognized the Underground as a cultural space for the doing of “living in truth.” His primary contact point with the Underground crystallized after attending a three-day trial on 23 September 1976, during which four members of the Underground were given prison sentences following a private wedding reception performance on 21 February of that year; Brabenec was one of those convicted and sent to prison. From this persecution of Undergrounders, the human rights initiative Charter 77 was created in January 1977, calling on Czechoslovak ­citizens to sign a petition in support of human rights. As the New York Times reported on 13 January 1977, “Czech party newspapers Rude Pravo and Pravda of Bratislava, criticizing human rights petition signed by more than 300 Czechs, say ‘the year 1968 will not be repeated,’ reference to brief period of Communist liberalism under Alexander Dubcˇek.” In the years that followed the signing of Charter 77, the Czechoslovak regime amped up their crackdown on the Underground and Charterists: Brabenec, who emigrated from Czechoslovakia in 1981, along with many Undergrounders who were targeted during the secret police Asanace campaign8 of the early 1980s, said in an interview with the Index on Censorship in 1983: “They asked me, ‘Do you want to be a martyr? Because we can make that happen’. They threatened to break my teeth on the table so I would never be able to play the saxophone again” (Brabenec & Jirous 1983). These were threats that certainly carried weight: Jan Patočka, university professor, father of Czech phenomenology and student of Husserl, died from an aneurism induced during a secret police interrogation in 1977;9 Patočka was at the time the spokesperson for Charter 77. The Plastics’ final performance occurred on 15 March 1981 as a memorial to the day of the Nazi invasion and occupation of Czechoslovakia, dedicating the musical ritual to the citizens who perished under the hands the Reich. Three months after this concert, on 10 June 1981, the farmhouse where the performance took place was razed by the secret police. The police chose their own dark commemoration date by destroying the house on the anniversary of the Nazi massacre in the Czech town of Lidice. The Plastics’ next performance took place nearly sixteen years later, on 10 January 1997. The ensemble reformed to play a concert in Prague Castle’s famous Španělsý Sál (Spanish Hall) at the request of then-President Havel for a commemoration ceremony of the twenty-year anniversary of the foundation of Charter 77. Though many Undergrounders born post war have passed away, this event in the Spanish Hall helped spark an “Underground Renaissance” (Stárek 2009). In recent years the renaissance has taken form in a number of public and private events of which the Underground was historically implicated. While some events in the renaissance have been prolific as a result of their public impact and dissemination, such as the thirty-year anniversary of Charter 77 or most recently Česká Televize’s multi-episode documentary series on the Underground, a majority of the renaissance has taken place in countryside farmhouses and villages similar to those described above. For example, Hospoda Americe (Pub America), is a small pub in the village of Rudolf near the south Bohemian city of České Budějovice. In recent years there have been a number of Underground events at this site to commemorate the Budějovická Masakr (Budějovice 162

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Massacre) that took place on 30 March 1974. The officially authorized event was supposed to have been a rock concert, The Plastics being one band of many set to perform. Before the concert could even begin, though, police and military units arrived to break up the gathering. In a circulated samizdat article written in 1974, Dana Němcová (1974: 3) describes the event: Emergency police units arrived in the afternoon, of which several hundred concert participants were then massacred [masakr – physically beaten]…. [I]n the railway station, boys and girls were beaten with batons, kicked and thrown down to the ground and dogs sent on them. Many long-haired youth (“students and young workers”) were sent back to Prague on an escort train wagon with police and armed military assistance. In a series of mugshot photos taken on the train journey, we see two images: one of each long-haired arrested concert participant and the next with their hair shaven off. In 2011 František Stárek (founder and editor of the Underground samizdat magazine Vokno), along with members of The Plastics and participants who had been at the event, erected a small plaque at the Hospoda Americe, reading, “On 30 March 1974, the unjustified and extremely brutal actions of the totalitarian regime armed forces took place against the attendees of an underground concert on this site.” The backdrop of the Budějovická Masakr concerned the body and the soul—­ shaving heads and suppressing collective musical practice—giving significance to the event and material to which collective memory began to take shape. These recent events commemorate not only the day of the masakr but also the Underground experience during the communist regime. The memory work accomplished here intersects two narratives: first, it helps to bind the Underground as both victims and resistors—the nature of rebirth in postcommunism—incorporating an institutional memory paradigm (“victims and resistors” [cf. Mark 2010]). Second, it signals an alternative narrative within the Underground that is not anchored by—returning to Havel’s temporalization—1968 and 1989, but rather a localized event within the communist era thus helping us to outline the Underground as Brabenec’s mnemonic community and inscribing the model of remembering (body, art, politics) in the opening quotation. The brutality imputed by the establishment at České Budějovice in 1974 served as one of many unconscious memory triggers that, six months later in September 1974, was revealed (or in Freud’s terms, “awakened” [Olick 2008]), articulated and enacted into Underground consciousness and practice at the First Festival of the Second Culture.10 Here, the Underground began to frame their collective in a similar fashion to the persecuted 15th-century Bohemian religious reformer Jan Hus (cf. Hagen 2012), emplacing the Underground within a narrative of outsider practice and experience in Bohemia.11 Hus, and the radical faction of the Hussites, are not counter-narratives—far from it: Hus and the Hussites occupy a shared space in the collective memory of Bohemia evidenced by numerous groups’ use of them throughout Czech history. Yet the Underground appropriation of this common memory site helped them move farther to the periphery, away from the “establishment.” Zerubavel (1996: 290) describes the “existential fusion” of social, national, ethnic or religious groups to events and communities that are long past but nevertheless are incorporated into shared collective memory. Memory traces as such aid in producing relational pairs, which, when enacted, generate realities. Subsequently these realities draw meaning to actions and afford sociocultural agency. In this existential fusion lies the continuity of practice: the pattern and experience of outsider persecution emplaced the Underground in a mobile, 163

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polychronic structure; “establishment,” then, is not an analytical category tied to any particular ideology but refers to the experience of a reality. Such a relational position has come to shape expectations of Underground life from the Czechoslovak normalization era to the present-day Czech Republic. The tripartite frame of the body, art and politics shows us a mnemonic model that highlights the interrelationship of the social, political, cultural and organic as indexes for expectation. In short, how one may anticipate a future through such points of continuity. How are memories of the future configured nowadays based upon this model? This is exemplified within Underground consciousness by the singer-songwriter Svatopluk Karásek. Like Brabenec, Karásek was imprisoned in the 1976 trial and emigrated in the early 1980s. He is well-known as composing the unofficial slogan of the Underground: “Say No to the Devil,” an acoustic, gospel-inf luenced song that succinctly encapsulates conceptions of establishment assemblages (“the devil”) while providing a relational pair of rejection practices (“say no”). Karásek describes the memory of the future during normalization and how those expectations frame contemporary realities: Young people sensed the oppression of communism and looked for something that would allow them to live fully…. We Underground people had believed that this system [communism] was installed for all time. That it would end was inconceivable to us [(Fasthuber 2006)]. Karásek reveals an important node for considering resistance and intentionality and thereby a memory of the future: the Underground’s relational position to the establishment was something that was not predicted to change. A maintained reality of establishment, rather, is an ever-present, continuous structure and therefore transformation, or the will and agency to make a transformation, as such was “inconceivable.” Far from being a “no-future” outlook that characterized sub- and countercultures of the late 1970s in the West, the Underground perspective on the constancy of body, art and politics makes possible an ontologically secure continuity of practice.

Discontinuity: national and transnational memory after 1989 The model of remembering put forward here points to the stability of relational structures, enacted in the Underground rituals; this in turn provides a point of disruption in current understandings of national and transnational memory projects. Much of the work of post-communist nation building—in which European unification is constituted by and constitutive of—is contingent on the memory paradigm that we see in Havel’s speech act at the beginning of this chapter (i.e. the uncertainty of new democracies made certain in the materialization of the communism as a singular event) and which Brabenec challenges: instead of democratic transition or transformation, Brabenec alludes to the unchanging nature of experience. Nation-state memory projects in East Central Europe have been situated in transnational memory paradigms that reject the communist past, offering a view of “continuity of the nation” and the “inevitability of liberal democracy,” thus seeking to legitimate governments after 1989 (Mark 2010: xii, xiv, 25). This rejection of the communist past as an externality of the nation illustrates the macro-level practice of a relation pair—rather than employing a complex historicity—affirming legitimacy of political power in performative speech acts and documents. In the Czech Republic, the communist era is presented as a historical discontinuity in the 1993 Parliamentary Act on the Unlawfulness of the Communist Regime and about the 164

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Resistance against it.12 As Kopeček (2013: 4) explains, “[i]n the dichotomy it drew between the ‘democratic present’ and the ‘totalitarian past’, the act was meant to emphasize the democratic credentials of the new regime [in the 1990s] and foster a sense of belonging among Czech citizens.” The act serves as one of many binding documents that shape the fixity of communismas-event in current national public memory display (whether this is believed by Czech publics or represents factual histories is beside the point). The fixity of the event for the nation’s future, or natural path—and implied national consciousness—is thus affirmed through the reality-generating pair of “democratic present” and “totalitarian past.” Consequently, this usage brushes the dirt off the welcome mat to Europe. The use of relational pairs is further employed at the level of transnational memory processes, where there has been an appeal to common European values, entailing a teleological notion of the nation and development of a European (i.e. European Union) memory paradigm. This is best exemplified in the documents that “New Europe” countries prepared in the late 1990s for their 2004 EU accession. For example, within the frame of the European Union accession argumentation, the Czech Republic is presented in the 1997 European Commission “Opinion on Application for Membership of the European Union” as having been part of Europe since the beginning of the country’s creation pre-1000 BCE (Hagen and Dorgouz 2008). Such teleological notions of the countries under review stipulate a natural, historical link to the European Union that is based upon “same basic values,” echoing Havel’s 2009 speech quoted at the beginning of this chapter. The EU is thus envisioned as a point of coherence and consistency in the narrative of the country. As such, the communist era, in this historically discontinuous frame, acts not as a liminal event in nation-state modernization but rather as a breach in natural progression toward Europe. The point of contestation here comes from the notion of “natural.” While not an essentialist understanding, one may posit that “natural” refers to the common sense of the nation (Francis and Hester 2004: 40). Thus it is clear to see that the “sense” of the reality of progress may not be “common” to all if theirs is a reality constructed through the constancy of an establishment structure. Brabenec must rely on a memory of establishment almost necessarily to constitute the Underground as does the Czech state to affirm its European-ness. As it turns out, then, both Havel and Brabenec employ the same trope of relational pairs generated from past narratives of resistance in Bohemia that simultaneously generate contrasting present-day realities.

Conclusions: forever underground? The survival of the Underground nowadays rests on the collective memory it has shaped in relation to establishments. This relational pair is the convention that holds the Underground together: the pathway of underground-establishment is continuous, the communist era being articulated into the multi-temporal meaning and use of establishment. For establishment is an assemblage, not an ideology per se, and enacted memory holds together this assemblage. Maintaining a reality of establishment nowadays thus allows for the continued doing of the Underground. Among the official state discourse on the memory of communism, though, is there space for Brabenec’s story to breathe? Is there room to articulate contemporary resistance to a conception of establishment after 1989? Nowadays this could be seen as anachronistic. The Plastics’ performances at commemoration ceremonies of events from the communist era place them within a historical narrative of communism as a “reconstituted object beneath the gaze of critical history” (Nora 1989: 12). This narrative is neatly tied with the narrative 165

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of Czech resistance that seemingly ends in 1989. Indeed, The Plastics, for many, is a phenomenon that belongs in the past, to be forgotten or their contemporary relevance to be memorialized as samizdat was in practice. To be sure, Brabenec’s quotation at the beginning of this chapter precludes the brutality, fear and violence that often shapes and characterizes post-communist memory paradigms; though he simultaneously indicates the recognition of salient points of police action against contemporary forms of dissent that are manifested in protest marches, occupying happenings or even musical events13 that highlight how nations frame forgetting, or rather what is to be remembered from the 20th century in order to progress along a natural path. Yet, when conditions arise that afford a rebirth of a narrative that Brabenec articulates, it not only inhibits forgetting but also provokes critical ref lection on such a “natural path” of contemporary economic and political processes.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Petra Berry for proofreading the Czech language translations.

Notes   1  James Mark (2010: 1) refers to the symbolism of the collapse of the Berlin Wall as “visual shorthand” for the otherwise invisible end of communist governments in the Eastern Bloc.   2  A Czechoslovak human rights initiative established in January 1977 that called on the Czechoslovak government to uphold the human rights covenant inscribed in the Helsinki Accords that it had signed in 1975. Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe, Final Act, Helsinki 1975. www.osce.org/ item/4046.html.   3  As DeNora (2014: 1) suggests, “instead of asking what reality is, we ask how our sense of reality is generated.”   4  Mark refers to the region as Central-East Europe, showing, as Todorova’s account of the Balkans (1997) or even the Rumsfeldian paradigm of the region as “New Europe,” the constant transitional state and uncertainty of the region between the West and Russia.   5  As Tucker (1996: 198) notes in reference to the 1938 Munich Agreement, that even as a “political, economic and cultural part of the West, this did not affect the decision of Britain and France to sacrifice Czechoslovakia to Hitler, while the isolationist USA stood by.”   6  The phenomenon of clandestinely self-published and circulated textual material in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc (cf. Hagen and DeNora 2011; Machovec 2009).   7  Češi v dějinách nové doby: pokus o zrcadlo (cf. Bryant 2000).   8  Meaning “Clearing.” Those targeted were signatories of Charter 77.   9  Although the secret police who interrogated Patočka were found in 1995, the Czech justice system was unable to charge them with the crime due to insufficient evidence (Tucker 1996).   10  The Second Culture (druhá kultura) is used as a synonym for non-official or Underground culture.   11  The term Outsider is used for two reasons: empirically, in the tradition of “outsider art,” minimally defined here as “artists with extremely idiosyncratic styles or outlooks” (Chusid 2000: 22); and conceptually, in that “outsiders” are perceived as “agents of change” within narratives (Griswold 2008: 21).   12  o protiprávnosti komunistického režimu a o odporu proti němu.   13  See, for example, 2004’s CzechTek event, during which Czech police raided a techno party in a farm field in Bohemia.

References Brabenec, V. & Jirous, I. (1983) “Banned in Bohemia.” Index on Censorship, vol. 12(1), pp. 30–34. Bryant, C. (2000) “Whose Nation?: Czech Dissidents and History Writing from a Post-1989 Perspective.” History & Memory, vol. 12(1), pp. 30–64. Chusid, I. (2000) Songs in the Key of Z: The Curious World of Outsider Music, Chicago: A Capella Books. DeNora, T. (2014) Making Sense of Reality: Culture and Perception in Everyday Life, London: Sage. 166

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Esbenshade, R. S. (1995) “Remembering to Forget: Memory, History, National Identity in Postwar East-Central Europe.” Representations, pp. 72–96. Fasthuber, S. (2006) “‘Say No to the Devil’: In an Interview with Svatopluk Karásek.” Magazine for Arts and Civil Society in Eastern and Central Europe, August. www.redost.com/1/texts/interviews/say-noto-the-devil (accessed 4 June 2015). Fine, G. A. & McDonnell, T. (2007) “Erasing the Brown Scare: Referential Afterlife and the Power of Memory Templates.” Social Problems, vol. 54(2), pp. 170–187. Francis, D. & Hester, S. (2004) An Invitation to Ethnomethodology: Language, Society and Interaction, London: Sage. Goffman, E. (1981) Forms of Talk, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Grant, B. (1995) In the Soviet House of Culture: A Century of Perestroikas, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Griswold, W. (2008) Regionalism and the Reading Class, Chicago: University of Chicago. Hagen, T. (2011) “Converging on Generation: Musicking in Normalized Czechoslovakia.” East Central Europe, vol. 38(2–3), pp. 307–335. ——. (2012) “From Inhibition to Commitment: Politics in the Czech Underground.” Eastbound. www.eastbound.eu/2012/hagen. Hagen, T. with DeNora, T. (2011) “From Listening to Distribution: Nonofficial Music Practices in Hungary and Czechoslovakia from the 1960s to the 1980s.” In T. Pinch and K. Bijsterveld (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 440–458. Hagen, T. and Dorgouz, H. (2008) “Being European: A Discourse Analysis of New EU Member States.” Unpublished paper. Havel, V. (2009) Projev na konferenci “Cesta z okovů”, Senát 17. listopadu 2009. http://vaclavhavel. cz/showtrans.php?cat=projevy&val=1293_projevy.html&typ=HTML (accessed 13 March 2012). Kopeček, M. (2013) “From the Politics of History to Memory as a Political Language: Czech Dealings with the Communist past after 1989.” In Forum Geschichtskulturen, Czechia, Version: 1:0, 16.12.2013. Available online at www.imre-kertesz-kolleg.ni-jena.de/index.php?id=519&l=0 (accessed 1 February 2014). Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980) Metaphors We Live By. Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press. Machovec, M. (2009) “The Types and Functions of Samizdat Publications in Czechoslovakia, 1948–1989.” Poetics Today, vol. 30(1), pp. 1–29. Mark, J. (2010) The Unfinished Revolution: Making Sense of the Communist Past in Central-Eastern Europe. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Němcová, D. (1974) Budějovická masakr. pp. 1–5, samizdat publication. New York Times (1977) No title. 13 January, p.3. Niven, B. (2003) Facing the Nazi Past: United Germany and the Legacy of the Third Reich, London: Routledge. Nora, P. (1989) “Between Memory and History: Les lieux de mémoire.” Representations, pp. 7–24. Olick, J. K. (2008) “The Ciphered Transits of Collective Memory: Neo-Freudian Impressions.” Social Research: An International Quarterly, vol. 75(1), pp. 1–22. Ricoeur, P. (1981) Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Rousso, H. (ed.) (1999) Stalinism and Nazism: History and Memory Compared, Lincoln: University of Nebraska. Sacks, H. (1972) “An Initial Investigation into the Usability of Conversational Data for Doing Sociology.” In D. Sudnow (ed.), Studies in Social Interaction, New York: The Free Press. Stárek, F. (2009) Interview in Prague by Trever Hagen. 13 April. Todorova, M. (1997) Imagining the Balkans, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tucker, A. (1996) “Shipwrecked: Patočka’s Philosophy of Czech History.” History and Theory, pp. 196–216. Vulliamy, E. (2009) “1989 and All That: The Plastic People of the Universe and the Velvet Revolution.” The Guardian, 6 September 2009. Available online at www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/sep/06/ plastic-people-velvet-revolution-1989 (accessed 6 September 2009). Wagner-Pacifici, R. (1996) “Memories in the Making: The Shapes of Things That Went.” Qualitative Sociology, vol. 19(3), pp. 301–321. Yurchak, A. (2006) Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zerubavel, E. (1996) “Social Memories: Steps to a Sociology of the Past.” Qualitative Sociology, vol. 19(3), pp. 283–299. 167

15 The reciprocal relation of scandal to collective memory Mark D. Jacobs

With notable exceptions (Schudson 1982; Fine 2002; Alexander 2003, 2006), studies of ­collective memory tend to ignore the topic of scandal. Yet as scandals proliferate during what might be called an “age of scandal”—a time of crisis when scandal becomes “the other means” of conducting politics, finance, and civic deliberation—it is especially important to examine the reciprocal relation of scandal to collective memory. Scandals help animate collective memory, just as collective memory helps frame scandals. Collective memory is a cultural system that exists in the present, but the present is “specious,” existing only at the intersection of retrospective prospect and prospective retrospect, as the continuously vanishing bridge between past and future. The end of any scandal leaves traces in collective memory that create the conditions for apperception of subsequent ones, which will in turn reframe the memory of those preceding. And since mediation—the shaping of scandal narratives by communications media as they publicize them—is the most eventful stage in the natural career of a scandal, media transformations have profound effects both on scandals and on collective memory. Media, scandals, and collective memory are not related in a unilinear temporal or causal sequence but are rather mutually interrelated. The explosion of the new electronic and digital media has transformed political, business, and celebrity journalism, both ref lecting and helping create the age of scandal. This essay explores these interrelations.

The mediation of scandal The scandal is a species of the social form that Georg Simmel describes in his seminal essay “Secrecy and the Secret Society,” a form expressing the fundamental dialectical tension between secrecy and revelation, each establishing the attraction of the other. Revelation is only valued because of belief in the existence and value of the secret. The secret is only valued because of the potential of revelation; once disclosed, it loses its power. No less than such other forms of social interaction charted by Simmel as conflict or super- and sub-ordination, the secret helps create both the attraction and the social distance—among groups as well as individuals—that make society possible. Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) should be understood in large measure as a gloss on Simmel’s essay. It is the leaked 168

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allegation of a secret transgression by a formerly trusted confederate that typically ignites scandal by compromising the integrity of a party’s staged “front,” breaking the ranks necessary to sustain convincing impression management. Scandals escalate through the back-andforth of reciprocal denials and counter-claims, cover-ups and disclosures.

Scandals as agonistic dramas surrounding secrets Scandals, then, are ambiguous and suspenseful public dramas, in which the agonistic parties (which Goffman would call “teams”) contest each other’s morally charged narrative about an alleged secret transgression. Scandals test the bounds of the “working consensus” about the ­definition of the situation that makes social interaction possible in Goffman’s dramaturgical analysis; although actors may be moral “behind their many masks,” their mutually reflexive “performances” are amoral. Scandals are ambiguous because not only is there disagreement about the facts, but different teams also give radically different interpretations to the same set of agreed-on facts. Facts fitted into narratives are indexical, their interpretation dependent of the context of the larger frame; the way each team frames its narrative has the power to undermine the other team’s interpretation of its selected facts and indeed to discredit the other team’s frame. Scandals are suspenseful because they shatter the Goffmanesque “tact” and “tact about tact” that protect the “working consensus” at the heart of social life about the definition of the situation. These definitions of the situation are of course highly consequential, because they help constitute social structures. Scandals are not merely interpersonal contests, because the most consequential scandals emerge along the fault lines of societal and cultural transformation. Thus suspense surrounds not just the substantive outcome of scandal—the winners and losers, the shape of the narrative that eventually dominates—but also the degree of “eventfulness” (Sewell 1996), that is, the dimensions of structural transformation occasioned by the outcome. Conceived in related terms, the scandal is a type of “social drama” (Turner 1974), which—when gestated to full term—follows the stages of breach, crisis, redressive action, and resolution. Turner’s “social drama” and Goffman’s “dramaturgy” should be seen to be complementary; Goffmanesque “impression management” is always a tenuous exercise, susceptible to disruption leading, in the extreme, to “social drama.” Turner’s stage of “crisis” represents a state of liminality, a suspension of fundamental beliefs about existence and identity; Turner’s stage of “resolution” is never permanently stable. In contemporary society, the relative stability of the resolution depends in large part on the performance of the media. Writing about the McCarthy era, the very period during which Goffman was doing dissertation research under his supervision, Edward Shils describes a culture of suspicion in terms that resonate strongly today, a culture clearly capable of spawning scandal: The exfoliation and intertwinement of the various patterns of belief that the world is dominated by unseen circles of conspirators, operating behind our backs, is one of the characteristic features of modern society. It is radical in its fundamental distrust of the dominant institutions and authorities of modern society. It is radical in its rejection of the ordinary, matter-of-fact, undramatic, unsystematic outlook of day-to-day politics in the state and in private institutions. The conspiratorial conception of society would eradicate the pluralism and privacy of institutions on behalf of a more homogeneous society and a more unitary loyalty [(1974: 31)]. 169

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Of course, suspicion about the existence and power of secrets is not necessarily paranoid. Indeed, as Jack Katz (1977) argues, drawing out the implications of the inescapable contradiction between formal and informal organization and procedures, it is a core responsibility of every manager to shield from external authorities the internal understandings that perforce govern the way any unit really operates.

Mediated scandals The scandal as a social and cultural form has existed ever since Adam and Eve. Modern scandals are distinctive, in John B. Thompson’s seminal analysis, because they are mediated: they are “not simply scandals that are reported by the media and exist independently of them; they are … constituted by mediated forms of communication” (2000: 31). They are “event(s) which involve the disclosure through the media of previously hidden and morally disreputable activities, the revelation of which sets in motion a sequence of further occurrences” (52). Whereas news of localized scandals circulates face-to-face in relatively small circles primarily as rumor, news of mediated scandals travels almost instantaneously through many media sources to mass audiences scattered globally. The amplified visibility of central actors strains their ability to maintain their chosen “fronts,” given the increasingly porous nature of the boundaries between backstage and frontstage. The localized scandal may be seen as an occurrence in what Goffman (1974) toward the end of his career termed a “primary framework” of his “frame analysis,” while the mediated scandal represents a reframing—a “keying” or “fabrication”— of it. As Thompson points out, mediated scandals evolve according to a distinct logic of their own: “the media operate as a framing device, focusing attention on an individual or an alleged activity and refusing to let go…. Denials raise the prospect of second-order transgressions, and hence are commonly met by intensified efforts at disclosure by media organizations and others” (74). Mediated scandals are “literally played out in the media” (74); they are “continuously narrated events, in the sense that they are constituted in part by an array of mediated narratives which are continuously refined and revised as the event unfolds” (76).

Fields that germinate scandals: politics, finance, the civil sphere Scandals vary in scale from small group to global. Societal-level scandals—those most likely to leave traces in the collective memory—germinate in the fields of politics, finance, and civic celebrity. In those and other fields, scandals are bred in contexts of secrecy and corruption.

Politics In Max Weber’s famous conceptualization of politics, for example, crystallized in his summative essay, “Politics as a Vocation,” corruption is endemic to the practice of politics. If the modern state is defined by its “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory,” then the “decisive means” of politics is violence, and the person who chooses politics as a vocation must realize that he or she must submit to “the diabolical forces lurking in all violence” (1946a [1919]: 34). Weber in effect offers a primer of comparative corruption: he compares the party organizations of the U.S., Britain, and Germany, with respect to their relative capacities to produce effective leaders. He prefers the U.S. system of party bosses, because the spoils system in the U.S. is the most promising in this regard. The boss is indispensable as the direct recipient of the money of great financial magnates, who would not entrust their money for election purposes to a paid party official, or to 170

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anyone else giving public account of his affairs. The boss, with his judicious discretion in financial matters, is the natural man for those capitalist circles who finance the election [(22)]. In America, the spoils system, supported in this fashion, has been technically possible because American culture with its youth could afford purely dilettante management. With 300,000 to 400,000 such party men who have no qualifications to their credit other than the fact of having performed good services for their party, this state of affairs of course could not exist without enormous evils. A corruption and wastefulness second to none could be tolerated only by a country with as yet unlimited economic opportunities [(21)]. The point of comparison is the manner in which each system enables the majority of politicians to live off rather than for politics, in the recognition that “all party struggles are struggles for the patronage of office, as well as struggles for objective goals” (Weber 1946a [1919]: 7). Moreover, as Weber (1968 [1922]) states explicitly in the appendix to Economy and Society, the most intensely conflictual boundary in politics is that between politicians and bureaucrats (translated into the terms of the U.S. political system, for example, this designates the inevitably fraught relations between senior civil servants and the legislators who have oversight powers, or the presidential appointees who become their supervisors at the start of each administration). And as Weber perceives, bureaucratic politics is always centered around the secret.

Finance Corruption is synonymous with a lack of system integrity, not necessarily with a condition of moral decay (although those two conditions turn out to be highly correlated). The integrity of modern finance is compromised in much the same way as that of national politics. Weber argues that the master trend in the transformation of modern society is “rationalization,” which “means that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation” (1946b [1919]: 139). This is clearly the master trend claimed by financiers to legitimate their activity. But the inevitability of frequent “busts” and even of periodic system crises that require governmental bailouts belies this claim. The major investment banks, said to be “too big to fail,” are beyond accountability. The lobbying resources they command are sufficient to enforce regulatory capture. These firms’ heavily mathematized and computerized business models turn out not to protect against imprudent or even reckless practices but rather to encourage and amplify them. Indeed, in this respect, as opposed to the type of “rationalization” described by Weber, finance instead instantiates the more contemporary form of rationalization described by Ulrich Beck in Risk Society. What Beck calls “ref lexive modernization”—“modernization within the paths of industrial society” (1992: 10)—is characterized by a different order of risk (and a different principle of rationalization) than what he calls “classical modernization”—“modernization of the principles of industrial society” (10). Ref lexive modernization is driven by a new order of risk: “Risk may be defined as a systematic way of dealing with hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernization itself. Risks, as opposed to older dangers, are consequences that relate to the threatening force of modernization and to its globalization of doubt. [The Weberian principle of rationalization] no longer grasps this late modern reality” (22). “Under the surface of risk calculation new kinds of industrialized, decision-produced incalculabilities and threats are spreading 171

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within the globalization of high-risk industries…. Along with the growing capacity of technical options [Zweckrationalität] grows the incalculability of their consequences” (22) (all italics in the original). The derivatives—especially credit derivatives—that crashed the global economy in 2008 are good examples of the new order of risks that Beck describes; their invention represents the new, riskproducing form of rationalization. No less than politics, finance also revolves around the secret. Modern investment banks are of course giant conglomerates, which have to guard closely many secrets of their investment strategies and market positions, as well as, oftentimes, their arrangements with governments, clients, and other financial institutions. As Karin Knorr Cetina explains, the very core of international financial architecture is an “epistemic culture,” comprising “codes of conduct that regulate information f lows and rules of mutual monitoring between governments and overseeing agencies”—a key feature of which is “questions of transparency, the how and when and how far of disclosures of information” (2005a: 72). Beneath the radar of state regulation, an entire “stealth economy” developed in innovative financial instruments that this epistemic culture never anticipated nor felt the need to control. Ostensibly developed to contain risk, the failure of these instruments was a major cause of the global financial crisis.

The civil sphere The civil sphere—the sphere of social life beyond the family and the church, unsteered by state or market—is the other major field that germinates public scandals. The civil sphere is characterized by a balance of division, fragmentation, and mutual suspicion, on the one hand, and integration on the other. As Alexander (2006) conceives it, the civil sphere comprises the values and institutions that engender social solidarity, centered around a cultural code of good as opposed to evil, that tempers the divisions of class, race, gender, sexuality, and religion and works to repair breaches in the social fabric caused by collective traumata, events that negate the very ideals of civility. (Drawing on Mannheim, Schuman and Scott [1989] call attention to another important source of division, that of generational cohort.) The civil sphere is the locus of collective memory, in its dimensions of both consensus and contestation, over contents remembered as well as those repressed. It is also a mix of popular and elite cultures, including celebrity culture. As Joshua Gamson (1994) theorizes it, even the seemingly frivolous contents of celebrity culture provide the occasion for public consideration of important civic issues across the social and cultural divides that would otherwise inhibit it, despite the ambiguities created by profound differences of perspective, knowledge, and understanding. One branch of the celebrity industry, of course, is devoted to unlocking the “secrets of the stars,” which the stars themselves must learn to reveal selectively in the interests of impression management. Celebrity culture emphasizes sex more overtly than politics or finance; sex is no less fungible as a currency of corruption than either power or money—and indeed it is a currency often exchanged for those others.

De-centering the media The various related ways in which the media are “de-centered” affect the processes of germinating scandals in each of these fields. De-centered media weaken party politics and encourage personal-attack politics instead; de-centered media enable the creation of financial simulacra; de-centered media divert public attention from the most consequential aspects of civic issues, inducing a public mood of ironism rather than commitment. Through all these effects, as we shall see, de-centered media coarsen and thin collective memory. 172

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The image of “decentering” the media has a range of dimensions. In 1959, Douglass Cater could refer to Washington journalists not just as the “fourth estate,” but also as “the fourth branch of government” (1959). Since then, the occupational prestige of journalists has sunk even further (to third from the bottom) than that of government officials; by 2009, according to the Harris Interactive Poll, only 13 percent of Americans considered journalists to have “very great” ­prestige, while 16 percent considered them to have “hardly any prestige at all.” Occupational prestige, as Shils (1965) notes, is an indicator of proximity to “the center,” which he defines as the central zone of values and institutions. As the rise of digital technology created financial challenges for newspapers, many ­independent publishers folded, downsized, or sold out to chains, resulting in dramatic staff cuts—reducing the numbers of reporters and fact-checkers. Many newspapers surrendered to what Dean Starkman calls “digitism,” reconceiving the paper not as a source of news but rather as a curated platform for sharing news from readers. As Starkman notes (2014: 299), this strategy faced two problems: it favored quantity of postings over quality, and it still failed to generate sufficient advertising revenues. Manuel Castells (2007) similarly describes the circuit of mediation as “horizontal self-communication”: that is, according to Castells, the direction of transmitting news switches from vertical to horizontal, while thanks to social media the news content can emanate from ordinary people all over the globe, rather than just from an authoritative center. Bruce A. Williams and Michael X. Delli Carpini draw on John Fiske (who himself draws on Jean Baudrillard) to claim that the contemporary “media regime” fosters a condition of “hyperreality”—the inability to distinguish a real event from its mediated ­representation— as well as one of “multiaxiality”—“which ‘transforms any stability of categories into the f luidities of power’” (2011: 117–20). As Michael Schudson (2011) describes “the news revolution of the twenty-first century,” it is marked by the “blurring” of a half-dozen distinctions—between reader and writer; among tweets, blog posts, newspaper stories, magazine articles, and books; between professionals and amateurs; among for-profit, public, and non-profit organizations; within commercial news organizations, between the newsroom and business office; between the old and new media (ch. 12). Williams and Delli Carpini would add to that list blurring between news and entertainment, facts and values, and objectivity and subjectivity (49). Although representing divergent ideological and methodological positions, all these scholars point to a dissolution of an institutional and epistemological “center” governing the f low of news to the periphery. Even more precisely than those others, Thompson (1995) similarly explains how the development of the communications media was an integral part of the rise of modern societies, in particular through the transformation of the social organization of symbolic power. Thompson claims that it is the “mediazation of culture”—the introduction of new technological modes of producing, reproducing, and circulating symbolic forms—rather than changes in attitudes, values, and beliefs that accounts most for the cultural transformation characteristic of modern societies. As a result of this mediazation, “mediated quasi-interaction” (where the f low of information is primarily one-way) develops with effects that go beyond those of face-to-face interaction or even mediated interaction (such as a telephone conversation). As one important consequence of the rise of mediated quasi-interaction, for example, the Habermasian ideal of a dialogic public sphere may become impractical. (Although Thompson does not use this term, such a public sphere might also be described as “centered.”) This collective portrait of the new media regime is precisely antithetical to the way that Morris Janowitz wrote in midcentury about The Community Press in an Urban Setting (1952). Following in the tradition of W.I. Thomas, whose classic study of The Polish Peasant in Europe 173

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and America demonstrates the way that the local Polish-language press helped assimilate Polish immigrants to life in Chicago in the Progressive Era, Janowitz studied the way that the neighborhood press anchored family and group adaptation to the larger metropolis. Summarizing part of his monograph in an advance article in Public Opinion Quarterly, Janowitz writes, The neighborhood newspaper is found to represent an auxiliary—rather than a competitor—to the daily press in the minds of its readers; it is … believed to be … an agent of community welfare and progress, and it often acts as an extension of the personal and social contacts of its readers [(1951: 519)]. Janowitz could not conceive today’s media regime, de-centered and unanchored. He would not have anticipated how quickly or thoroughly the major contemporary social media platforms, initially promoted as means of mediated interaction, would turn instead into platforms of mediated quasi-interaction, subordinating social “connectedness” to the commodification of formerly “private” personal information. In the lingo of Facebook, for example, corporations become your “friends,” and “privacy” means that you must agree to sign away control over the use of your personal information (Van Dijck 2013).

The de-centering of the media and the seeding of political scandal Decentered media weaken party politics and encourage personal-attack politics instead. Political scientists Ginsberg and Shefter, among others, spell out this dynamic. They conclude that the decay of American electoral democracy—particularly the destruction of party organizations and erosion of voter turnout—has contributed to the emergence of alternative forms of political struggle. This pattern of politics undermines governmental institutions and further discourages voter participation [(2002: 228)]. In lieu of electoral competition, “contending political forces have come to rely on such weapons of institutional combat as congressional investigations, media revelations, and judicial proceedings to defeat their foes. In contemporary America, electoral success often fails to confer the ability to govern …” (Ginsberg and Shefter 2002: 14). Political scandal, translated into their scheme, is a form of “politics by other means.” Of course, the media have been instrumental in fueling this development, through an activity Ginsberg and Shefter dub “revelation, investigation, and prosecution.” The communications scholars Williams and Delli Carpini insist that new communications technologies are only partly responsible for the shapes of emerging “media regimes”; they also emphasize the constitutive inf luence of power and government, among other things. In their own terms, they offer a similar explanation of media inf luence on the growing prevalence of rumor, conspiracy, and scandal: Hyperreality has blurred the distinction between a mediated event and its factual underpinnings, giving them greater credence and thus impact, regardless of their importance or even truth. Multiaxiality has increased the number and range of actors who can shape the discursive environment and the number of entry points into the mediated public sphere these actors have available to them. At the same time, the authority of professional journalists to act as authoritative gatekeepers, and so as arbiters of what is or is not accepted as true, has declined precipitously [(2011: 166)]. 174

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Summarizing the range of variables responsible for the growing prevalence of scandal in such liberal democracies as the U.S. and the UK since the 1960s, Thompson identifies “(1) the increased visibility of political leaders, (2) the changing technologies of communication and surveillance, (3) the changing culture of journalism, (4) the changing political culture, and (5) the growing legalization of political life” (2000: 108). As party politics declines, and politics therefore becomes increasingly personal, with the ability to inspire trust in his or her person a politician’s primary resource, political scandals are especially significant to Thompson because they represent attempts to undermine politicians’ personal reputations.

The de-centering of the media and the seeding of financial scandal De-centered media enable the creation of financial simulacra, while helping to disable government regulation and public awareness of financial corruption. Financial instruments are themselves increasingly hyperreal, multiaxial, and self-referential. Indeed, among the most prescient writers on economics is a deconstructionist art critic and scholar of religion, Mark Taylor, who writes, “the new economy is a ‘network economy’ … characterized by the increasing interrelation, complexity, and dematerialization of items and channels of exchange” (2004: 149). Primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary markets (dealing in successively more complex and abstract financial instruments) “form a complex emergent self-organizing system” (180). Four years before the global financial crisis, he gave the clearest economic explanation of what was to come: With the fever of speculation spreading, new products and the investment strategies with which they were traded created a crisis in which more and more financial assets rested on a dwindling collateral base. As derivatives became more abstract and the mathematical formulas for the trading programs more complex, markets began to lose contact with anything resembling the real economy. To any rational investor, it should have been clear that markets were becoming a precarious Ponzi scheme. Contrary to expectation, products originally developed to manage risk increased market volatility and thus intensified the very uncertainty investors were trying to avoid [(8)]. Wall Street investment banks had exploited downturns in the academic marketplace to recruit PhD mathematicians and physicists (“quants”) to produce computer-designed financial instruments so abstract and abstruse that they could not be fully explained discursively. Until they started to unwind, these derivatives, collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, and other esoteric instruments seemed to generate unheard-of profits—even though economic exchanges had lost their materiality and the money exchanged electronically had become an empty signifier. To the lay observer, perhaps the most incriminating evidence against Fabrice Tourre, a midlevel employee of Goldman Sachs (and, incredibly, the highest-level employee found liable of defrauding investors during the financial crisis), was an email he sent to one of his supervisors on 31 January 2007, in which he admitted to “standing in the middle of all these complex, highly levered, exotic trades … [I] created without necessarily understanding all the implications of those monstrosities” (Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission 2011: 236). Both the construction and the sale of these post-modern financial instruments are proprietary activities, opaque and highly mediated, processed by giant servers of high-speed computers. In Karin Knorr Cetina’s decade-old observation (2005b) of global currency markets, for example, deals were entirely mediated by the GRS (global ref lex system) screens that traders possessed and that circumscribed the knowledge guiding their decisions, knowledge that was 175

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therefore “scopic.” Even this observation is now obsolete, supplanted by programmed cybertrading, consummated virtually and without human intervention. The brick-and-mortar central financial marketplace has become largely an anachronistic artifact. In hindsight, the global financial crisis should not have come as a surprise. It was not surprising to such financial luminaries as Warren Buffett, Paul Volcker, and George Soros, all of whom had explicitly warned against it even before the fact. (Warren Buffett, for example, had famously described derivatives as “financial instruments of mass destruction.”) The “progress” of financial science represented precisely the sort of “rationalization” that Ulrich Beck had warned about, the rationalization that creates incalculable risk exacerbated by “the unwinding of politics.” By the turn of the twenty-first century, the speculative industries of finance, insurance, and real estate were generating fully 40 percent of the profits in the U.S.; the economy had become a “casino,” in precisely the sense that Keynes described it during the Great Depression in The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money: Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done [(1936: ch. 12, VI)]. In that sense, the crisis was a structural one. But the crisis was also caused by widespread predatory and fraudulent activity in the mortgage, mortgage re-insurance, and financial industries. And the de-centering of the media—exacerbating and exacerbated by the de-regulation of finance—contributed to the crisis by failing to call attention to these ominous activities and trends, as Starkman (2014) explains. The run up to the financial crisis from about 2003 on saw a dramatic transformation and contraction of the media, and more to the point of the business media. As the economics of newspapers worsened, independent papers in particular folded, cut back, or sold out to conglomerates. This resulted in massive layoffs of reporters and a disproportionate reduction in “accountability” (or “investigative”) reporters relative to “access” reporters. The former group produces time-consuming and long-form journalism that brings the vestige of the “muckraking” tradition to their papers’ readership; the latter group relies on their access to persons in authority to provide a more “established” version of the news, which they can package in shorter articles with quicker turnarounds. The Rupert Murdoch or the “CNBC” models—of conveying messages to investors from business and financial executives—largely squeezed out the “accountability” model of conveying dissident messages to the public at large. To the extent that media corporations switched to or adopted supplemental “digital” distribution and advertising strategies, quantity generated more revenue than quality. Although a handful of business reporters continued to practice in the “accountability” tradition, journalism in that tradition was largely shut down. This coincided with a virtual end of government regulation of finance, resulting from the political triumph of laissez-faire. The simultaneous decline of accountability reporting and government regulation had a mutually compounding effect, since regulators helped uncover information useful to accountability reporters, and conversely. As a result, even the handful of remaining accountability reporters missed the big story, about the systemic, institutionalized nature of financial corruption.

The de-centering of the media and the seeding of celebrity scandal Why (according to Google Trends) does a reality TV star such as Kim Kardashian—a “pseudoperson,” in Daniel Boorstin’s phrase, someone “well-known for being well-known”—attract 176

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so much more public attention than an Edward Snowden, the daring whistle-blower who revealed the U.S. government’s secret and likely unconstitutional massive electronic surveillance? (Even Kim’s sister Khloe, who never released a sex tape nor married a famous rapper, scores more “likes” and “followers” than Edward Snowden during his period of whistle-blowing and exile.) Political and financial scandals potentially involve matters that are literally world shaking; yet celebrity scandals, often nothing more than “pseudo-events,” command much greater interest from most people. Gamson sees value in celebrity culture, precisely because the world of celebrity narratives (not unlike that of political narratives) is constituted by “semifictions” that betray the manipulation and artifice of their creation. “When audiences play with celebrity, they are playing with the dilemmas of democratic power” (1994: 195). Although the narratives claim that celebrity is achieved through merit, they play off each other as in a hall of mirrors, making interpretation problematic, and inviting a range of analytic strategies to make sense of them. Some celebrity watchers are gullible enough to take the narratives on their face; others believe they can find the kernel of truth in the narratives by adopting a partly skeptical perspective; still others disbelieve the narratives entirely, and seek to deconstruct them. Two other sets of observers approach celebrity narratives purely as “game players”—gossips and detectives probing the nature of reality. People can discuss their differences freely, in a spirit of play, because nothing is really at stake. But this form of play is of great civic significance according to Gamson, because it teaches participants to recognize and speak across their fundamental differences of orientation, and in so doing, it breeds an ironism he considers healthy.

The normalization of scandal in the “post-heroic” age The de-centered media not only help seed the fields that germinate scandals in contemporary society; they cross-fertilize them. The ironism produced in the sphere of civic celebrity heightens distrust of government and withdrawal from electoral participation as well as the sense of financial mystification and injustice, which even in the absence of irony reinforce each other. This negative synergy helps “normalize” scandal, both in Durkheim’s (1951) sense of making it more frequent, and in Diane Vaughan’s sense of routinization, a “gradual process through which unacceptable practices or standards become acceptable” (1996: 65). Scandals become serial, with the cumulative effects of previous scandals on subsequent ones carried by collective memory. Negative, personal politics—and political journalism—depresses voting, especially among the independent and non-ideological voters who constitute the center of U.S. politics (Ansolabehere and Iyengar 2010). The lack of civility in politics—and in political events broadcast by the media—depresses trust in government (Mutz and Reeves 2005; Mutz 2007). Lipset and Schneider (1983) document a steadily growing “confidence gap” about the U.S. government from the 1960s through the 1980s; recent survey results from the Pew Research Center show that trust in government today is only about half of what it was in the mid-1980s (www.people-press.org/2013/10/18/trust-in-government-interactive). The very increased visibility of politicians diminishes their stature, as Thompson notes. Modern campaigns require the candidate to give the electorate an intimate close-up, electronic and digital, of the “real” person behind the suit. Yet as we know from both Durkheim (1995) and Freud (1950 [1913]), violating a primordial taboo by getting too close to the patriarch deprives him of his charisma—his totemic sacrality or power. The proliferation of “scandals” in contemporary society is another indicator of what Barry Schwartz (2008) calls “the post-heroic society.” Annual counts of print articles containing 177

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the word “scandal” in the online index of The New York Times over the last generation reveal an average of 3 or 4 articles per day from 1980 through the end of the millennium (with two years as outliers); since the start of the millennium, that average frequency has jumped to 6 to 24 articles per day over the course of a year, with a median of 14. As Schwartz describes “the post-heroic society”—a society with many admirable features, including enhanced dignity for the individual, greater acceptance and social inclusion of minorities, and the relaxation of obsolete cultural restraints—it is, however, awash in obscene vulgarity, incapable of recognizing let alone embracing sanctity. As time passes, its inhabitants become less committed to nation, community, and family. The great men that once represented these establishments are replaced by a vulgar subset of celebrities whose major achievement is to have distracted rather than restored and refreshed society…. The same process that destroys stereotypes belittling religious and racial groups also destroys stereotypes distinguishing the great man from the ordinary [(2008: 190–91)]. In other terms, it is a “de-centered” society, a society of diminished charisma. Schwartz finds an indicator of this cultural mood in the architecture of such “post-heroic” monuments as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial—constructions that are abstract, emphasize horizontal rather than vertical lines, feature inconspicuous placement, are dark, small, and lie low to the ground. Another indicator of post-heroic society may be that it produces scandals rather than heroes. It may even, I would suggest, fail to produce “grand” scandals. Scandals proliferate, but they tend to fizzle out, instead of culminating in cathartic or healing “resolution.” They have become “normalized.” No liminal “crises” that Victor Turner would have expected; and if no real crises, then no real redressive actions or resolutions. Here collective memory plays a role: the last “grand” U.S. scandal was Watergate, and although subsequent scandals may have involved more serious transgressions, they have played out more routinely. The way “Watergate in American memory” (to borrow Michael Schudson’s phrase) prevented the full prosecution of Irangate is just one case in point. Reagan must have ordered the sale of arms to Iran in exchange for the release of hostages (even though Iran replenished its supply of hostages by taking new ones as they ransomed the old ones); Reagan also must have ordered using the proceeds of the arms sales to fund the Contras in Nicaragua. But Reagan escaped impeachment in Irangate for a variety of reasons, in Schudson’s (1982) analysis. His staff had learned the lesson of Watergate and made a show of cooperating with the investigation. As a result, Irangate did not have the high drama of Watergate. The staff had been careful to provide Reagan with formally plausible deniability. Two senior aides—Poindexter and North—took the fall relatively early on. Above all, however, there was no bipartisan consensus in the House to prosecute the unconstitutional waging of a secret war—just as in Watergate, which had necessitated dropping the most serious article of impeachment against Nixon. And unlike Watergate, although the charges were if anything more serious, there was no “smoking gun,” in the form of a suspicious gap in a recording tape. Irangate did not provide as esthetically compelling a narrative of culpability; the memory of Watergate set the threshold of proof unreasonably high. Gladys Lang and Kurt Lang (1983) recount how the then relatively f lourishing and authoritative broadcast news operations were able to manage the “media event” of the Watergate hearings to legitimate the potentially controversial and divisive findings of impeachment. Reagan was able to pre-empt such an event. (It is worth recalling that when Dayan and Katz first coined that term, they defined media events as “the high holy days of communication” [1992: ch. 1].) 178

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A similar case could be made about the failure of collective memory in applying the lessons of the Great Depression to the global economic crisis eight decades later; I have written about that elsewhere ( Jacobs 2010; 2012, especially the section, “A Tale of Two Crises”). In both these series of iconic scandals—from Watergate to Irangate and the Great Depression to the global financial crisis—the memory of an earlier scandal framed the later one, which then helped reframe the previous one in turn. In both series of scandals, more robust and centered media enabled fuller resolution of the earlier crisis, and the collective memory was def lated as it helped dampen the reaction to the subsequent one.

References Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2003. Watergate as Democratic Ritual. In The Meanings of Social Life, by Jeffrey C. Alexander. New York: Oxford University Press. ——. 2006. The Civil Sphere. New York: Oxford University Press. Ansolabehere, Stephen and Shanto Iyengar. 2010. Going Negative. New York: Simon and Schuster. Beck, Ulrich. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage. Castells, Manuel. 2007. Communication, Power and Counter-power in the Network Society. International Journal of Communication 1, 238–66. Cater, Douglass. 1959. The Fourth Branch of Government. New York: Random House. Dayan, Daniel and Elihu Katz. 1992. Media Events. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Durkheim, Emile. 1951 [1897]. Suicide, tr. by John Spaulding and George Simpson. New York: The Free Press. ——. 1995 [1912]. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, tr. by Karen Fields. New York: The Free Press. Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. 2011. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Report. Authorized Edition. New York: Public Affairs. Fine, Gary Alan. 2002. Difficult Reputations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1950 [1913]. Totem and Taboo. New York: Norton. Gamson, Joshua. 1994. Claims to Fame. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ginsberg, Benjamin and Martin Shefter. 2002. Politics by Other Means. New York: Norton. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor. ——. 1974. Frame Analysis. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Jacobs, Mark D. 2010. Preface. In Front-Page Economics, by Gerald R. Suttles with Mark D. Jacobs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jacobs, Mark D. 2012. Financial Crises as Rituals and Symbols. In The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Finance, ed. by Karin Knorr Cetina and Alex Preda. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Janowitz, Morris. 1951. The Imagery of the Urban Community Press. Public Opinion Quarterly 15:3, 519–31. ——. 1952. The Community Press in an Urban Setting. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. Katz, Jack. 1977. Cover-Up and Collective Identity. Social Problems 25, 1–25. Keynes, John Maynard. 1936. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Knorr Cetina, Karin. 2005a. How Are Global Markets Global? The Architecture of a Flow World. In The Sociology of Financial Markets, ed. by Karin Knorr Cetina and Alex Preda. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Knorr Cetina, Karin. 2005b. Culture in Global Knowledge Societies. In The Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Culture, ed. by Mark D. Jacobs and Nancy Weiss Hanrahan. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Lang, Gladys Engel and Kurt Lang. 1983. The Battle for Public Opinion. New York: Columbia University Press. Lipset, Seymour Martin and William Schneider. 1983. The Confidence Gap. New York: The Free Press. Mutz, Diana C. 2007. Effects of “In-Your-Face” Television Discourse on Perceptions of a Legitimate Opposition. American Political Science Review 101:4, 621–35. Mutz, Diana C. and Byron Reeves. 2005. Videomalaise: Effects of Televised Incivility on Political Trust. American Political Science Review 99:1, 1–15. Schudson, Michael. 1982. Watergate in American Memory. New York: Basic Books. 179

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——. 2011. The Sociology of News. 2nd Ed. New York: W. W. Norton. Schuman, Howard and Jacqueline Scott. 1989. Generations and Collective Memory. American Sociological Review 54:3, 359–81. Schwartz, Barry. 2008. Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sewell, William H. 1996. Historical Events as Transformations of Structures: Inventing Revolution at the Bastille. Theory and Society 25:6, 841–81. Shils, Edward. 1974 [1956]. The Torment of Secrecy. Reprint. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ——. 1965. Charisma, Order, and Status. American Sociological Review 30:199–213. Simmel, Georg. 1950 [1908]. The Sociology of Georg Simmel, tr. and ed. by Kurt Wolff. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. Starkman, Dean. 2014. The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark. New York: Columbia University Press. Taylor, Mark. 2004. Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World without Redemption. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Thomas, W. I. and Florian Znaniecki. 1918. The Polish Peasant in Europe and America: monograph of an immigrant group. Boston: G. Badger. Thompson, John B. 1995. The Media and Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ——. 2000. Political Scandal. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Turner, Victor. 1974. Social Dramas and Ritual Metaphors. In Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Van Dijck, Jose. 2013. The Culture of Connectivity. New York: Oxford University Press. Vaughan, Diane. 1996. The Challenger Launch Decision. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Weber, Max. 1946a [1919]. Politics as a Vocation. In From Max Weber, ed. by Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press. ——. 1946b [1919]. Science as a Vocation. In From Max Weber, ed. by Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press. ——. 1968 [1922]. Economy and Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. Williams, Bruce A. and Michael X. Delli Carpini. 2011. After Broadcast News. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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16 Antigone in León The drama of trauma politics1 Alejandro Baer and Natan Sznaider

Well, then, if this is something fine among the gods, I’ll come to recognize that I’ve done wrong. But if these people here are being unjust may they endure no greater punishment than the injustices they’re doing to me. Antigone (Sophocles 2007: line 925, p. 42)

Can memory be a bad thing? Why is it always taken for granted that states and societies need to remember political tragedies in order to heal? What does “heal” mean in this respect? Whether in Argentina, South Africa, Spain, East Timor, or many other places that need to reckon with the past, memory is stirred through tribunals or truth commissions, memorials, state-sponsored commemorations and museums, oral history projects, and educational initiatives. Through memory, societies that have suffered political violence are supposed to come to terms with their past and to overcome it. A troubling question arises here, however: Can states and societies, like mourning or traumatized individuals, heal through a therapeutic process? Can we assume that people acting as groups, as collectives, undergo the same process as people acting as individuals? Trauma has developed into one of modern culture’s master concepts. However, there seems to be increasing consensus among memory scholars that the concept of trauma has been overstretched (Kansteiner 2004a, 2004b; Leys 2000; Sime 2013). If so, what does this mean for the nexus of memory and transitional justice, whether in its legal or its symbolic form? These are the questions we explore in this chapter. We will examine in particular the cases of Argentina and Spain, two societies in which discussions about the legacies of dictatorship, state terror, and grave human rights violations have gained extraordinary importance in contemporary political life. The desaparecidos of the Argentine military juntas (1976–1983) and the victims of Spanish Francoism (1936–1975) appear at the center of fervent discussions in which the processes of political violence, as well as the models of transitional justice that were adopted in its aftermath, are being revisited, questioned, and reinterpreted. The Argentinean and Spanish cases show that notions of trauma and analogies to trauma, human rights advocacy, and memorial production in the arts and literature are intimately entangled. They form the core of what we define as a pervasive “Never again” metanarrative, which projects

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criminal pasts unto the future as an avoidance imperative and at the same time renders these pasts insurmountable, haunting, and always present. To highlight this phenomenon and to come to terms with those specific historical cases, we will introduce classic Greek tragedy as method and metaphor for an alternative epistemology in memory studies that restores the political dimension of dealing with the aftermath of mass violence in post-conf lict societies, without losing sight of one of the original sites of trauma discourse.

From traumatized individuals to a traumatized society A widespread psychological credo holds that unpleasant memories are repressed and that only the truth will set one free. It takes for granted that individuals are held hostage to trauma. This notion applies not only to individual therapy but also to the contemporary culture of therapeutic politics. We wish to explore how the notion of trauma affects the scholarly and general understanding of societies that seek to overcome their legacies of large-scale political violence. Generally, the attribution of traumatic suffering is organized in two representational dimensions: one revolving around the difference between universal values and particular experiences, and the other, related one, involving the changing nature of the victim-­ perpetrator relationship. The respective balance between these dimensions affects the extent to which memories and representations of trauma are politically and culturally consequential. These themes are at the core of Dominick LaCapra’s (2001) distinction between structural and historical trauma, a distinction he perceives as central for coming to terms with the Holocaust. Structural trauma in his terms is related to “trans-historical absence and appears in all societies.” In this view, everyone is potentially a victim or a survivor. Historical trauma, however, refers to actual experiences, not to the identification experienced by “surrogate victims.” According to LaCapra, everybody can be subject to structural trauma. With respect to historical trauma and its representation, however, the distinction between and among victims, perpetrators, and bystanders is crucial. “Victim” is not a psychological category but rather a political one. Here, we move from psychology to history, from psychoanalysis to politics, from the individual to the collective level. The proliferation of museum exhibitions and memorial sites that represent not heroic narrations of nationhood but rather traumatic events indicates the centrality of negative foundational moments. Trauma also becomes inscribed in controversial rituals and laws. The latter are particularly conspicuous in societies that have emerged from protracted internal conf licts (like those in Argentina and Spain, for example), where the dividing lines between perpetrators and victims remain subject to interpretations of the past. Frequently the creation and resolution of collective traumas are addressed in terms of justice, in a process that can be referred to as traumatic transition. Accordingly, political trials, war crime tribunals, and truth and reconciliation commissions all become trauma “workshops,” but as the example of Spain indicates, the absence of such judicial bodies and proceedings may point to directions outside the usual judicial institutions where trauma needs to be dealt with. What is important to remember in these cases is that the cultural and linguistic “turns” have introduced the notion of structural and trans-historical trauma into the study of the Holocaust and its aftermath as well. In addition, in the context of psychological research on Holocaust victims, the notion of “intergenerational transmission” of trauma was developed. Thus we will see how the memory of the Holocaust (like a ghost) travels rather easily from the site and event of the destruction of European Jews to other sites. Memory of the Holocaust 182

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projects itself upon unrelated cases—the actual historical (dis)similarities between events are less relevant—through the notion of trauma. The point of departure is the traumatized individual, a universal category that cuts across all specific historical conf licts and epochs. And it reaches beyond the immediate victims and hovers over new generations. While a therapeutic approach has the potential to lead individuals to healing and closure (what Freud [1917] called “mourning”), the trauma politics and the aesthetics of “Never again” are incapable of resolution, as the trauma remains open and ongoing (as in what Freud called “melancholy” in individuals). This open character is intertwined with a human rights discourse resting partially on the concept of crimes against humanity, which are not subject to a statute of limitations and that are “particularly odious offenses in that they constitute a serious attack on human dignity.”2 The therapeutic approach downplays the concrete crimes through the idea that we are all victims. It also makes them fully atonable through a conversion experience to this point of view. The particular model of victim consciousness depends on its distinction between perpetrator and victim. In the particular (historical trauma) system, there can be no victim without a perpetrator—and conversely, to call someone a victim is to instantly accuse someone else of being a perpetrator. For the universal (structural trauma) concept, concentrating on the perpetrators undercuts the whole idea of victim consciousness.

Spain and Argentina: ever-returning traumatic pasts What do Spain and Argentina have in common? In historical terms, both countries had rightwing dictatorships that brutally persecuted real and perceived enemies: Spain mostly in the 1930s and 1940s and Argentina mostly in the late 1970s. In terms of the adopted models of historical justice, however, the cases of Spain and Argentina could not differ more. Spain’s Transición—the period between the death of Franco in 1975 and the completion of a new constitution in 1978—established a politics of consensus that advocated forgetting and placed the need for peace above that for justice. In contrast, in Argentina public remembrance of the previous regime’s crimes began the moment the dictatorship ended. The 1984 truth commission’s report, Nunca Más, and the 1985 trials held the members of the juntas—the leaders of the military dictatorship—accountable for human rights violations, and the memory of state terrorism achieved an extraordinary level of importance in Argentina’s political culture from the early stages of democracy. Spain has long been known for its successful transition from dictatorship to democracy after Franco’s death. Moreover, it has served as a model, showing how a society can move from authoritarianism to freedom, integrate into Europe, and modernize within a short time and without processes of revenge and retribution against those responsible for the crimes of the previous period. This image of success seemed to change in the year 2000 when civil society associations started to exhume victims of the Spanish Civil War from mass graves. The opening of these graves and the emergence of a surprisingly strong social movement driven by the Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory, ARMH) 3 generated intense debates that exposed conf licting political cultures, from both an ideological and a generational viewpoint, with respect to the legacy of Franco and the crimes committed during his dictatorship, and raised the question of whether Spain’s much-touted Transición was indeed as exemplary and virtuous as had been thought. Moreover, the memory recovery movement contends that the previous generation wrongly closed the past, and that Spain’s forgetting Franco’s victims during the transition to democracy has had negative effects on the quality of Spain’s democracy (Ferrándiz 2007). These views are more salient among the generations born after the 1960s. 183

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As they were only children when Franco died, they had no direct experience of the dictatorship and had not participated in the political pacts surrounding the 1977 Amnesty Law. This law shields from judicial prosecution those who under the terms of international human rights standards and jurisdiction are considered criminals. It is highly contested now, and there are fierce debates about whether it violates international human rights law (Aguilar 2012; Davis 2005; Encarnación 2008). We need to emphasize that the memoria histórica generation became familiar with the emergence of a transnational human rights regime and a globalized memory culture arising out of the memory of the Holocaust, among other things (Levy and Sznaider 2010). In this respect, the “recovery of historical memory” is understood to encompass not only a private initiative that seeks individual redress, through the finding and exhumation of graves and the identification of the bodies of victims, but also, in social and political terms, a set of initiatives—artistic, cultural, legal, and educational—that give public visibility to this same process of “recovery.” Memory work, according to its advocates, would address Spain’s democratic shortcomings and its incomplete Europeanization. (See the work of Ferrándiz 2006, 2013; Renshaw 2011; and Rubin 2014, among others). Memory, couched in the language of ARMH, consists of granting the previously silenced victims their proper place in society, and thus profoundly challenging the status quo with regard to public (non)remembrance of the civil war and Francoism. In other words, Spain became “Argentinized.” Spain and Argentina came together in the new millennium around the notion of traumatic memory. A striking example in the Spanish context is a short video produced by filmmaker Almudena Rodriguez in 2010, in which several Spanish actors, musicians, and writers p­ ortray 15 victims of Francoist policies. Each of them faces the camera, tells his story brief ly, and concludes with the following statement: “I did not have a trial or a lawyer or a sentence. My relatives are still searching for me. Until when?” Suddenly, the dead have a voice in society.4 The Spanish “recovery movement” incorporates exactly this tension between a haunting past and a haunted present, which is epitomized by the notion of “wounds” that finally close, thanks to “historical memory,” that is, thanks to the locating, exhuming, identifying with DNA techniques, and proper burying of the victims of Francoism. The discourse of trauma and a positivist epistemology of “recovery” of an allegedly silenced, unmediated, and truthful history have become central components of the Spanish memorialist discourse. But there could also be another side to this, where closure is considered an unwarranted option, even in the unlikely case that the demands of restorative justice were ever met. Thus, exhumations do not have to lead toward the liberation of memory, and through this means, to the healing of Spain’s lingering traumas, to solace and closure (Sime 2013). Rather, they facilitate “modes of encounter with the past—indeed with the dead” (38), in which the past remains open and asserts its rights in the present. In the Spanish case, the violent past is not interpreted in terms of civil war that calls for “reconciliation” and “starting a new chapter,” one of looking ahead. Instead, the new chapter is one of looking back. What was “thrown into oblivion,” the term coined by Santos Juliá (2003, 2011) in his passionate defense of the agreements and balances struck in the transition, are no longer the fratricidal fights of a civil war, but crimes against humanity committed by the victors of that war and later swept under the carpet. And these are crimes that not only have no statute of limitations but also call for amendment and even repeal of the legislation that ignored them and for restitution in its full scope. If, in legal terms, the crime against humanity is not subject to a statute of limitations, then in moral and political terms it is characterized by its validity and operation, by its constant posing of questions to the present. The dead now speak through a third generation and become powerful signifiers in 184

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contemporary society. “With the feet standing in the present, looking at the 1930s and the finger pointing to the transición,” writes Rodrigo, the “recovery of historical memory” constitutes in itself an attempt at a “metanarrative on our contemporaneity” (2012: 243–244). This metanarrative of trauma and victimhood opens new rifts in the political sphere, as the category of victim is particularly open to contradiction and fierce debate in a post–civil war society. The politics of memory of the recovery movement is embedded in a philosophy of ­h istory that claims the need to “undo history” and bring in the perspective of the victims (see Silva et al. 2004). It is no coincidence that philosophers and cultural theorists—rather than political scientists or historians—provide the theoretical backing for this metanarrative. The former have introduced the Benjaminean metaphor of “brushing history against the grain” and the notion of new generations inheriting a “messianic power” from their predecessors, which obliges them to remember their suffering and lost struggles.5 Several historians have raised objections to applying such categories in the Spanish context. Above all, they are concerned that memory is being preserved at the expense of history (Gallego 2008), particularly by constructing a victim-centered narrative that lacks comprehensiveness or complexity by erasing the political history of the conf lict and establishing a sharp distinction between the guilty perpetrators and passive, innocent, and non-political victims. It is no coincidence that the paradigm and universalized model of these narratives—the Holocaust—has left its stamp on the methods chosen by the social actors involved in memory work to relate to this past and project it in the public sphere.6

Greek drama as method and metaphor But in addition to a Benjaminean model of memory, we will here discuss a classical Greek one as performed by Greek tragedy. Greek tragedy is pertinent for memory studies, because it incorporates many, and often irreconcilable, voices. Moreover, Greek dramas were public rituals in which moral dilemmas were played out publicly. As in Greek tragedy, the audiences of the politics of memory are shaken emotionally by the dramas performed in public. Greek tragedy also bridges the dilemmas of universalism and particularism, partaking of both realms at the same time. Take Sophocles’ Antigone, for instance. No drama presents the conflict between human and divine law in more tragic form than this one (Steiner 1996). It can be easily interpreted as a tragic conflict between the interests of the state and human rights—or “victims’ rights,” which is the basic conflict between post-violence compromise on the one hand and memory and morality on the other. It is no coincidence that Hegel, in his Phenomenology of Mind (1807), analyzed Antigone as the quintessential ancient drama for modern times. He points out that the state and the family, as the source of the citizenry of which the state is composed, should be in perfect harmony. The state is the institution that preserves society, and society is the building block of the state. They are not in harmony but rather in irreconcilable conflict. Antigone is acted out each time societies and states engage in conflict over questions of memory and forgetting, conscience and law. In ancient Greece, the ability to forget was considered a classic political virtue. It was able to prevent evil things from happening again. As Christian Maier (2010) demonstrates, what happened after the Athenian defeat in the Peloponnesian War can be considered a model for other post-violence settings. He quotes from a now-iconic speech by Andocides: “When you returned from Piraeus, having it in your power to exact vengeance, you decreed to let go of the past, and you thought it better to think of the safety of the city than of your own private grievances, and a decree was issued to forget past wrongdoing” (13). Maier recalls the 185

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history of the virtue of forgetting, from Cicero to Churchill, and claims that the Holocaust changed politics dramatically, so that its evils do not allow this political virtue to be adopted anymore. The trauma literature as well as the literature on transitional justice (and social memory) usually asserts exactly the opposite. Memory and justice are inseparable. Victims of injustice deserve to be commemorated; moreover, they need to be commemorated if society is to heal the wounds of injustice. A close look at the language surrounding testimony or oral history projects about conf lict and violence is very telling for its conf lation of individual and collective memory processes and what we have called therapeutic politics. In Spain, the oral history archive of the ARMH, the memorialist movement, used to employ the formulation se buscan donantes de memoria (“we seek memory donors”). The analogy to blood donors is significant, as it implies a vital need. Stories and testimonies of a silenced past would be the sap that permits life and leads to healing, for both the individual who overcomes trauma and the traumatized society at large. We are brought back to Antigone. Antigone wants to bury her brother against the direct orders of the new ruler of Thebes, Creon, who wants the body to remain unburied. The punishment of the traitor to the city is to remain a cadaver, whereas Antigone wants to turn the cadaver of her brother into a corpse through traditional burial rites. We are in a situation in which one side considers morality more important than peace and another side, often identified in our time with amnesty and amnesia, regards the process of forgetting as the necessary precondition to peace that can make real morality possible. This has been the case for the successors of the victors of the Spanish Civil War.7 We may call this the typical Creonian position. Creon exemplifies, in Sophocles’ tragedy, the ruler (and victor in the civil war) who seeks to impose this exact view by prohibiting the burial of the leader of the losing side. This is fundamentally the opposite view to that of Antigone, who—if we may impose our categories on Sophocles’ drama for a moment—basically assumes that civil peace can never be endangered by her activities, which are dictated by higher moral law and religion, and that no amount of mobilization, polarization, and anathematization can ever bring about a complete breakdown of the state but will always purify it. Such is the power of memory. But in ancient Greek tragedy, things are never as clear-cut as in modern cultural studies of memory. Clearly, the ultimate reality after a civil war situation is the need for peace or “Never again Civil War.” This is an argument in favor of f lexible principles, whose essence is to find the best solution, given the constraints of the situation and the likelihood at any point of making things worse or less durable. These principles are designed to lead to the best compromise. These concerns involve weighing the benefits of remembering and reacting to past abuses and injustices against the costs that remembering could incur for such violations in the future. This, among other things, has led the process of transition in Spain and is the quintessence of the so-called pact of oblivion, as it was termed at a later stage. But this is not as easy as it may sound. More is involved, as in the classic Hegelian interpretation of Antigone as the presentation of irreconcilable ethical positions: the needs of the state as opposed to the needs of family, religion, and ritual. Both sides—those who want to leave the dead where they are and those who want to exhume them in order to rebury them, those who want to forget in order to live and those who want to remember in order to live—are engaged in a relationship in which they define and structure each other. Spain is not alone. Argentina is another site where we can see how Antigone is played out in the debates regarding the desaparecidos of the military dictatorship. Thus, in Argentina the politics of memory is being performed differently by those who remain unpunished for 186

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their deeds, those who want to bury family members, and those who prefer to have their deceased relatives continue to live like ghosts within Argentinean society. Thus, memory as trauma dons different guises and enacts different tragedies and trajectories. There are those in Argentina who refuse closure, reject burials and reburials, even reject death—la muerte no existe, in the words of some adherents of this movement—and refuse compensation. As Bevernage and Colaert (2014) show, in Spain, too, the families and some of the Republican organizations contest the exhumations. They believe that the bodies need to stay where they are as testimonies to what happened and as part of the refusal of closure. In this way the Argentine desaparecidos and the Spanish paseados (those executed and buried in mass graves) continue to live as ghosts, between the world of the living and the world of the dead. They are like the Furies of Greco-Roman mythology, calling for justice and retribution rather than closure and forgiveness (for an analysis of the Furies with respect to the politics of memory, see Booth 2001). The Furies (see Oresteia, by Aeschylus) are the handmaidens of justice; they make sure that nothing is forgotten. They are awakened by the ghost of Clytemnestra urging them to pursue Orestes to claim the memory and revenge of matricide; they track Orestes in a mad and furious way until justice, in the form of a jury trial, is introduced to Athens. No mourning is possible here. In madness, there is no past to be overcome; and in revenge there is no future to be taken care of. There is only a present of injustice. As we know, Antigone prefers death to life, justice and divine law to a common future. And in Greek tragedy, as in politics, there are actors and there are spectators; there are actions hidden from the actors but revealed to the spectators. Where does that leave us, as students of memory? What is it exactly that provides us with the instruments with which we observe the actions of others? We are not surprised to encounter readings of Antigone that leave no room for doubt and ambivalence, as Sophocles did. For instance Joan Ramon Resina (2010) is more than critical of the Spanish Transición and thinks that it is suffering from an Antigone complex. For Resina, Creon, who forbids the burial of Polynices, is clearly the villain, while Antigone, by defying his order, becomes the heroine of the play. Antigone’s loyalty to the dead is the truly noble act, and Resina identifies her defiance of Creon as a reenactment of the Spanish situation, with the Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica playing the role of Antigone, while the post-Franco state of Spain’s transition takes on the role of Creon. Clearly, more is at stake here than Greek tragedy and its readings by critics of Spanish politics. What is at stake here is the political role of memory in general and its relationship to trauma. Antigone is a political text, but one should push beyond the purported dichotomy between Creon and Antigone. Clearly, Creon is the tyrant and we modern-day democrats identify with Antigone. And like many tyrants, Creon appeals to peace, security, and loyalty to the city. However, if Antigone was right and Creon wrong, this would not be tragedy. It would also make the clear-cut case that memory is the most significant aspect of transitional justice. No memory—no democracy. However, we do not want to pit memory against forgetting or justice against peace. Thus, one can look at Antigone not only as a symbol of radical democracy but also as one of religious piety; these are not mutually exclusive. Clearly, she has more allegiance to the dead than to the living. Most interpretations of Antigone do not ref lect a third character in the play, Haemon, Creon’s son and Antigone’s fiancé (for an attempt to rehabilitate and center Haemon in the tragedy, see Barker 2006). We should not forget that Sophocles builds his tragedy around the fact that neither Creon nor Antigone is willing to yield, to compromise, or to listen to others. Both argue and act from a position of absolute justice, and the audience may or may not determine that duty lies with the dead or with the living, with the laws of the land or with the eternal laws 187

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of the gods. But enter Haemon. He is the only one who talks about political prudence. He tells his father: But, for a man to learn, even a wise man, is nothing shameful, nor to learn to bend and give way. You see how, in the winter storms, the trees yield that save even their twigs, but those who oppose it are destroyed root and branch. Just so the captain who never slackens his sail once he’s stretched it gets his boat turned and sails the rest with benches upside down. Rather, yield your anger and let yourself change. Even though I’m young, a good idea might come from me: It would be best by far that man be born full of all the knowledge there is, but, if it usually happens not to turn out that way, to learn from those who speak well is a good substitute. (Sophocles 2007: 39, lines 725–730) Here, the political wisdom of citizenship means yielding. Haemon has disappeared in the sea of Antigone interpretations (as he has in memory studies), and in the end he commits suicide, but in many ways he can serve us as a guide to the modern politics of memory. But cautioning against the complexities of the demands imposed by human rights imperatives and the institutional requirements of transitional justice should not be construed as an argument against trials as such or truth commissions when the dead are being reclaimed from oblivion. Much depends on local circumstances. And recent scholarship may even complicate the picture by dwelling precisely on the tensions between legalist orientations of global-universal-transitional justice projects and the priorities and needs of the victims, which are particular and bound to context and culture (Robins 2013). How are societies to deal with their legacies of mass violence? Should we allow their decisions to be overturned by an international tribunal? And what is the significance of different moments in history? These are important questions in the politics of memory, as one of its key concepts, “trauma,” ignores the circumstantial by stressing the universality of its theoretical notions. And so does the concept of human rights. They are universalist concepts that exclude or subordinate community, culture, and context. That is precisely what the Greeks bring in again: agency and local/communal/particular notions of dealing with crime and past wrongs without giving up what we call trauma today. One way in which the unfinished business of traumatic memory emerges is through the presence of the absent, the ghost.

Ghosts of the Holocaust and the aesthetics of traumatic memory Ghosts are everywhere when one looks at cultural theory applied to the legacies of mass violence. In the case of Spain, many books and articles about recent Spanish history use the term “ghosts” (e.g. Ferrándiz 2006; Tremlett 2007; Labanyi 2002). For most cultural critics “ghosts” are not mere metaphor. They are genuine. Denying their reality is like denying the reality of history—or of trauma, for that matter. Derrida speaks of a new “hauntology.” In Spectres of Marx (1994), ghosts play a formative role. They are real and therefore are the “real” victims of history who climb out of their graves to claim what is theirs. Ghosts are there yet not there; they are like the desaparecidos of Latin America, the paseados of the Spanish mass graves, the dead of the Holocaust. They haunt our present and emerge through literature, films, memorial sites, and even mass graves. These ghosts will haunt societies until they are confronted in a healing process, which always exists only in the future. As a sort of mirage, it is never reached. This is not an easy subject for empirical sociology, and one needs to have recourse to works of literature and film to capture these thoughts.8 188

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In recent Argentine literature and film the desaparecidos inhabit Argentine memory through spectrality (Ernesto Semán’s Soy un bravo piloto de la nueva China, 2011; Mariana Enríquez’s Chicos Que Vuelven, 2011; and Benjamin Avila’s film Infancia Clandestina, 2011). As in Hamlet, the dead know of a secret to be revealed, a wrong to be righted, and an injustice to be made public, or a wrongdoer to be apprehended.9 Novels and other cultural productions such as art, installations, and films explore the presence of what no longer exists, and they facilitate an engagement, a dialogue, with the ghosts, with what is past. Such pasts can never be overcome and are always present. While in Argentina and Spain many of these memorial efforts in the cultural sphere are carried out in the hope that their work may result in raising public awareness of the need for juridical processes and thus closure, healing and closure may never be achieved. Ghosts emerge as a consequence of shifting the dominant frame of interpreting past violence from politics to metaphysics and aesthetics. This shift takes the form of multiple simultaneous transitions that are constitutive of the “Never again” paradigm: from agency to victimhood, from war and conf lict to genocide and mass atrocity, from closure to cultural trauma and post-memory. Here is where the language of the Holocaust and its aesthetics of memory become highly relevant and useful. The Holocaust serves not only as a bridging metaphor but also as a cognitive model—a script—for structuring and framing the events of the past (Baer 2011; Kaminsky 2014). For example, the record provided by photographs and their artistic exhibition play an important role in this process, as is the so-called post-memorial work by families of Holocaust victims (see the work of Marianne Hirsch 2012), where bodies can no longer be traced. This kind of post-memorial work is being adapted in Argentinean and Spanish memory projects (see, for instance, the documentary series Espacios de Memoria, produced recently by the Argentine Estela Schindel, or Clemente Bernard’s Donde habita el olvido on Spanish victims of Franco).10 Post-memory seeks to articulate the gap between the historical events and the way succeeding generations try to look at these events. The “post-memory generation” is inscribed at this particular temporal moment, marked by “looking backward rather than ahead and defining the present in relation to a troubled past … it is a consequence of traumatic recall but … at a generational remove” (Hirsch 2008: 106). Saul Friedländer, in his magisterial works on the Holocaust (2007), has used the term “disbelief ” as a central part of his methodology. Disbelief tries to give an account of the victims’ voices in the study of history. While Friedländer used this approach to write the history of the Holocaust, the sense of disbelief has traveled to other sites of victimization. The Argentine truth commission report, Nunca Más (Never Again) (a term directly borrowed from the Dachau monument), which became an icon of the global politics of memory, starts with the following paragraph: Many of the events described in this report will be hard to believe. This is because the men and women of our nation have only heard of such horror in reports from distant places. The enormity of what took place in Argentina, involving the transgression of the most fundamental human rights, is sure, still, to produce that disbelief which some used at the time to defend themselves from pain and horror. (CONADEP 1986: 9) The imperative “Nunca más” was, for the authors, an expression of hope that the historical cycle of repression in Argentina could be closed. However, the notion that the events are “hard to believe” is an integral part of the trauma. Hard to believe means that even though 189

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the events happened, they are, like ghosts in “uncanny” stories, not part of the natural order of things. While the Nunca Más commission recommended reparations and prosecutions, it introduced a narrative of the Junta’s crimes that suggested that the logic of law would never make sense of their very monstrosity.

Conclusion Politically, the ghostly trauma discourse has the potential to create political and moral obligation to others and is couched in the language of human rights. Ghosts of the past have one clear message: “Never again.” Can we identify “never again” in different contemporary settings in which politics and history are being subordinated to other epistemological and psychological needs of victimhood and suffering? What matters for the topic we are exploring here is what the concept of trauma and, with it, the traveling and ever-returning ghosts of the past mean for a theoretical formulation of the relationship between memory and transitional justice. This question led us to look at Greek tragedy as an aid to understanding. The drama Antigone helps to illuminate post-conf lict scenarios in places that seem to be trapped in zero-sum memory struggles and enmeshed in binary categories of perpetrators and traumatized victims or victim communities/ descendants. While a violent past has repeatedly shown an ability to erupt into the present and future of societies, Greek tragedy may serve both the citizen and the researcher as a symbol and model for another kind of political action. We dedicate this chapter to our friend and colleague Ulrich Beck, who passed away on the first day of 2015. He will remain a constant inspiration.

Notes   1  We thank Daniela Flesler, Daniel Levy, Adam Muller and Yagmur Karakaya for critical feedback and helpful comments.   2  “Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.” United Nations Treaty Collection, 17 July 1998. https://treaties.un.org/Pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=TREATY&mtdsg_no=XVIII-10& chapter=18&lang=en (accessed 22 March 2013).   3  The association was founded in 2000 by journalist Emilio Silva. The organization of ARMH coincided with the exhumation of the mass grave of Priaranza del Bierzo in the Province of León, the first to be carried out using archeological and forensic techniques. The remains of 13 Republican men were found in the grave, including those of Emilio Silva’s grandfather. Since then ARMH has headed projects in Spain and called on the government for justice in the cases of the people who disappeared during the Francoist repression (see Silva and Macías 2003).   4  See www.youtube.com/watch?v=qd4m1pvvfcgwww.youtube.com/watch?v=qd4m1pvvfcg.   5  Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, 1969. The renowned philosopher Reyes Mate (1991, 2008) and his research group Filosofía después del Holocausto have played an important role in nurturing this theoretical underpinning of the memorialist narrative.   6  It is interesting to note that historian Santos Juliá blames a “Jewish approach” for Spain’s contemporary revisting and reinterpreting of its troubled past: “in relation to the Holocaust, these practices have consisted, above all, in the demand that the past should not pass, meaning that it determines the politics of the present or that it is put at its service” (2011: 136).   7  The Spanish post-conflict scenario is even more complex, as the Transición occurred almost 40 years after the civil war and the memorial movement took another 25 years to emerge. This involves a multilayered temporality, with a variety of actors, across the political spectrum, representing the different roles in the Greek drama between 1975 and the present-day.   8  See, for instance, Gordon 2008, who in her book Ghostly Matters examines the works of Luisa Valenzuela to connect the Argentinean desaparecidos to ghosts. “The ghost is alive” (64), as she so insightfully 190

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claims. Gordon tries to connect the literary theory of ghosts inspired by Derrida to an engaged sociological analysis of ghosts.   9  Silvana Mandolessi, “In Search of Another Truth: The Disappeared in Contemporary Novels of the Argentine Post-Dictatorship,” presented at the workshop “Auf der Suche”at the University of Konstanz, December 2011. Unpublished.   10  www.proppi.uff.br/ciberlegenda/espacos-de-memoria and http://clemente.4ormat.com/#

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17 Urban spaces, city cultures, and collective memories Kevin Loughran, Gary Alan Fine, and Marcus Anthony Hunter

Cities are indelibly shaped by memory. City governments, real estate developers, entrepreneurs, community organizers, and neighborhood residents constantly present and debate ideas about how local history and character should be utilized to construct urban space. Urban theorists, however, have tended to overlook the critical role of memory in shaping city spaces. Most accounts of urban processes have focused on matters such as political economy, culture, social (dis)organization, institutions of power, and growth coalitions. Theories are often presented as universal but are inextricably linked to the cities where scholars developed them and that serve as empirical models. The major “schools” of American urban sociology were each generated by scholars operating in unique times and places: industrial Chicago (Park and Burgess 1925; Wirth 1928; Drake and Cayton 1945), postindustrial Los Angeles (Davis 1990; Flusty 1994; Soja 1996), and New York as a cultural nexus ( Jacobs 1961; Greenberg 2008; Zukin 2010). These three schools represent distinct ways to theorize the city (Halle 2003; Hunter 2014); each has its share of boosters and detractors. While the intellectual distinctions among the three schools may be exaggerated, as Molotch (2002) suggests, it is undeniable that these constellations of social-scientific inquiry contain many of the canonical works of urban scholarship and remain theoretical and ideological guideposts for contemporary scholars. An approach to urban sociology that is grounded in a city in which history—and its display— is an insistent reality for residents (Boyer 1994), and even a justification for a tourist economy, might have a very different tenor as urban actors look to the past as a basis of civic affiliation and local planning. Such cities include Philadelphia, Venice, and Jerusalem. While we make no claims about the relative merits of each approach, we argue that a crucial gap exists in urban sociological scholarship at the intersection of collective memory and urban development. This gap has been addressed only sporadically, often lacking a common theoretical narrative to draw these disparate pieces into conversation. Our chapter addresses this gap, delineating a framework for theorizing the nexus between collective memory and urban change. We illustrate how collective memory works in conjunction with political economy, culture, and human ecology to create community. Urban memories can be leveraged for development, used as a basis of political mobilization, and model the daily socio-spatial practices and lived experiences of citizens. For reasons of space, we do not describe the growing literature on social mnemonics and collective 193

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memory (Olick and Robbins 1998; Olick, Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Levy 2011). However, this approach, even when not grounded in spatial organization, recognizes the power of the past (“the past as a foreign country” [Lowenthal 1986]) to create social order and communal affiliation. In this chapter, we attempt to situate the linkage of memory and urban space by analyzing socio-spatial transformations “from above,” “from the middle,” and “from below.” In so doing, we demonstrate the critical interplay between urban change and collective memory. With a focus on three (macro, meso, and micro) dimensions of urban change, we demonstrate the central role of memory and history in the production of urban space. Our review focuses on claims-making that deploys real or imagined histories and memories, where local character and visions of a common past are linked to an imagined future. This is what French historian Pierre Nora (2006) speaks of as places of memory (“les lieux de mémoire”). Ultimately we argue that collective memory can either frustrate or facilitate urban change, as it is mobilized at all three levels. It becomes a powerful tool for framing and advancing urbanites’ actions for and against particular forms of development across time and place.

The city and collective memory “from above” While collective memory has not been a formal aspect of growth machine analyses, urban regime theory is built on the assumption that the social construction of “place” is fundamentally shaped by collective ideas about local character and history (Molotch 1976; Logan and Molotch 1987; Molotch et al. 2000; Suttles 1984). In the process of “creative destruction” that characterizes urban development under capitalism, the city is continually built anew. As an 1860 New York Times article put it, “old landmarks are swept away, and even good buildings are pulled down to make room for better. The iconoclastic hand of improvement is everywhere busy and everywhere visible” (quoted in Munn 2004: 5). When older buildings, infrastructure, and public spaces are torn down, to be replaced with structures that are considered to be better suited to contemporary demands, a recognition of what was tends to remain and sometimes that past is longed for. As Maurice Halbwachs (1992) notes in his study of the “legendary topography” of the Holy Land, place memory shifts as a function of the social frameworks of the present. Further, whether held solely in the memory of local residents—like the Times writer of 1860—or revealed materially by architects or civic leaders— in memorials such as the one found on the site of Chicago’s since-demolished Haymarket Square—these places are in dialogue with the past. New structures often speak to the spaces that came before them in recall or, famously as in Berlin, in their erasure. The modern city is rich with gestures to the past—from the innumerable local tributes captured in place names, such as Philadelphia’s Germantown or Brooklyn’s Boerum Hill (Kasinitz 1988; Osman 2011), to broad architectural styles, such as Renaissance Revival, that reimagined historical buildings for the contemporary city. These built forms embody an effort by urban developers and architects to glorify a real or imagined past, both in appeals to the “high culture” of another time and place and in assertions of harmony with local architectural styles. Certainly, such links to the past are not always readily visible. But even the most functionalist aspects of the built environment are colored by local character and identity. Many Chicagoans have their favorite skyscraper; New Yorkers, their favorite subway line; and Angelenos, their favorite freeway. Thus, even while forging a universalistic fusion of architecture and society, the work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, or Louis Kahn and the other modernists has everywhere taken on a decidedly local complexion. 194

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More recent architectural styles have evoked an explicitly local connection with the past. The tenets of postmodernism—the current hegemonic style in urban planning and design— emphasize, among other principles, the importance of local context and history. Rather than reimagining European palaces for American cities à la Daniel Burnham or implementing grand modernizing plans à la Le Corbusier, the designers of postmodern projects have rooted the production of space in a reimagined local, rather than universal, history. We find an oft-cited example of this trend in the wave of “festival marketplaces” that swept the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, such as Baltimore’s Harborplace, Boston’s Faneuil Hall, and Chicago’s Navy Pier. At South Street Seaport, for example, the merchant shipyards of colonial Manhattan were transformed into a pastiche for middle-class leisure and consumption that reimagined a particular vision of New York’s history. Recent studies of urban development have affirmed the growing importance of “authenticity” and “place” in shaping how developers and city governments leverage history for real estate speculation and capital accumulation. In the contemporary city, where real estate development, tourism, and culture industries tend to dominate economic activity, placebased identities have become key assets for political and economic elites. To be sure, global cities in particular have long histories of commodified “places,” as countless Chinatowns and Little Italys can attest. These types of places illustrate elites’ desire to connect certain aspects of local history and identity—namely, those that can be neatly packaged and readily consumed by tourists—with strategies to create economic growth. Following the tradition of scholars such as Booth (1889–1891), Addams (1895), and Du Bois (1899), the Chicago School made studies of “place” a major line of inquiry into the dynamics of urban life. The sharply segregated metropolis of early twentieth-century Chicago provided sociologists with a “mosaic” of different urban communities (Park 1925: 40). The classic community studies of areas such as the Near North Side (Zorbaugh 1929), the city’s Jewish ghettos (Wirth 1928), and African American Bronzeville (Drake and Cayton 1945) became a model for thinking about how ideas about local community fuse with particular places. These studies that rooted urban communities in their historical context and encompassed many dimensions of local community life foreground our understanding of how collective memories and shared pasts structure communal spatial meanings. From the Chicago model’s insights, we can consider how contemporary “growth machine” development efforts interact with established local communities. Today’s urban development projects are typically antithetical to the federally funded postwar projects that leveled entire neighborhoods in the name of civic progress, creating abstract spaces in their wake—such as university campuses, state buildings, and the ubiquitous “barracks style” housing projects. Today, the specter of postwar urban renewal’s well-known failures (Zipp 2010), coupled with the increasingly visible political agency of individual communities (Hunter 2013; Marwell 2007), means that elite-led attempts to “renew” particular neighborhoods must work with local leaders and institutions to respect the “authentic” urban community (Loughran 2014). Such deference to “the local” can ostensibly legitimize contemporary urban redevelopment projects to outside stakeholders and can make such projects more palatable to local residents. Of course, elite engagements with community interests are purely superficial in some cases. When the power relations between elites and the local community are especially one-sided—as is often the case when city governments attempt to redevelop poor or “ethnic” communities—community input is often illusory, superseded by the interests of growth coalitions that tend to favor the commodification of local cultures and traditions over “legitimate” partnerships with marginalized communities (Dávila 2004; Arena 2012). Place-based 195

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identities then become valorized by elites for their legibility as tourist zones, as the links that residents form with each other—expressed in shared memories as well as in cultural objects, such as culinary and artistic traditions—help make a community legible to outside consumers. These visible symbols often serve as the focus of top-down efforts at community redevelopment. Scholars have illustrated numerous examples of this process: Gotham (2002), for example, demonstrates how New Orleans elites have used the tradition of Mardi Gras as an anchor for the city’s place-marketing strategies. In his study of the Philadelphia Barrio, Wherry (2011) details how symbols of the neighborhood’s arts scene became a crucial dimension of larger redevelopment efforts. In a similar context, Dávila (2004) illustrates how ideas about East Harlem’s Latina/o identity have been leveraged by growth machine elites to foster “culture industries,” redevelop the neighborhood, and attract tourists. Grams (2010) similarly demonstrates that ethnic communities in Chicago can leverage heritage for the purposes of community development. Other studies reiterate the notion that places rich in collective memory—especially those linked to a particular ethno-racial group, as further suggested by Harvey’s (2007) study of Black heritage sites in New Jersey and Shaw’s (2007) study of Montreal’s Chinatown—have become increasingly attractive sites for urban redevelopment. The leveraging of place-based collective memories for urban development extends well beyond ethno-racial enclaves. As many scholars have shown, this practice is seen in arts districts, gay neighborhoods, and other urban areas that have a strong (or at least easily legible) sense of collective identity. Zukin (1982, 1995) has illustrated how artist enclaves— neighborhoods where artists work and live—transform into arts districts—places where art and other commodities are consumed. Through this process, developers appropriate the aesthetic and spatial dimensions that embody artistic production (for example, industrial lofts) and use this place-identity to drive tourism and commerce (Whitt 1987; Strom 2002). More recently, this development strategy is also apparent in top-down efforts to brand the historical enclaves of (white, middle-class) gays and lesbians for cultural consumption. This co-optation has grown into a widespread phenomenon in large Western cities, as suggested by evidence from Chicago (Reed 2003), Paris (Sibalis 2004), London (Collins 2004), and Manchester (Binnie and Skeggs 2004).

The city and collective memory “from the middle” But the use of collective memories for reshaping urban space is not the exclusive practice of city governments, growth coalitions, and real estate interests. Groups of urbanites also read and interpret the visible symbols of community in their everyday socio-spatial practices. Constellations of local symbols create visions of “authentic” urban neighborhoods that often are highly valorized by today’s middle-class consumers (Brown-Saracino 2009; Zukin 2010). This connection between local symbols of collective memory and middle-class consumption has important implications for urban space. In the “search for authenticity” that has been bound up in gentrification processes (Brown-Saracino 2009; Osman 2011), individual gentrifiers—usually white, highly educated, and middle-class (Zukin 1987; Lees 2000; Smith 2002)—move into communities that have been deemed “authentic,” in contrast to the “mass-produced” suburbs and “sanitized” downtown districts. As scholars such as Neil Smith (2002) have argued, contemporary gentrification processes represent a much more pervasive “urban strategy” than the narratives of individual gentrifiers would suggest (Lloyd 2006; Pattillo 2007). Thus, while the movement en masse of middle-class whites into communities 196

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of color is less of a “bootstraps” movement than many gentrifiers would like to believe, how gentrifiers read and understand local collective memories is a crucial, and sometimes overlooked, aspect of gentrification processes. Gentrifiers armed with “authentic” local histories intersect in numerous ways with their “new” urban neighborhoods. Interventions by gentrifiers at the levels of housing, commerce, and public space reify the legible past, inscribing new spaces with a “gentrified” vision of community (Brown-Saracino 2009; Zukin 2010). Gentrifiers use their readings of collective memories to assert a connection with the local. Such connections can be deployed in a variety of ways; some use them as a means to respect (their interpretation of ) history and local character—seen, for example, in painstaking attempts to restore the “authentic” details of brownstones (Kasinitz 1988; Osman 2011). Others leverage collective memories as legitimating strategies, often deployed for potential profit by entrepreneurs and brownstoners who hold a “mix of cultural, social, and economic motivations” (Zukin 2010: 20). In spite of collective memory’s peripheral role in most studies of gentrification, some inf luential scholars have underscored the importance of history in shaping urban change. In particular, Sharon Zukin has written extensively on the interrelationships among cultural tastes, gentrification, and the production of socio-spatial meanings in the city (1982, 1995, 2010). Zukin describes how the valorization of “authentic” cultural products has been translated to the level of the neighborhood and shapes both the aesthetic and social dimensions of urban space. Zukin’s research suggests that attention to collective memory in gentrification processes illuminates the contradictory impulses and practices that emerge in gentrifying contexts. Even when gentrifiers sympathize with the existing spatial needs of longtime residents and respect local history, their very presence in the neighborhood creates conf licts that can undermine tenuous political or socio-spatial solidarities and threaten the “authenticity” that many newcomers fetishize. Other scholars have illustrated various dimensions of this process. In his study of Chicago’s “neo-bohemian” Wicker Park neighborhood, Lloyd (2006) demonstrates how older gentrifiers use their comparatively deeper connections to local history to distinguish themselves from newer middle-class arrivals. Various “waves” of gentrification create layers of local memories and expose the f lows of economic and cultural capital that migrate with gentrifiers in their quest for an “authentic” habitus. Illustrating that the “search for authenticity” and the valorization of “place” goes beyond middle-class white residents, Pattillo (2007) shows how African American gentrifiers engage with local history on Chicago’s South Side, as Hunter (2013) does in Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward. In her multi-site study of four gentrifying communities, Brown-Saracino (2009) reveals the threads that link “social preservationists”—gentrifiers who seek to preserve the social and spatial characteristics of their new neighborhoods. These studies illustrate how collective memory intersects with gentrification processes, impacting the production of new urban spaces and the cultural interpretation of existing ones. While gentrifiers differ in magnitude from vast “urban renewal” schemes, the process of reading local history and character for the stimulation of economic and cultural capital is markedly similar. For outsiders, local collective memories often amount to little more than a text to be read, and engagement with local traditions and histories is largely superficial for many gentrifiers, cultural consumers, real estate developers, and government actors. Gentrifiers may, as Zukin (2010: 20) suggests, bring a “mix of cultural, social, and economic motivations” to their socio-spatial interactions with existing communities. However, the relationship between collective memory and gentrification is deeply affected by power relations—newcomers who hold disproportionate levels of the “forms of capital” 197

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(Bourdieu 1984) relative to existing residents often see their “vision” for community and memory triumph (Lloyd 2006; Brown-Saracino 2009). But collective memories have more than one side. In spite of top-down efforts at cooptation and commodification, urbanites continually reclaim the city of the past through everyday practices and collective actions. Residents reinscribe urban spaces with memory, even when material traces of local histories have been erased from the built environment. Gestures to the past are not the exclusive province of developers and other growth machine elites. Just as the legible symbols of collective memory can be co-opted by elites in the name of economic development, urban residents—“the active, sometimes skilled users of culture” (Swidler 1986: 277)—similarly utilize history to shape their locales.

The city and collective memory “from below” Throughout history, memory-rich urban spaces have often served as the focus of political mobilizations. From the Bastille to Tahrir Square, the people who drive revolutions and other social movements look to spaces infused with history to give legitimacy and visibility to their movements. These events can be linked to a variety of emotions from anger, sadness, to crowd joys (Lofland 1982; Ehrenreich 2006). Like the developers and gentrifiers discussed in the above sections, activists and revolutionaries leverage their city’s cultural symbols to make spatial claims. The same areas targeted by elites for redevelopment projects can serve as counter-hegemonic spaces of refuge and mobilization. The same socio-spatial symbols that make collective memories “visible” to consumers and developers can be activated by the very cultural producers and everyday people whose labors and life histories create and shape local identities. Despite the links among urban space, collective memory, and social movements, sociological scholarship contains little analysis of these connections. In each of the major schools of urban sociology, the “from-below” aspect of collective memory is underdeveloped, as their respective theoretical frameworks predominantly focus on the top-down restructuring of urban space. New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles have all been the sites of important social movements, yet scholars have largely ignored these events as key dimensions of urban processes. When sociologists have gone beyond elite-led processes—whether conceived of as “growth machines,” “ecology,” or “revanchism”—they have focused on the ethnographic texture of urban poverty (Duneier 1999; Venkatesh 2000), rather than on the contestations that emerge around political-economic restructuring, racial segregation, poverty, and other issues. The result is a theoretical and an empirical void around issues of memory in the urbansociological literature. In this section, we link sociological studies of urban movements to our theory of cities and collective memory, illustrating how memory processes work in a dialectical fashion. The malleability of local collective memories enables strategic actors to leverage cultural symbols in the name of diverse social movements. In some cases, this comes in response to the topdown co-optation by powerful actors discussed in the previous section. In other cases, mobilizations around resonant spatial symbols provide visibility for activists and revolutionaries, even in the absence of preexisting conf licts over the use of local places. For many people, the symbolic capital inscribed in urban space is underused until enterprising actors, serving as movement entrepreneurs, reignite relevant values and historical memories. Urban public spaces infused with the symbolic power of state ideology—liberté, égalité, fraternité and the like—become resonant even for groups that wish to challenge the status quo. It is precisely the spatialization of master narratives and nationalistic collective memories 198

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that make public spaces key venues for revolutions and popular uprisings. Insurgent groups that successfully link their movements to preexisting national symbols can stake claim to the power of the state. For that reason it is not surprising that movements as disparate as the African American Civil Rights Movement, the Tea Party, and Abortion Rights and Pro-Life groups have gathered on the National Mall and invoked the Declaration of Independence in their rhetoric. The attachment of diverse groups to these and other symbols of U.S. national identity evince the malleability of collective memories and the spaces that contain them (Schwartz 2000; Fine 2001; Berezin 2002). Though scholars of memory have long studied how social groups or “mnemonic communities” (Zerubavel 1997) adapt state ideologies and collective memories for strategic purposes, few scholars have translated these ideas to the urban environment. To link empirical studies of place, culture, and development to the theoretical and empirical traditions of memory studies, we draw from a variety of studies to illustrate the mnemonic texture of the city. We focus our analysis specifically on three broad types: state spaces, subaltern places, and what Sassen (2011) terms the “global street.” State spaces represent one key site where collective memories intersect with mobilizations. In cities, these environments have long histories, dating at least to the emergence of modern urbanization processes and nation-states. New systems of governance spurred the development of public spaces, marked as sites of ritual and governmental power (Foucault [1978] 2009; Levinson 1998; Doss 2010). Monuments and other permanent sites of commemoration, such as Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia or the National Mall in Washington, organize the city as a tool of communal recall. They emphasize features that those with resources and interests wish to preserve or build. Such spaces often stand silent, or as sites for the tourist gaze, but they also can be used for festival events or for sponsored rituals of commemoration. Physical spaces include the parade grounds, piazzas, and plazas of imperial and colonial cities, in addition to government buildings and other spatial symbols that express the power of the sovereign or the state and make this power legible to the mass of subjects (Brenner et al. 2003). Yet, as Scott (2012) points out, even jaywalking can be a political statement, capturing the right to own the street in the face of systems of control. As sites of memory, state spaces present a governing ideology and official history at the level of the built environment (Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz 1991; Vinitzky-Seroussi 2002). But such sites remain open to multiple interpretations—just as Abraham Lincoln’s memory was appropriated, in different ways, by socialists, conservatives, and immigrants (Schwartz 2000). The memory of place is translated through the ideological lens of the user (Hayden 1995). Often a master narrative inscribed in urban space—such as the National Mall in Washington or the Place de la Concorde in Paris—is far from the final word. As in the case of other master narratives, groups can position themselves vis-à-vis state space in multiple ways. In some cases, groups mobilize to draw distinctions between their “populist” demands and a “repressive” political structure, seen for example in the cases of Cairo’s Tahrir Square in 2011 (Nanabhaya and Farmanfarmaian 2011), Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989 (Hershkovitz 1993; Lee 2009), and Washington, D.C.’s March on Washington in 1963 (Barber 2002). Such political gatherings, made dramatic through the crush of bodies, can draw distinctions between a nation’s ideals and its practices or can give visibility to marginalized groups. These movements can also build on collective memories around past achievements, particularly in spaces with a history of democratic contestation of state power, seen for example in protests in New York’s Union Square (Zukin 2010: ch. 4) or London’s Hyde Park (Mitchell 2003). 199

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Activists also mobilize around collective memories in subaltern places to shape cities. Forged in the face of socio-spatial marginalization along lines of race, gender, class, sexuality, or national origin, these sites are often rich with collective memories “from below,” particularly in light of responses to shared trauma (Huyssen 2003). In such locations, communities, activists, and social movement groups forge common identities around salient cultural or political issues (Roy 2011; Clayton 2011). We find a prime example in the long history of activism in Black communities in the United States, as places like Harlem and South Philadelphia—and even Montgomery, Alabama—take on a spiritual and cultural significance (Kelley 1992; Marable and Mullings 1999; Hunter 2013). Moments of place-based artistic production, such as the Harlem Renaissance, evince the power of subaltern places to foster the collective identities, actions, and memories that shape cities in material and symbolic ways. Immigrant enclaves (Iskander 2007; Liu and Geron 2008), queer spaces (Armstrong 2002; Shepard and Smithsimon 2011: ch. 4), and gendered communities (Damousi 1991; Anwar 2010) have also provided the mnemonic basis for collective mobilizations (Nicholls 2009; Hou 2010; Parkinson 2012). Saskia Sassen has invoked the term “global street” to express the revolutionary political possibilities that exist in the modern city. In her theoretical framing, the street is “a rawer and less ritualized space” than parks and squares, and critically, “a space where new forms of the social and the political can be made” (2011: 574, emphasis in original). In Sassen’s conception, the global street is a venue for the oppressed to seize power, if only temporarily, and assert their “presence” in the political realm. We have witnessed the rise of the global street in the remarkable number of revolutionary movements that have occurred around the world in the last few years. In places as diverse as Egypt, Greece, Myanmar, and the United States, activists have taken to the streets to protest authoritarian regimes, austerity politics, and rising inequality. With the myriad protestors sharing visibility and a transnational affinity linked to the proliferation of social media and communication technologies, much of the media and scholarly analysis of Occupy and recent revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa centered on the question of whether or to what extent these uprisings were driven by technology, sometimes attributing a problematic agency to Facebook, Twitter, and other social media (Morozov 2009; Aday et al. 2010). Lost in the rush to anoint the next “Twitter revolution” was how actual groups mobilized, asserted claims to space, and linked their movements with collective memories. Occupy Wall Street provides an instructive case. For two months in 2011, activists “occupied” Zuccotti Park, an otherwise nondescript public plaza in downtown Manhattan. Located a few blocks north of Wall Street, Occupy demonstrators leveraged Wall Street’s resonance (Schudson 1989) as the symbolic center of global finance and capitalism to provide power to their movement. Occupy’s successful linking of social movement and spatial symbol indicates the malleability of both collective memory and urban space. Through the process of “occupation,” activists transformed Zuccotti Park into a collective marker in its own right, serving as the symbolic and spiritual home of what rapidly became an international Occupy movement. The tented encampments that popped up across the United States in 2011 became mnemonically bound to Wall Street and Zuccotti Park. In this process, even small postindustrial cities, such as Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Portland, Maine—places in many ways external to the “command centers” of finance capitalism—became outposts in the struggle against a “street” found hundreds of miles away ( Juris 2012; Wengronowitz 2013). In sum, ordinary people, activists, and revolutionaries have long used the power of collective memory to shape urban space from below. In state environments, in subaltern places, and 200

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in the global street, people often challenge the top-down reordering of cities by governments, developers, and other elites, even if these occasions are punctuated by times of acceptance and acquiescence. By operationalizing history and spatial symbols of collective memory as sites to contest powerful actors, movement groups assert their “right to the city” and give visibility to their cultural and political claims. While not always successful, these actions are powerful markers of the role of collective memory.

Cities of memories In this chapter, we have asserted the significance of collective memory in shaping urban space. We argue that the production of place is a dialectical process, with collective memories “from above,” “from the middle,” and “from below,” each factoring into the material and symbolic dimensions of cities. In considering these processes “from above” and “from the middle,” we have examined the roles of city governments, developers, and gentrifiers in claims-making that draws on local histories. In many cases, elites reduce local history and culture to “texts” through the commodification of collective memories. Developers and consumers read local history and character for the stimulation of economic and cultural capital, expressed through real estate development and place-based consumption. In considering these processes “from below,” we have examined the role of urban social movements in leveraging spatial symbols and shared memories to make claims. We have considered state spaces, subaltern locales, and the “global street” as three key socio-spatial venues for movement groups to utilize collective memories. We argue that contestations around spatial symbols of collective memory provide an important way for marginalized groups to make claims on the state and assert their political and cultural presence. We have also emphasized the under-examination of collective memory within American urban sociology. The empirical and theoretical achievements of the New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago Schools have provided a rich foundation for research and theory, yet each approach can benefit from an emphasis on the role of collective memory in shaping urban environments. In analyzing works that operationalize human ecology, political economy, and cultural production, we point out how shared history can complement each of these approaches. Scholars need to develop theoretical and empirical projects that link urban sociology with mnemonic studies. Cities, we have argued, are ultimately sites of memory.

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18 Digital trauma archives The Yellow Star Houses Project Gabriella Ivacs

Introduction Public history has been studied and practiced for almost thirty years. However, in east-central Europe it seems that we keep problematizing approaches to public history, discussing its role and confronting it with a nineteenth-century notion of historiography. In the United States, Roy Rosenzweig paved the way for a broader acceptance of public history. He was convinced that “history embraces not only what historians at universities think and write but also all ways people see, recall, and understand their pasts” (2011: 13). Starting in the 1980s, scholars developed interests in museum, archive, and library collections because they began to realize that working together with amateurs and information professionals to create an ethic of shared community and to shape programs of cultural institutions were worthwhile efforts. Over time the trend became overwhelmingly global as libraries, archives, museums, private and public institutions created and ran public history projects based on their digitized collections. Needless to say, all these initiatives go beyond the traditional role of cultural heritage institutions (that preserve an objectivized culture as they engage in discourse with the public via outreach programs, exhibitions, and the Internet) as they ultimately try to tap into the intimate ways that people use, relive, and remember their past. Parallel to the emergence of this participatory culture another paradigm shift that took place in the cultural heritage domain was digital scholarship, which entered the phase of normativity at universities in the same decade. Digitalization has been fully integrated into the mandate of archives and libraries as the mechanism to balance between “access” and “preservation functions.” According to Ross Parry (2010: 1–7), we have already reached the post-digital age when cultural institutions naturalize “digital” into their overall vision, and an essential and rather dynamic relationship is constructed between institutions and technology. Wanda Orlikowski (1992) expands on this argument and warns against the deterministic model that postulates technology as being the trigger for organizational change. She proposes that we examine the ongoing interactions among organizations, humans, and technology to look for the human factor that impacts technology development. At the very least we should look at the complete ecosystem of scholarship, public, technology, including digital versus analog, and try to grasp the new phenomenon in its complexity. 205

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In this chapter, I argue that digital, public history projects of today are the result of a blended production process from both the perspective of society, in which there is a noticeable and renewed interest in digital history, and personal narratives, testimonies, and imagined (virtual) communities. Such a trend is evidenced by contemporary higher-educational curricula, the abundance of home movies, family photo collections on the Internet, and so on. Additionally, the potential of digital storytelling means and their underlying distributive infrastructures, such as broadband connectivity and the democratic nature of social media (as opposed to the one-way communication of early institutional websites), offer a unique and powerful combination of tools for public history projects. Considering the long-term consequences of emerging memory practices brings to the surface an important tension between “fixity” and “ephemerality” in the archival profession. Archives metaphorically are often represented as custodians of traditional media, such as preserving tapes, VHS cassettes, paper, microforms, and other formats, which consequently prevent data records from evolving into other kinds of media. Thus, fixity and ephemerality are organically connected with the domain of the archive as memory fails to resist time; it is the archive that holds the key to unlocking the missing details. Paradoxically, I propose that digital remembering and forgetting is highly dependent in part on memory technologies but also on socio-technical practices rooted in our daily operations—for example, Facebook profiles, Instagram photos, and YouTube videos. In other words, the way we see ourselves tomorrow will be the result of today via the “convergence culture” of new media’s permanent effect of ephemerality. Therefore, I propose that technological digital components become a fundamental structure for preserving, memorizing, and processing information as humans. The way cultures retrieve memory and the future of preserving the past (Cohen: 2005) is shifting from official institutions—among them, archives with a long tradition of memorialization—to everyday media environments, such as the above-mentioned platforms. At the same time, this f leeting and controversial framework of digital media creates new opportunities and incentives for people to engage with public history projects by sharing their narratives of the past. Moreover, the mobilization of citizens, dissemination of information, and outreach to the public, friends, and relatives is substantially easier nowadays on digital networks than by any other means. Using the public-history project, the Yellow Star Houses Project, developed and implemented by the Open Society Archives in Hungary in relation to the potential of digital media in remembering the past, I explain how professionals, historians, and in our specific case, archival institutions can and should make conscious decisions together to address highly sensitive, historical topics. At the same time, these mnemonic actors also have the mandate to facilitate four areas: the process of remembering, how the very condition of remembering is reconstructed on distributed, digital infrastructures, how the same process has its extension in real-time, public events, and how this new, hybrid ecosystem transforms public space.

Building trauma archives Traumas are everywhere. The medical expression used by social psychology proposes that change, per se, regardless of its positive or negative consequences—whether it be radical, unexpected, or sudden—may leave a social group, community, or a whole population in a shock (Sztompka 2000: 449). This definition is based on Jeffrey Alexander’s powerful concept of cultural trauma (Alexander et al. 2004), which occurs when a collectivity feels that it has been subjected to a horrendous event marking its memory forever and changing its 206

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future identity in irrevocable ways. Controversially, this rule can be applied to historical events that are considered to be progressive and beneficial, in general. Trauma could also be undoubtedly creative, since it has the potential of making history, creating a new social system (Sztompka 2000: 5), allowing change, and introducing new value systems. Along with structural changes, social changes are usually visible and leave noticeable signs on the tissue of a society. For example, the collapse of the Communist regimes in 1989 opened up new opportunities for people in East and Central Europe. However, cultural traumas accompanying the social rapture, which happened in 1989 in several countries in East and Central Europe, might have long-lasting, subversive effects on values, beliefs, and convictions of several generations in the society. If we recall the vivid twentieth-century history of East and Central Europe, then it is no wonder that we rarely find the moment when true and credible history coincides. In other words, there is an enormous gap between the rhetoric of pseudo-Fascist, Nazi, or Communist regimes and individual memory practices, or certain groups of the society, in the way they experience and interpret traumatizing events and social change, in general. Hungary represents a case wherein recent collective traumas happened one after another with the loss of its territories after the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, through the unprecedented massacre of Shoah, the Soviet occupation in 1944, and the repression of the 1956 Revolution and its aftermath, which led to the collapse of the regime in 1989. All these events accumulated layers of “traumatogenic” experiences in generations of Hungarians through different time periods and in different circumstances. Throughout the decades, change has touched many aspects of life for Hungarians. Huge Hungarian enclaves ended in different countries after World War I; almost 400,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to concentration camps and killed during World War II. After the Soviet occupation, hundreds of thousands were transported to forced labor camps in Gulag or were repatriated to other countries, and 200,000 Hungarians emigrated to the West after the 1956 Revolution. Behind the figures we can recognize a universal pattern of the social conditions in which traumatogenic changes can be subjective and objective at the same time, whether they be political, legal, economic, moral, cultural, art related, or even language related. Hungarians of different social strata, religion, education, and region selected definitions and framings from an available set of meanings encoded in Hungarian culture. They lived through, witnessed, and survived these changes, applying definitions that relied on their own and collective accounts of the past. These cultural, collective constructs do not necessarily overlap with the recurring historiography, which tries to develop narratives to correspond with or to respond to a memory politics imposed by discursive power structures. A binary logic often remains, limiting counter-arguments against the leading canon, rather than focusing on issues relevant to peoples’ perspectives that emerge from having experienced the sudden change. Furthermore, historians are not always interested in addressing the “social,” the “group” experience and facilitating the healing mechanism, while witnesses of traumatic events often find themselves in situations where they are expected to describe inarticulable experiences to the public. The untold stories can leave their marks on several generations. As an alternative, they could be recorded as testimonies and collected in trauma archives. Robert K. Merton defines four categories of adaptations to anomie in the Durkheimian sense: innovation and rebellion are active responses, and ritualism and retreatism represent passive adaptations to change (1996). Along this same line, Piotr Sztompka (2000: 463) makes an attempt to apply these categories to cultural traumas in East and Central Europe in order to explain that social anomie is the result of post-Communist “trauma of victory” after 1989. 207

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Figure 18.1  S  ticker in Budapest 2nd District, April 2014. Note: Open Society Archives staff and volunteers placed stickers on the front gates of the approximately 1,600 former yellow star houses that are still standing in Budapest today. This sticker campaign aimed to raise awareness and to encourage residents to join the 21 June 2014 commemorations marking the 70th anniversary of the mass forced relocation of Budapest Jews into yellow star houses. (© Open Society Archives)

It is quite important to note that trauma theories do not always differentiate the position of the victim and the witness in coping with trauma or tend to neutralize the overall social responsibility in contrast to the coping strategies of the specific group. In addition to his impressive taxonomy of post-1989 effects, Sztompka seeks to understand the double meaning of trauma without restricting its connotation to either the cause of the shock—something which triggers the trauma—nor to the result of event. He suggests the so-called traumatic sequence in which trauma is a process that has typical stages from beginning to end. The traumatic sequence may end with overcoming trauma by the consolidation of a new cultural complex (the closing phase of the sequence) and the future identity of the effected group. But how this happens, when this happens, and to whom this happens all depend on the wider social context, and sometimes, surprisingly, other parametric processes that can have subversive effects on social agents. Sztompka claims that “one set of parametric processes consists of everything of importance, which happens in the wider world, outside of a given society, but in the global era has repercussions within a society” (2000: 12). My thesis states that although technological changes seem to be part of the outside setting, recent technological turns can be considered as so-called parametric processes that have an increasing role in aggravating or healing traumas in today’s digital ecosystem. Another emerging question occurs when social responsibility enters into the discussion. How can digital public history projects, for example, trigger a broader social response? 208

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New generations integrated into the digital era—often mentioned as digital natives—are time carriers of cultural legacies, such as children of survivors and witnesses of traumatogenic changes who strive for the contemporized past. Interestingly, Aby Warburg, without considering the social foundation in his pictorial endeavor, describes the symbolic value of the retrospective contemplativeness as a visual connection between the memory and language of cultural frames. The emergence of digital (and predominantly visual) culture makes this connection more f luid, less selective, and less controlled as it enables one to choose an even broader frame of reference than before. Such digital culture, therefore, uses different approaches and relies on digital assets to face the process of traumatic sequence. This widespread and inevitable shift in memory practices aided by new media technologies—notably, the technologies associated with creating, collecting, and processing digital archives—tends to produce ephemeral and miscellaneous collections of testimonies, documents, visual materials, and subjective accounts. Websites of testmonies on genocide, revolution, invasion, and collapse and databases of survivors’ interviews and other types of recollections of historical events are numerous nowadays. In the past, roots of the popularity of oral history might be traced back to the establishment of the Oral History Association (OHA) in the United States in 1968. Oral history interviews as new documentary evidence continued in triumph regardless of skeptical voices on archival objectivity and the role of the archivist in the interview process. Fixity, authenticity, and objectivity concerns were swept away by the social history movement of the 1970s and the democratization of archives diminished the role of mainstream archival records. Conservative collection policies were enhanced and thus brought to life new appraisal principles focusing on under-documented, under-represented social groups, such as rights and peace activists, the Women’s Movement, and human rights actors. Although objectivity gradually became an unattainable goal in curatorship, new content types opened up the repositories to new types of recordings. As a natural consequence, these materials were less organized and had unclear provenance. Curatorship and creatorship often got merged in the case of proactive acquisition— though this contributed to the transformation of text-focused cultural memory. Following this path, with the spread of video-camera-produced home movies, home photographs continued offering even greater challenges to the archival profession as these represented unsolicited, private, and sometimes candid looks into the lives of individuals. This is the point wherein we have to remind ourselves that “communicative memory” along with its limited life span, intends to include varieties of collective memory based on exclusively everyday communication actions. The fundamental change occured with the expansion of technical devices by the 1990s in the way of video, audio, and camera. Their mass production allowed individual and family documentation to increase exponentially and create media-based collections in memory institutions. As the next stage, the digitized but analog-born cultural products started becoming popular in the late 1990s, and this again attempted to broaden the scope of the cultural, memorialization process. Likewise, this connected more human components and even more personal remembering to the fixed points of the past, such as cultural artifacts and formations of culture as texts, images, and recordings in a digital form. As a matter of fact, the collapse of the Communist regime removed numerous barriers against applying these mnemonic practices in the former Eastern Bloc. After the political change, the first oral histories created by historians were meant to collect testimonies of recent historical events, which were unspoken, forgotten, or surpressed during the Communist times. During the 1970s, sociologists as system engineers were already looking for patterns and structures in factories, trade unions, 209

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Figure 18.2  Yellow Star Houses Guided Walks, 21 June 2014. Note: Representatives of the embassies of Italy, the Vatican, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland, and the International Federation of the Red Cross take part in a guided walk through the 5th and 13th districts commemorating the diplomats who saved tens of thousands of lives in 1944: Giorgio Perlasca (Italy), Angelo Rotta and Gennaro Verolino (Italy), Henryk Slawik (Poland), Sampaio Garrido and Teixeira Branquinho (Portugal), Angel Sanz-Briz (Spain), Raoul Wallenberg (Sweden), and Carl Lutz and Friedrich Born (Switzerland). (© Open Society Archives)

schools, and state socialist institutions to reform and modernize society. Thus, with the collapse of the Communist regime, frameworks of their work had been swept way. The new traumagenetic condition described by Jeffrey Alexander (Alexander and Smith 1993: 157) as the “discourse of real socialism” as opposed to the “discourse of emerging capitalism,” brought up discontents and dilemmas to account for the past. Even though many suspending questions, lustration of former secret police agents, de-communization, doubts on democratic opposition movements, and the localization of the Holocaust experience in countries such as Hungary remained unresolved. With regards to the Holocaust over the past decades, memory politics of the ruling political parties were unable to offer reconciliation at a large scale, though at the same time they assumed collective responsibility for the Shoah. It is from these socio-political, technical, and historiographical conditions that the Yellow Star Houses Project emerged at the Open Society Archives in Budapest in an attempt to understand a distributed public history of trauma.

The Yellow Star Houses (YSH) Project Holocaust historiography in Hungary tends to focus on the history of the Jewish Ghetto within the city of Budapest and the preconditions for creating the Ghetto. The official 210

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organization of the Jewish deportations from Budapest and the countryside, however, have often been overlooked. This politics of memory has also played a role in ignoring facts about the active assistance provided by the Hungarian people in removing Jews from their homes or confiscating their belongings, not to mention the role of state authorities collaborating with Nazis. Even when Budapest is mentioned in today’s public discourse, it is usually in reference to the majority of Budapest Jews who survived; the city where Governor Miklós Horthy “saved” the Jews, and put an end to the deportations. On 16 June 1944, the mayor of Budapest issued a decree that marked out almost 2,000 apartment buildings in Budapest, “in which Jews (obliged under the existing decrees to wear the mark of the yellow star) may reside.” Every one of these apartment buildings had to “mark all their street entrances with a yellow star which must be kept permanently in tact and clean. The sign shall be a six-pointed canary yellow star measuring 30 centimeters in diameter, on a 51 x 36 cm black background.” In the given time period almost 21 percent of Budapest’s population was of Jewish origin. The order to wear the yellow star therefore applied to 187,000 Jews, and a further 35,000 converted Jews. Only 8 days after the decree, Jews had to leave their apartments by midnight on 24 June and move in to these yellow star houses. Their vacant homes were then given over to non-Jews. Eventually, after some modifications, a total of 1,944 apartment buildings were identified to become “yellow star houses.” The Jewish population of Budapest was forced to live in these houses until the establishment of the Ghetto in the final weeks of 1944. In January 2014 the Open Society Archives (OSA) launched a dedicated website1 with an interactive map to show the location of the former yellow star houses and what they look like today. The map is supplemented with numerous documents, including the relevant decrees, a list of houses, a chronology, a glossary, and recollections. Using the navigation tools, visitors to the site can view the former yellow star houses at street, district, and even city level and submit their recollections or personal stories to the curator of the site. The preparatory work of collecting photographic images of the buildings was done by volunteers and students at almost no cost. The website launch was the first event in a year-long series of public programs of OSA dedicated to the suffering of Budapest in 1944. It provided a rich array of events from exhibitions to concerts aimed at public outreach and to mobilize citizens. While it ran parallel to the official commemoration organized by the government on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of Jewish deportation, the organizers presented their view on the website clearly distancing their initiative from the official programs: As well as presenting a different look at the history of the Holocaust in Budapest, our aim is to remind contemporary Hungarian society not only of the tragedy but to emphasize our shared moral responsibility toward both the past and present.2 The official government site of the Holocaust Commemoration put an emphasis on the commemoration act itself and its temporalities. Additionally, it also separated participants, survivors, victims from the rest of the society: Although fewer and fewer surviving victims and perpetrators live among us now that two generations have passed, true remembering means facing our own past and showing solidarity with those alive today, those who are here, to remember in a way that relates to ourselves, and in the present, because we are here. The absence of those who were never born is the silent cry of the history that lives with us. The unbearable silence penetrates to our soul.3 211

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Figure 18.3  The website of the Yellow Star Houses Project. (© Open Society Archives)

On 21 June 2014, YSH events took place all across the city at over 130 locations from early morning until midnight. Approximately 10,000 citizens of Budapest—former and current residents of the yellow star houses, cultural institutions, embassies, young volunteers, artists, public figures, actors, and musicians—organized or participated in public events at the buildings. In three months the number of visitors to the YSH Facebook page reached 7,000, and the number of posts became increasingly richer and richer. Each day more and more testimonies, photos, personal documents were added to the website by private individuals. The event was carefully prepared by an awareness raising campaign that included 5,000 stylized Star of David stickers attached to the gates of the former yellow star houses, which included the date of the campaign, 6 April, which was also the date that Jewish residents had to start wearing the yellow star publicly in 1944. Although the sticker campaign collided with the Hungarian national elections, thus hindering the chances of good media coverage and publicity, its principal impact was unquestionable. Many residents of the yellow star houses approached the OSA for further information and became active in distributing f lyers and mail and in posting to friends and family members through social media. Although the YSH website remained the main information channel for mass communication, social media, primarily Facebook, substantially contributed to the snowballing outreach to the community. On the peak day, 21 June, 212

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one of the volunteers described the happenings on Facebook: “We’ll certainly take today’s thoughts and atmosphere forward, and so will our children. Today, my faith in civil society has returned.”4 As a follow-up activity to the 21 June event, OSA also launched two virtual exhibitions about the Yellow Star Houses Project on Google’s Open Gallery website.5 The first exhibition6 focuses on the history of the yellow star houses and explains it to the public in a more condensed and visual manner. Since very little archival photographs of the buildings remain, the exhibition explores what life and death were like in the Budapest of 1944. It uses photographs, original archival documents, and short excerpts from films from the early 1940s, together with excerpts from the hundreds of stories OSA received from victims and survivors during the YSH project in order to provide historical context. The second online exhibition7 presents the reception of the project in 2014 and the commemoration in its current sociopolitical context. It also includes an inventory of the archival-historical research, available sources, and the commemorations held across the city on 21 June, including concerts, guided walks, personal recollections, and the erecting of memorial plaques. Besides the plethora of digital resources—published by OSA and other cooperating partner institutions on the YSH website and linked platforms throughout 2014—the most valuable contributions were created by individuals of local communities, childen of victims, witnesses, and even perpetrators. Here I only include some examples on the anonymized personal narratives out of the 1,700 longer remarks that were posted or mailed to the organizers: My family and myself were in the “Csillagos haz” [Star House], Wesselenyi utca [street] 61 in 1944. We were cramped in a small apartment on the second f loor with two other families. We were five of us, I was only 10 years old and it was very difficult and there was suffering for all of us. My father was only able to work on selected days and we just hardly made it. On October 19th the Arrow Cross8 thugs took my father and that was the day when I saw my beloved father the last time. He was killed by the Arrow Cross. On November 1st with the help of my late uncle who worked in the Swedish Embassy we were able to escape and my younger brother and I were placed in a “safe house” in Lonyai utca 9, which house had Swedish protection. My mother and older sister were placed in a Catholic Convent which was also “protected” by the Swedish Embassy. Raul Wallenberg was the hero and I vividly recall that one day in November Raul Wallenberg personally came to save us from the Arrow Cross thugs. Mid December 1944 we had to escape from the “safe house” because the most horrible Arrow Cross thugs wanted to take us. My mother felt that we should walk to the Ghetto. While we walked in the city the Arrow Cross members stopped us and transported us to one of their “Terror House” which was on Andrassy ut [avenue] 47 (near Octogon [intersection]). The Arrow Cross Thugs were the most primitive murderers and as a 10 year old I saw just killing, blood and the worst human suffering. After almost 70 years I’m still suffering from that unbelievable experience! —Testimony 1 I lived at Pozsonyi Street 16 when it was a yellow-star house. I was 14 years old. There were 40 of us in a two-room apartment, 5 of whom were children. The front gate was guarded by the older men of the house. The house’s air raid commander was an Arrow Cross man, who let the Arrow Cross adolescents in, and who even took an older lady to the Arrow Cross because he wanted her nice apartment. The Arrow Cross mostly took people away whom we never heard of again. There were mothers, children and elderly 213

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men in the two-room apartment. They took part in guard duty, but it wasn’t much use because then they were in danger. —Testimony 2 Not long ago, when I asked my late neighbor how long he had lived on Tátra Street for, he replied that he had come here in 1944 with his mother from Buda, hoping for a safer place to live, and when they arrived in front of Tátra Street 36, that was when the Arrow Cross were driving the residents of the house out, and set off with them for somewhere. They went into the house as the forced march was passing, but the concierge warned them that there were still some Arrow Cross men searching the apartments, and that they should hide in the laundry room behind the tubs. He’d tell them when the coast was clear. —Testimony 3 The strikingly noticeable phenomena occuring in most of these recollections is that the traumatic sequence is presented and lived through on an open platform, as if sharing one’s inner most fears, thoughts, and guilt would be easier to do in public. According to the organizers, within the first three days of the Facebook page launch of the YSH project, about 4,000 people liked the page and began writing on the wall and sending messages. Another interesting phenomenon occurred wherein not only did they communicate with the organizers but they also started forming new networks of Facebook users, who began to talk to each other and share stories and memories. The Holocaust and My Family group on Facebook proved to be one of the new networks inspired by YSH. With its steadily growing community of 7,000–8,000 members, it was extremely helpful to get the message through and to make the effected community begin communicating. Not surprisingly these virtual communities continue recruiting new members even today, expanding their complex networks, generating and capturing narratives and family archives in a digital form. They are also uploaded to social media sites and continue to expand.

The networked trauma archive The success story of YSH cannot be simply explained by the application of digital, technology tools or the network effects. The blended process had additional components, such as real-time events, grassroots initiatives, and unconventional marketing strategies. The permanent, archival records published by OSA were contrasted to ephemeral postings and narratives; fixed physical places were connected to the virtually reconstructed venues in the city; and the collective (and abstract) traumatogenic experience was personalized and became appropriated by members of the Jewish community. Jan Assmann (Assmann and Czaplicki 1995: 132) proposes a dual model by differentiating between the potentiality of archives: the so-called totalizing function and mode of actuality when the historical document is re-contextualized by contemporary frames. The potentiality of the YSH project could be captured in the totalizing effect of cultural trauma and actuality of personal stories in a new context and supported by recent memory practices. To extend this argument, Andrew Hoskins (2009) confirms that contemporary memory (and digital archives) is mainly distributed in socio-technological practices and generated “on-the-f ly.” We can add to this by viewing how the ongoing processes around the YSH project redefine the trauma archive itself as a dynamic construction. Instead of representation, establishing another documentum-monumentum or a new virtual site of commemoration, where retrieving and remembering is practiced, the dynamic construction of the archive gains in importance. I have already pointed out that trauma archives existed already in the 214

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Figure 18.4  C  itizens commemorating the events in the courtyard of one of the yellow star houses in the 8th District, Budapest, 21 June 2014. (© Open Society Archives)

pre-digital age, but processing trauma through sharing, talking and possessing techniques to make the sequence visible to others or even recordable is different. The historical value of testimonies, recordings, subjective recollections distributed on the Internet is often questioned as these are usually contrasted to mediated communication, official records, or collections physically stored in designated cultural institutions. During a recent discussion, a known French historian, whose main interest is in collective memory and the Holocaust, revealed his concerns about the Visual History Archive established by Steven Spielberg. His skepticism of the scientific trustworthiness led him to adamantly advocate for the exclusion of these interviews from higher educational curricula. His comments seem to be convincing, perhaps even true, but quite irrelevant. Wolfgang Ernst wittily characterizes obsessed unmediated thinking (2013: 45) as focusing on objects or artifacts, which in the post-digital age tends to disregard digital media. It lacks any self-ref lection on the use of digital sources and thus proves to be rather traditional as it considers stable and permanent memory as the only acceptable one. Despite the fact that digital technology has a powerful way of affecting our lives today—even though we know less about its principles since they are in part invisible to observation—networked digital archives as part of broader socio-technical practices are less studied. By presenting the case study of the Yellow Star Houses Project, I have attempted to describe the historical, political, social, and technical context of the emerging digital memory practice in the social and individual processing of collective trauma in Hungary in 2014. This experience ref lects a current parametric process that can/might have a surprisingly huge role in the trauma sequence. My argument is based on the assumption that the networked and distributed infrastructure of new media—the set of digital tools including digitization, storytelling 215

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means, virtual exhibitions, mash-ups, and social media platforms—offers incomparably more opportunities to address issues of collective identity and could potentially grow into a powerful public history project. Indeed, the YSH digital trauma archive does not resemble classical archival collections, yet the dual system of classic and new archives builds upon each other. When we encounter the visual image of the Yellow Star Houses map, we realize that the historicized version is unique—it strikes in us something imminently disturbing in the sudden view of yellow stars populating the familiar scenes of Budapest; ultimately we want to enter the image. We click on the building and the journey starts. Rather than being purely readonly memory, these trauma archives are constantly generated and also dynamically changed according to our needs and interpretations; we play the multiple role of creator, reader, citizen, victim, and witness at the same time. Perhaps what an archivist could add to this as an end note is that we need to remind ourselves that being digital is not a panacea. Public history projects, such as the Yellow Star Houses, should teach us some fundamental lessons about digital history making or social becoming. However, there are still multiple ways that can be employed in different social, economic, and technical contexts, and the public should not be left alone with the abundance of digital sources, therefore explanations and guidance are needed more than before. Finally, digital trauma archives have the role of informing the public at large and involving members of the non-traumatized community as well. Can the public as a whole become the carrier of resolution? These questions remain to be answered.

Notes  1  www.yellowstarhouses.org  2  www.yellowstarhouses.org/#overlay=historical_background/introduction (accessed 21 December 2014).  3  http://holokausztemlekev2014.kormany.hu/az-emlekev-szellemi-alapvetesei  4  Facebook post on the YSH page, mentioned in the summary report written by Nora Bertalan. I would like to thank all OSA professionals and excellent colleagues Andras Mink, Gwen Jones, Istvan Rev, Karoly Timari, Miklos Tamasi, and Nora Bertalan, who provided translations of the testimonies, written reports, graphical images, or verbal information to me about the project.  5  www.google.com/opengallery  6  https://yellowstarhouses.culturalspot.org/exhibit/iQJSfZrh3FQ7Ig?position=0%3A0  7  https://yellowstarhouses.culturalspot.org/exhibit/SgKSO1nP03KrLQ?position=25%3A0  8  The Arrow Cross Party (Hungarian: Nyilaskeresztes Párt–Hungarista Mozgalom, literally “Arrow Cross Party-Hungarist Movement”) was a national socialist party led by Ferenc Szálasi, who led a government in Hungary known as the Government of National Unity from 15 October 1944 to 28 March 1945.

Bibliography Alexander, J. C. and Smith, P. (1993) “The Discourse of American Civil Society: A New Proposal for Cultural Studies,” Theory and Society, No. 22. Alexander, J. C., Eyerman, R., Giesen, B., and Sztompka, P. (2004) Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, Berkeley: University of California Press. Assmann, J. and Czaplicka, J. (1995) “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” New German Critique, No. 65, Cultural History/Cultural Studies, Spring–Summer. Available online at www.jstor.org/ stable/488538 (accessed 21 June 2009). Cohen, D. J. (2005) “The Future of Preserving the Past,” CRM: The Journal of Heritage Stewardship, Vol. 2, No. 6. Available online at www.dancohen.org/files/future_of_preserving_the_past.pdf (accessed 4 December 2014). Ernst, W. (2013) Digital Memory and Archive, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hoskins, A. (2011) “Media, Memory, Metaphor: Remembering and the Connective Turn,” Parallax, Vol. 17, No. 4. Available online at www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13534645.2011.605573 #tabModule (accessed 20 December 2014). 216

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Merton, R. K. (1996) “Social Structure and Anomie.” In On Social Structure and Science, by R. K. Merton and edited by P. Sztompka. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Orlikowski, W. J. (1992) “The Duality of Technology: Rethinking the Concept of Technology in Organizations,” Organization Science, Vol. 3, No. 3. Available online at www.dourish.com/classes/ readings/Orlikowski-DualityOf Technology-OrgSci.pdf (accessed 12 December 2014). Parry, R. (2010) “The Practice of Digital Heritage and the Heritage of Digital Practice.” In Museums in a Digital Age, edited by R. Parry. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Rosenzweig, R. (2011) Clio Wired: The Future of the Past in the Digital Age, New York: Columbia University Press. Sztompka, P. (2000a) The Ambivalence of Social Change: Triumph or Trauma? Papers // WZB, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung, No. P 00–001. Sztompka, P. (2000b) “Cultural Trauma: The Other Face of Social Change.” European Journal of Social Theory, Vol. 3. Available online at http://est.sagepub.com/content/3/4/449.abstract (accessed 6 June 2014).

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Part IV

Technologies of memory

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19 Cultural heritage Tangible and intangible markers of collective memory Diane Barthel-Bouchier

Both tangible and intangible heritage serve as important markers of collective memories. Tangible heritage, whether as small as a simple artifact or as large as a whole cultural landscape, serves to provide physical evidence of the past. This evidence can be relatively untouched by time or may have undergone significant alteration. It can be found in museums or villages, or take the form of a minor language, a commemorative practice, or public history. Whatever its form and setting, cultural heritage testifies to the existence of pasts different from the present yet connected to it in ways both evident and subtle. People use the tangible remains of their heritage as well as the intangible traditions and practices as tools that help to shape collective memories, and to provide the narratives that explain and accompany them. Within the category of tangible heritage, built heritage is of particular importance because of its size and relative immobility. Paintings, sculptures, and archaeological artifacts can be stolen or sold across national borders, often ending up in private collections and disappearing from view. With Angkor Watt, Machu Picchu, or Chartres Cathedral, it’s another matter. While guards must be vigilant against vandalism, it is difficult for vandals to abscond with the whole structure. Much of the cultural significance of such sites is linked to their physical location and therefore to the social groups and/or nations who value them for their role in both shaping and reconfirming collective memories. Such memories often assume social and/ or political importance as they are used to confirm the justice of a group’s claims to goods, status, or power. In contrast to tangible heritage, intangible heritage can be defined as “the practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills—as well as the instruments, objects, artifacts and cultural spaces associated therewith—that communities, groups, and in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage” (UNESCO 2010). As this definition makes clear, specific forms of intangible heritage may include tangible elements. Distinctive musical traditions rely on musical instruments, the visual arts rely on physical materials and result in artistic or craft products, and staged drama relies upon costumes, settings, and props. What is compelling about intangible heritage is the sense that it somehow must be “kept alive,” and in order for it to be kept alive it must be ritually reenacted. Many of the practices included under the label of intangible heritage are ancient forms of music, dancing, or visual art, or particular customs including parades, historic reenactments, or holiday celebrations. 221

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The whole creation of the category of intangible heritage thus is based in no small measure on a Durkheimian recognition of the importance of rituals to the maintenance of social solidarity in both relatively undifferentiated traditional societies and in modern, highly differentiated societies How then do we recognize what is or is not cultural heritage? It seems at first glance that heritage can be everything and nothing. For Graham, Ashworth, and Tunbridge, heritage includes “almost any sort of intergenerational exchange or relationship, welcome or not, between societies as well as individuals” (2000). Heritage and history are linked but separate phenomena. For Lowenthal, history “explores and explains pasts grown ever more opaque over time,” whereas heritage “clarifies pasts so as to infuse them with present purposes” (1985: xi). Heritage was originally associated with families: the collective goods and wealth that constituted the patrimony handed down from one generation to another. Presumably, intangibles as well as tangibles were also handed down: the family’s relative social position within the village, its reputation for bravery or cowardice, generosity or avarice. Over time, this definition expanded to include concepts of local or regional heritage. One village might have slightly different culinary traditions from another, small variations might occur in language use and accent from one part of a region to another. Today, the cultural heritage of specific regions is receiving renewed attention and assuming political significance. For example, heated debates are being held over whether bullfighting constitutes an important part of the culture of Spain, with some observers suggesting that the desire of Catalonia to ban bullfighting represents part of its separatist movement against Madrid. Given the growth of tourism, localities compete to find something distinctive they can celebrate and market. In one village it may be local pottery, in another the basket weaving tradition. The village of Montaren, in the south of France, lacking both pottery and baskets, hosts an annual chickpea festival. Beyond family, local, and regional associations, cultural heritage has assumed national significance. As Kowalski (2011) rightly remarks, nation-states view heritage as a form of cultural wealth, and are keen to transform their cultural wealth into economic assets. For example, France has historically been concerned about promoting its past and present cultural achievements, while relatively new nations such as Senegal use dance groups and other artists who receive international recognition. The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) promotes this definition of heritage by emphasizing the cultural diversity that exists between nation-states rather than that existing within nation-states. Heritage thus serves to define a sense of national identity, including who does or does not belong to “the nation.” It can create a sense of national purpose all while leading to the suppression of racial or ethnic minorities representing cultural differences. Such minorities keep alive not simply different languages and cultures but also the memory of periods of persecution throughout history. Their collective memories thus run counter to official narratives of national unity and represent a perceived threat to the political center. Above the level of national collective memories and forms of commemoration, Levy and Sznaider argue for the existence of “cosmopolitan memories,” which they view as constituting “a process of ‘internal globalization’ through which global concerns become part of the local experiences of an increasing number of people” (2002: 87). Cosmopolitan memories are not free-f loating but rather linked to specific regions, settlements, or sites. Cosmopolitan memories can be formed by either direct knowledge, whether obtained as a local or a tourist, or mediated knowledge. Indeed, Maurice Halbwachs (1952) drew a distinction between social memories, which are shared by those who directly experience them, and historical memories, which are mediated by education, the mass media, or even hearsay. 222

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Building on this work, I argue that heritage sites provide the physical grounding for many cosmopolitan memories. Some sites become the habitual televised backdrop for news emanating from a specific nation with, for example, the Arc de Triomphe appearing as the backdrop for France or the Houses of Parliament for England. Indeed, specific sites have become a metonym for nation-states or political off ices, as when one speaks of the “Kremlin,” “10 Downing Street,” or the “White House.” Other sites provide ready associations of travel (Venice, the Pyramids of Giza), public celebration (Times Square, Trafalgar Square), or protest (Tahrir Square, Tiananmen Square). Individual memories may also share a specific backdrop, as tour buses pull up at the exact same spot so that tourists can photograph each other in front of Mont Saint-Michel or St. Peter’s Basilica. Thus cultural heritage can be seen as contributing to the formation of collective memories within families, specific collectivities, nation-states, and across nation-states. Cultural heritage can also pertain to identities that are not based on geography but rather on some other principle, including, for example, religion, gender, race, social class, occupation or avocation. Seneca Falls is a heritage site in New York State that commemorates a key moment within the history of North American feminism, while Robbins Island, South Africa, is a World Heritage Site commemorating the struggle against apartheid. However, this still leaves open the question of what is to be considered heritage for each group and at each level of geographical identification. For example, one family member may consider a grandmother’s old hooked rugs to be a form of heritage, while another may consider them ready to be tossed out with the garbage. One village may go to great pains to preserve its historic wash-houses, while in another they are left to ruin. Some nations preserve the bullet holes in buildings as visible reminders of past conf licts; in other nations they are quickly plastered over to present a more pleasing and marketable image ( Jordan 2006). Let us therefore take a step back to consider not what is cultural heritage but rather who decides what elements of the past become incorporated into dominant narratives of collective memory.

The development of a Global Heritage Community This question of what is or is not defined as cultural heritage has a strong political dimension. Over the course of the twentieth century, specific groups of what Burke called symbolic bankers (1984) have taken a major role in the conservation of visible reminders of the past. These symbolic bankers defined what was worth conserving, why it was worth conserving, and both how it should be conserved and interpreted to the public. As heritage professionals and managers, they worked with governments and often served in government ministries where heritage became interwoven with mandates to preserve a nation’s culture and to promote its cultural achievements. Thus heritage can be seen as an important form of cultural capital that can then be called upon to serve a variety of political, social, and economic ends (Bourdieu 1993). Realizing this fact, social groups that perceived they had been dispossessed of their heritage began to contest official narratives. From the late 1960s onward, advocates of the New Social History began pushing for recognition of the heritage narratives associated with persons of color, the working classes, and women, among others whose collective memories had heretofore not received greater societal recognition. Industrial sites in Britain and the United States moved from commemorating entrepreneurs and inventors to focusing on worker history; the history of slavery received greater recognition, and the whole category of “sites of difficult memory” was created to conserve sites associated with confinement, torture, extermination, and other forms of collective oppression. 223

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In the second half of the twentieth century, heritage conservation assumed a truly global scale with the foundation of what I call the Global Heritage Community (Barthel-Bouchier 2013). This Global Heritage Community can be defined as including all those who are active in promoting the values associated with a cosmopolitan approach to heritage conservation. The Global Heritage Community draws on forms of expertise associated with a range of professions, including architecture, archaeology, history, material science, chemistry, law, urban planning, and public policy, among others. Despite representing these different disciplines and coming from an increasing diversity of national backgrounds, members of the Global Heritage Community share a basic commitment to a set of global values and norms as to why heritage matters and how it should be conserved. While the historical roots of heritage conservation date back centuries, this Global Heritage Community began to take form in the decades following World War II. As part of the global revulsion against the war crimes and widespread destruction, the concept of a human right to culture, a right that included the protection of cultural monuments and traditions, began to gain ground. This concept gained further legitimacy when it was incorporated as Article 27 in the United Nations’ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which specified that “everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.” As Silverman and Ruggles (2007) point out, while this article introduced the idea of culture as a human right, it neither specified the particular relationship among individuals, communities, and nations nor clarified what procedures should be followed in cases of conf licts over the right to a particular cultural form or manifestation. An impressive list of conventions, resolutions, and declarations followed in the wake of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. One of the first and most important was the Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conf lict, also known as the Hague Convention. Adopted in 1954, it was designed to protect cultural property, with all parties signing the convention agreeing to respect monuments in times of war and to protect them in times of peace. A second document is the Convention on the Means of Protecting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export, and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, which was adopted by UNESCO in 1970. As the title suggests, this convention protects items of cultural heritage and archaeological importance against illegal exportation. Perhaps the best known of the agreements is the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, which was adopted by the UNESCO General Conference in 1972. Under the terms of this convention, nominations for heritage sites are forwarded by member states to UNESCO’s World Heritage Center. Professional experts prepare a technical report, assessing whether the property is truly of “outstanding universal value,” with the nomination then being forwarded to the World Heritage Bureau, and eventually to the World Heritage Committee, which makes the final decision. The Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, passed by UNESCO in 2003, can be seen as ref lecting what Kymlicka (2007) has identified as an international shift from post-war universal human rights to post-cold war minority rights. What was distinctive in this convention was that it located ownership of intangible heritage not in individuals, nation-states, or humanity writ large, but in “communities, groups, and in some cases, individuals” (UNESCO 2010). Criteria for judging among what were called “elements” explicitly called for evidence of community participation in the process and respect for the practices. Nonetheless, such nominations are still channeled through the states participating in the convention and a panel of international experts makes the final decision as to which elements will be added to the list. 224

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Then in October 2005 UNESCO passed the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, widely known as the Convention on Cultural Diversity. Although the convention quickly gained widespread support among nation-states, the original purpose underlying its proposal by sponsoring nations France and Canada was the protection of their cultural industries, especially publishing and audiovisual production, against the economic power of those of the United States. Opponents of the Convention saw it as reinforcing the arguments for censorship by authoritarian regimes. Thus we see how a concept that at first glance seems universally laudable and perhaps even unproblematic can, in fact, readily be mobilized as a tool to serve a variety of political ends. The fact that there is widespread acceptance of the idea that preserving cultural heritage is a worthy enterprise has led Elliott and Schmutz (2012) to argue that World Heritage is an example of what John W. Meyer and his colleagues see as a growing world polity (Meyer, Boli, Thomas, and Ramirez 1997). According to this approach, international governmental organizations (IGOs), international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) and national non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are the prime movers in the spread of a set of values and norms around the world. Rather than undermining the importance of nation-states, this form of normative globalization works through the nation-state, in encouraging programs and other social investments supportive of science, human rights, and the spread of health and education, among other social goods. Members of such organizations “self-authorize,’ that is, they take it upon themselves to work for what they see as good and right in societies around the world, regardless of national borders. There can, in fact, be little doubt that the world polity approach has been successful in identifying processes through which a set of ideas and organizational forms originally identified with Western civilization are being spread across the globe. There is also no denying that the very existence of the United Nations and of a set of agreed-upon norms provides a global arena and rules for competition. But there are grounds for questioning the level of the agreement and the intensity of the assumed attachment to the values at the heart of the World Heritage regime. In brief, World Heritage cultural sites frequently suffer from threats ranging from development (intrusions from mining and industrial companies, new road works and bridges), war and looting, over-exploitation through tourism, pollution, and lack of basic maintenance. World Heritage natural sites suffer from all of the above, plus poaching. In addition, it is widely acknowledged that nation-states have frequently come to support World Heritage not because of their high ideals, but because of their desire to improve their trade balance through tourism, or even to effect ethnic cleansing by removing unwanted populations from natural sites. (For example, in 1997 human rights organizations protested in Myanmar when major nature protection organizations failed to respond to reports that the government was forcing the Karen minority off the land where it was creating the world’s largest nature reserve.) In fact, varied and widespread evidence suggests that the principles associated with world polity may be supported by only a small minority of the world population of the world: those largely middle and upper class, Western or Westernized members of INGOs, and their governmental counterparts. Other values, most notably basic survival for some and the profit motive for others, but also political motives and values associated with status, leisure, and consumption, frequently run counter to these principles, and interfere with their application in practice. Rather than ref lecting deeply held values, I would argue that the apparent acceptance of heritage conservation principles and practices can be better appreciated by reference to what German social theorist Ulrich Beck has called “the banality of good” (2000). In proposing this concept, Beck is referencing Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil used to 225

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explain the bureaucratic operation of mass murder in Nazi Germany. In its simplest terms, Beck’s argument is that nation-states will be positively disposed toward policies when these policies are perceived as bringing honor and status to the nation-state, while depending on international cooperation to yield the desired results and involving relatively little cost. Following this argument, then, the fact that the Copenhagen Climate Conference (COP 15) resulted in a disappointingly feeble agreement may well be precisely because effective policies to reduce climate change would come at substantial costs to nation-states. By contrast, a nation-state’s ratification of the World Heritage Convention comes at very little cost, and the admission of national sites to the World Heritage List carries numerous benefits. The status that accrues to the list redounds to the nation-state and is also likely to increase cultural tourism, with the financial benefits that follow. Whether because its values and norms are indeed deeply held, or because support of such values carries with it more perceived benefits than costs, heritage conservation developed dramatically in the second half of the twentieth century. As the concept developed, so too did the organizational field of cultural heritage, which evolved from being a relatively small, somewhat elitist, and largely amateur concern to a highly professionalized, global enterprise. As professionalization increased, so too did a process of rationalization. This rationalization involved increased attention to scientific standards and what became known as “best practices,” as well as the creation of areas of scientific specialization. This process is of considerable importance for our understanding of how the collective memories of populations around the globe are being evaluated not only for their particularistic significance, but also for their universal significance for all of humankind. Heinich (2012) has demonstrated how this scientific approach both ref lected the broadening of the concept of heritage and further encouraged it. Once only great works of art and architecture were considered worthy of consideration as national or universal heritage. But over the course of the twentieth century, the Global Heritage Community increasingly adopted the idea that not just the artistically unique site or object, but also the merely representative, deserved to be conserved. Through a process akin to scientific sampling, conservationists increasingly sought out the best examples of a given phenomenon. This meant that more commonplace items that had ties to the collective memory deserved to be preserved, whether they be boundary markers or kitchen utensils. At the same time, it must be said that the general public has not necessarily followed the Global Heritage Community as it has embraced this more scientific conception of its mission. As Choay has rightly remarked, “The Parthenon, Saint Sophia, Borobudur, and Chartres recall the enchantment of a quest that, in our disenchanted world, is proposed by neither science nor critical analysis” (1996: 185). More recent additions to the World Heritage List that ref lect this more scientific attitude, sites such as Sweden’s Varburg Radio Station or Chile’s Sewell Mining Town, might be decidedly less likely to inspire awe, even if they find some place in local and national collective memories. An analysis of public attitudes toward World Heritage did in fact suggest that, while there may be considerable support among the aff luent, educated, and well-traveled populations, these same people are less likely to accept the idea that relatively unknown sites whose claim to fame lies in industrial, military, or Modernist associations are of universal significance to the same extent as the major cultural sites that were among the first to be named to the list in the late 1970s (Barthel-Bouchier and Hui 2007). As the Global Heritage Community developed in terms of numbers of activists and as its activities expanded both geographically and topically, it began to interest social scientists for a range of reasons. These reasons include its relationship to historical consciousness and collective memory, the particular ways it linked national pasts to contemporary societies, and the 226

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political ramifications of its selection of sites and construction of accompanying narratives. The next section examines how the development of a social science critique of cultural heritage took shape, and reviews some of the key contributions to this literature.

Social science analyses By the 1980s, the growing interest in cultural heritage had led not simply to the founding of innumerable organizations at the local, regional, national, and even international levels but also to the development of interdisciplinary academic programs dedicated to developing heritage generalists and specialists in a range of fields, including architecture, archaeology, art history, history, management, law, and the material sciences. It is not surprising, then, that scholars began studying and writing about this development. While there had been a number of important volumes dedicated to the history of heritage and its techniques, the 1985 publication of David Lowenthal’s The Past is a Foreign Country provided a more intellectual analysis, one that linked the whole phenomenon of historical consciousness to broader movements in philosophy, literature, and the arts. In this first major volume, Lowenthal analyzed both the attraction and the fear of the past as it shaped historical consciousness in specific periods and settings, notably Renaissance Europe, Enlightenment France and Britain, Victorian Britain, and Revolutionary America. He demonstrated how science became connected in the public mind with progress, and how the arts, which seemingly did not progress, became associated with cultural conservatism. In a second section of the book he reflected on the difference between memory and history. Concluding that the role of memory was declining as that of history was expanding, he believed that relics could provide important tools for anchoring personal and collective memories, even if they never removed the possibility, even the necessity, of interpretation. In the third section Lowenthal turned his attention to the growth in the number of heritage representations, including both museums and the media. He recognized the role that public expectations play in determining what is presented, how it is presented, and what narratives are constructed from the historic artifacts. Lowenthal went so far as to argue that the public frequently prefers historic reproductions to the real artifact, because the former is more congruous with their taste and expectations than the latter. Thus people may prefer colonial revival furniture to actual colonial furniture, or pseudo-Victorian houses to historically accurate Victorian houses. When compared to Lowenthal’s generally supportive approach to cultural heritage, the work of two British scholars showed a more critical edge. In his 1985 volume, On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain, Paul Wright ref lected widely on how a nostalgic view of the past was shaping the English mentality. Wright found evidence of this uncritical view of the past in a variety of cultural forms, including advertising, architecture, and urban development. But he was most concerned about how the past had been appropriated by conservatives in Thatcherite England, how it contributed to a simple-minded patriotism during the conf lict in the Falklands/Malvinas, and how it distracted people from the actual economic and social conditions of their everyday lives. Two years later, Robert Hewison’s The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline argued that heritage had become a massive and multi-faceted structure imposed from above, by the state, on a population that for the most part had little interest in it. Hewison saw organizations like The National Trust, English Heritage, the Arts Council, and the Historic Houses Association as taking both resources and energy away from other economic sectors that might have been more effective and efficient in reversing Britain’s economic decline. The sanctification of the past through social mechanisms such as the listing of buildings in terms of their historic importance, 227

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coupled with the striking rise in the number of museums being founded and funded, meant that the basis for individual and collective identities was to be found in the past. Like Wright, Hewison worried about the political consequences of an increasingly widespread nostalgia for a golden age that never was. Compared to Great Britain, cultural conservation in the United States lacks the same sort of powerful centralized organizations, a fact ref lected in the works of American social scientists. The British National Trust (founded in 1896) is one of the nation’s largest landholders, while the US National Trust, founded only in 1949, serves more as an information clearing house that encourages grassroots efforts while managing a restricted number of properties. In my 1996 book, Historic Preservation: Collective Memory and Historic Identity, I linked these organizational differences to differences in the narratives that were being constructed through heritage presentations in each country. I examined how what I called the Preservation Project had grown from an interest in the rural past and patriotic sites to encompass developments in industrial heritage, where the desire of site administrators to provide a pleasant experience for tourists clashed with the simple historic fact that industrial factories and mills were noisy, dangerous, and polluting places. War sites presented their own challenges, as different ethnic groups and nations disputed over what had really happened, and as groups such as women, whose participation in wars had previously been unrecognized, wanted to be remembered in ceremonial commemorations. Other chapters of my book examined how preservation had extended to include the history of consumerism and World Heritage. I was particularly interested in the development of what I called Staged Symbolic Communities. These communities were mythic representations of the historic past and were particularly popular in the States when compared to Britain. They could be constructed either on the basis of a once existing community such as Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, or be constructed on a fresh site, with historic buildings imported from elsewhere, such as Henry Ford’s Historic Greenfield in Michigan or Old Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts. Or they could coexist alongside a living community, such as in Iowa’s Amana Colonies or Historic Deerfield in Massachusetts. Whatever their relationship to actual local history, these Staged Symbolic Communities often seemed more like “real” communities to visitors than did their own localities. Other scholars soon provided a detailed analysis of how such an attractive image of community was manufactured and communicated by the corporate managers working as symbolic bankers. In their ethnography of Colonial Williamsburg, Handler and Gable (1997) accepted that the heritage presentations of this major tourist site had changed markedly since its founding in the 1920s, when Rockefeller saw in it the image of a harmonious pre-industrial past, filled with Georgian buildings and well-groomed gardens. Now, the presence of people trained in the New Social History meant that other narratives were being introduced, namely those relating to women, African Americans, and the lower classes. Slavery, which in the early decades had been invisible, was now part and parcel of this heritage site and enacted by black interpreters, who were nonetheless strongly advised about what they could or could not say to visitors (as were all of the interpreters). Handler and Gable provided sharp criticisms about the extent to which entertainment took over from education, with heritage being presented as a “product” to be consumed. Nonetheless, many people involved in heritage as managers, interpreters, experts, or scholars, questioned the very idea that heritage could be the same as history. They recognized that, to become part of collective memories, history must go through multiple processes of translation and transformation, becoming infused with contemporary purposes. Heritage sites provide settings where these narratives can be both recounted and dramatically reenacted. 228

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How, then, to capture these multiple pasts and understand the purposes to which they were and are being put? In France, it took a team of over one hundred researchers under the direction of historian Pierre Nora to produce the seven volumes of Les Lieux de mémoire, published between 1984 and 1992 and of which an edited selection was later published in English (Nora 1996–1998). This extensive undertaking was designed to analyze the many different forms of tangible and intangible heritage that helped constitute French national identity. The subjects ranged from sites such as Reims, where the French kings were crowned, to the small Musée du Désert in the southern Cévennes mountains, a former Huguenot stronghold transformed into a museum honoring the Protestant cause and sacrifice. Les Lieux de mémoire also included figures such as Jeanne D’Arc and Charles de Gaulle, and discussed the symbolic importance of La Marseillaise and the Louvre. In his chapter in this volume, Hutton demonstrates how this impressive endeavor contributed to French historiography and fueled debates about the relationship between history and memory. A number of other works focus more specifically on how difficult historical periods are transformed into heritage narratives. Olick (2007) has argued that nation-states have gone from commemorating only moments of heroic grandeur to incorporating episodes of atrocities within what he calls a “politics of regret,” based on a shared sense of responsibility, rationality, and justice. Through an analysis of key commemorative acts, such as Willy Brandt’s visit to the Ghetto Heroes Monument in Warsaw, the visit of Ronald Reagan and Helmut Kohl to the Bitburg cemetery, and the annual commemorations of May 8, 1945, Olick shows how commemorations take on a path-dependent form, with current events existing in a form of dialogue with past commemorations (c.f. Olick and Levy 1997). Jordan (2006) shows how this politics of regret is given visual form in the markers and memorials found throughout Berlin. The fact that Jordan’s analysis is based on commemorative sites rather than commemorative occasions is ref lected in her very pragmatic concern with why some potential sites, i.e. sites of historic significance for the Nazi party or German resistance to its regime, are ignored while others are officially recognized and protected. Her answer revolves first around the availability of the land, whether it is in private hands or government ownership, and whether or not it is attractive to commercial developers. She also stresses the importance of memorial entrepreneurs in promoting a specific site’s importance, and the state of public opinion regarding the site and the desirability of its commemoration. Following destruction due to armed conf lict, nation-states and impacted localities must decide whether or not to leave bullet holes in buildings and whether or not to rebuild monuments that were destroyed in the course of both intranational and international conf licts. England’s Coventry Cathedral has been left as an evocative reminder of the bombing suffered in World War II, and the ruined exhibition hall at Hiroshima is now an integral part of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Poland followed a different strategy by rebuilding the historic center of Cracow (itself now a World Heritage Site) as a sign of the nation’s resilience and its recovery from the massive destruction suffered. More recently, Rivera (2008) has demonstrated how Croatia is bent on concealing all physical evidence of the destruction it suffered during the wars leading to the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. With its policy governed by a strong desire to attract increased tourism, Croatia has marketed itself as holiday destination with beautiful beaches, islands, and historic towns, a cultural narrative in which recurrent outbreaks of ethnic hatreds have no place. Indeed, “heritage tourism” has developed such importance within the field of heritage conservation and plays such a role in the collective memories that people form of different places that it is worth taking the time to give it special consideration. 229

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Heritage and tourism As the Rivera article suggests, heritage conservation has been strongly impacted by the rise of tourism as the world’s leading industry over the course of the second half of the twentieth century. The World Trade Organization (WTO), a United Nations agency, estimates that the revenues of the global tourist industry grew from a gross of just over US$2 billion in 1950 to approximately US$444 billion in 1997. The WTO further predicted that the global number of tourist trips would rise from approximately 842 million recorded for 2006 to a record 1.5 billion in 2020 (Barthel-Bouchier 2013: 155). While specific figures are hard to calculate, it is nonetheless estimated that about half of all tourism involves some component of heritage tourism. In Cultural Heritage and the Challenge of Sustainability (2013), I demonstrate how the attitudes of the Global Heritage Community went from being anti-mass tourism to embracing tourism as a source of funding for heritage projects. In the process, a discourse on sustainable tourism developed to resolve the contradictions between protecting cultural heritage on the one hand and exploiting it through ever-increasing tourist visitation on the other. Yet numerous studies demonstrate that tourism frequently has a negative impact on the physical heritage site itself, through pollution, wearing down of surfaces, theft, and by imposing too large a footprint in terms of tourist shops, services, and facilities. Tourism also negatively affects intangible heritage, as tourist-oriented businesses replace traditional sources of living, and as indigenous arts become transmogrified into “tourist arts.” In the process, collective memories are reworked into narratives that have even less relation to the historic past or to local populations. For example, Flesler and Melgosa (2008) show how certain Spanish communities have created mythic versions of their past to fit with tourist expectations. McCrone, Morris, and Kelly (1995) demonstrate how the whole nation of Scotland has been marketed as a “brand” for tourists—a process also seen in such tourist-friendly cities as Barcelona and Amsterdam. Venice is a particularly blatant example of how the tourist presence can overwhelm the local community, threatening the historic fabric by over-visitation and pollution, and forcing many native Venetians off their historic islands (Davis and Marvin 2004). Outside of Europe, both tourism and heritage conservation can assume a form of neocolonialism in developing nation-states. In his in-depth analysis of the relationship among these forces in nine Latin American cities, Scarpaci (2006) demonstrates how pro-tourism forces within nation-states have joined with global corporations such as major hotel chains to dramatically alter the historic centers of cities and towns. Scarpaci argues that having a socialist government does not make Cuba any less interested in the market economy or any less keen to exploit its heritage to attract tourists. Foreigners are gentrifying Havana’s historic Habana Vieja, and global capital is transforming the built landscape. In the small city of Trinidad, local officials dedicated to preserving a certain authentic quality in their distinctive historic center find themselves battling the representatives of the national government pushing for greater tourist development to attract more hard currency. Scarpaci’s comparative analysis supports my argument about how heritage machines composed of local and/or national government agencies, non-profit organizations, and development interests promote heritage tourism and associated processes of commodification (Barthel 1996). This process can be observed the world over. In the Kalahari, Hitchcock (1997) finds government officials in Botswana and Namibia joining with development and tourism professionals as well as scientists to promote sustainable tourism. While some of the Kalahari Bushmen enjoyed certain benefits, unanticipated costs included greater social stratification, community factionalism, and environmental harm. And Harrison summarizes the findings 230

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of contributions to his co-edited volume regarding heritage sites in The Netherlands, the United States, Mexico, Kyrgyzstan, Cambodia, India, and Vietnam by suggesting that the powerful stakeholders who parachute in from elsewhere tend to drown out the voices of the local residents. Regarding the latter, Harrison writes, “The meanings such sites hold for them may be quite different from those propounded by national tourism marketing agencies and UNESCO” (2005: 7). By operating according to its own scientific criteria of universal value, UNESCO imposes its narratives on local narratives, and the cosmopolitan memories of tourists threaten to overwhelm local collective memories. Since World Heritage status is perceived as a cultural good by nation-states, actual heritage practices can be changed where necessary to fit into the United Nations narrative of universalism through cultural diversity. For example, Yan (2012) demonstrates how China has come to value World Heritage as a source of both international prestige and tourist revenue. China has been extremely active in promoting its sites for inclusion on the World Heritage List, and successful in achieving listing. This is due in no small measure to its reorganization of its heritage administrative system and also to what Yan sees as a profound transformation of the discourse on heritage. The stated significance of heritage sites has been reformulated according to the World Heritage categories, and a national consensus has been encouraged to form around these official narratives Through all these different social processes, cultural heritage shapes local and national collective memories and also cosmopolitan memories. Tangible heritage has the benefit of reminding us that we live in a physical world, one in which physical objects have a definite presence and sometimes an “aura” that provides the basis for the construction and perpetual revision of social narratives. Intangible heritage also plays a role by reminding us of the importance of human practices that both use objects from the social environment and change that environment. Both tangible and intangible heritage require interpretation, but what form this interpretation can take is nonetheless limited by the historic evidence. As Olick and Levy (1997) have suggested, such interpretations often assume a path-dependent pattern through which latter interpretations are to some extent conditioned by those that came before. What people do with their cultural heritage depends, in turn, on the relationships they construct between their collective memories of the past and their various social agendas for the future.

References Barthel, D. (1996) Historic Preservation: Collective Memory and Historic Identity, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Barthel-Bouchier, D. (2013) Cultural Heritage and the Challenge of Sustainability, Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Barthel-Bouchier, D. and Hui, M. M. (2007) “Places of Cosmopolitan Memory,” Globality Studies Journal Online. Available www.stonybrook.edu/globality. Beck, U. (2000) “The Cosmopolitan Perspective: The Sociology of the Second Age of Modernity.” British Journal of Sociology 51: 79–105. Bourdieu, P. (1993) The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, R. Johnson (ed.), New York: Columbia University Press. Burke, K. (1984) Attitudes Toward History, 3rd rev. ed. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Choay, F. (1996) L’Allégorie du Patrimoine, 2nd rev. ed., Paris: Editions du Seuil. Davis, Robert C. and Marvin, Garry (2004) Venice, the Tourist Maze: A Cultural Critique of the World’s Most Touristed City. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Elliott, M. A. and Schmutz, V. (2012) “World Heritage: Constructing a Universal Cultural Order.” Poetics 40(3): 256–77. 231

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Flesler, D. and Melgosa, A. Pérez (2008) “Marketing Convivencia: Contemporary Tourist Appropriations of Spain’s Jewish Past,” in E. Afinoguénova and J. Mari-Olivella (eds.), Spain is (Still) Different: Tourism and Discourse in Spanish Cultural Identity, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Graham, B., Ashworth, G. J., and Tunbridge, J. E. (2000) A Geography of Heritage. Power, Culture, and Economy, London: Hodder Arnold. Halbwachs, M. (1952) Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire, Paris: Presses Universitaires Françaises. Handler, R. and Gable, E. (1997) The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Harrison, David (2005) “Introduction: Contested Narratives in the Domain of World Heritage,” in David Harrison and Michael Hitchcock (eds.), The Politics of World Heritage: Negotiating Tourism and Conservation. Bristol: Channel View Publications, pp. 1–10. Heinich, N. (2012) “L’Inventaire, un patrimoine en voie de desertification?” in N. Heinich and R. Shapiro (eds.), De l’artification. Enquêtes sur le passage à l’art, Paris: Editions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Hewison, R. (1987) The Heritage Industry, London: Methuen. Hitchcock, R. K. (1997) “Cultural, Economic, and Environmental Impacts of Tourism Among the Kalahari Bushmen,” in E. Chambers (ed.), Tourism and Culture: An Applied Perspective, Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Hutton, Patrick H. (in press) “Pierre Nora’s Les Lieux de mémoire Thirty Years After,” in A. L. Tota and T. Hagen (eds.), Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies, London: Routledge. Jordan, J. A. (2006) Structure of Memory: Understanding Urban Change in Berlin and Beyond, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kowalski, A. (2011) “When Cultural Capitalization Became Global Practice: The 1972 World Heritage Convention,” in N. Bandelj and F. Wherry (eds.), The Cultural Wealth of Nations, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 73–89. Kymlicka, W. (2007) Multicultural Odysseys: Navigating the New International Politics of Diversity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levy, D. and Sznaider, N. (2002) “Memory Unbound: The Holocaust and the Formation of Cosmopolitan Memory,” European Journal of Social Theory 5: 87–106. Lowenthal, D. (1985) The Past Is a Foreign Country, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McCrone, D., Morris, A., and Kelly, R. (1995) Scotland—The Brand: The Making of a Scottish Heritage, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Meyer, J. W., Boli, J., Thomas, G. M., and Ramirez, F. O. (1997) “World Society and the NationState,” American Journal of Sociology 103(1): 144–81. Nora, P. (1996–1998) Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, L. D. Kristman (ed.), A. D. Goldhamer (trans.), New York: Columbia University Press. Olick, J. K. (2007) The Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility, New York: Routledge. Olick, J. K. and Levy, D. (1997) “Collective Memory and Cultural Constraint: Holocaust Myth and Rationality in German Politics,” American Sociological Review 62: 921–36. Rivera, L. A. (2008) “Managing ‘Spoiled’ National Identity: War, tourism, and memory in Croatia,” American Sociological Review 73: 613–34. Scarpaci, J. L. (2006) Plazas and Barrios: Heritage Tourism and Globalization in the Latin American Centro Histórico, Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Silverman, H. and Ruggles, D. Fairchild (2007) “Cultural Heritage and Human Rights,” in H. Silverman and D. Fairchild Ruggles (eds.), Cultural Heritage and Human Rights, New York: Springer. UNESCO (2010) Basic Texts of the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, 2010 Edition, Paris: United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. Wright, P. (1985, 2009 rev. ed.) On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yan, Haiming (2012) World Heritage in China: Universal Discourse and National Culture, unpublished thesis, University of Virginia.

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20 Remembering through music Turkish diasporic identities in Berlin1 Pinar Güran-Aydin and Tia DeNora

Introduction In this chapter our aim is to contribute to the growing literature on music and memory through a case study: the relationship of music and cultural memory in a migrant community, namely the Turkish diaspora in Berlin, Germany, and the changing patterns of music consumption within generations present in Berlin since the beginning of guest worker agreements in 1961. We describe how members of the Turkish diaspora have been utilising music for remembering, for preventing memories from being forgotten, and for transmitting them to the next generations. We will describe this musical memory work as it features in the everyday lives of these Turkish respondents and in terms of how it can be seen to structure the operations of memory. To that end, this chapter will consist of three sections. First, and as context for the main part of our discussion, we describe how musical memory work is practiced among three different generations of people from Turkey. Then we will ‘zoom in’ to the ways in which ‘Turkish’ cultural heritage and identity is musically fabricated by the third generation, our youngest respondents, who were born and raised in Germany. Finally, we ‘zoom out’ to consider the more general question of how narratives of ‘Turkishness’ are woven into the music production of the third-generation Turks and how this process serves to enrich our understanding of cultural technologies of memory. Throughout, we will understand music as a very particular type of technology of memory (Irwin-Zarecka 1994; Olick 2007, 2008; Sturken 1997; Tota 2004; Wagner-Pacifici 1996), and we relate this type of memory to the situation of migrant workers in Berlin. Conceptually we will describe, following Radley (1990), Urry (1996), and Connerton (1989), the idea that remembering occurs in a world of things and words, and that “artefacts play a central role in the memories of cultures and individuals” (Radley 1990: 57). As several scholars have suggested (DeNora 2000; Hagen 2012; Batt-Rawden 2006), music can be used as a device for the ref lexive process of remembering/constructing who one is, where one has been, and where one is headed. Similarly, Stokes describes how music is an affective agent, rousing collective memories, and affording the sense of “relocation” (Stokes 1997: 3).

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In migrant communities this imagined space meets a variety of needs, such as the need for belonging, preserving culture, or communication. Among these, communication can be provided by sharing knowledge, by music reminding people of shared experiences and allowing an emotional connection to other people. From this perspective, the important point for what follows is that remembering can be a form of knowledge and that music can function as an agent that shapes knowledge formation. How, then, do acts of musical remembering/ knowledge production come to connect different generations of immigrants from Turkey and its culture and what are the ways in which music mediates the shape of what is ‘remembered’, what is ‘known’ and what is declared as authentic about the Turkish homeland? These are the questions that will guide us in our presentation of this case study.

Historical and musical background Germany was in need of labour after World War II. To fill this gap, the government signed bilateral agreements with several countries, Turkey being one of them. Turkey’s agreement with West Germany was initiated in 1961 and soon the majority of the guest workers in the country were from Turkey. According to the first agreement, the guest workers were to return to Turkey after two years; but with later arrangements, the period was extended due to demand from both Turkish and German sides. Today, Berlin is home to a dense Turkishspeaking population that constitutes nearly ten per cent of the city’s residents. Since the initial plan of the guest workers was not to settle down in Germany, the first generation remained quite isolated from German society. They formed a community of their own, lived in Turkish neighbourhoods, socialised with other immigrants from Turkey, and neither needed nor endeavoured to learn German, which further isolated them from the society they were living in. The visible cultural gap and the integration issues of the Turks were mostly caused by the fears of the immigrants who had come to a country with a different language and, most importantly, a different religion. Ensuing educational problems, which were exacerbated by the language barrier and the general attitude of the host nation towards the guest workers, also created difficulties for the second-generation people to compete with their German peers. In such an environment, music became one of the most important cultural agents immigrants embraced with differing agendas compared to their fellow citizens in Turkey. Music was used as a tool for sharing, remembering, reproducing, and spreading their experience of being immigrants. The first wave of guest workers were playing their instruments they had brought from Turkey (mostly bağlama, the most popular and widely played long-necked lute in Turkey), singing türküs (folk songs) in the big dormitories in which they were living together, creating a shared listening experience (Greve 2006: 37). In the following years, when guest workers’ stay extended longer than the initial plan, the population of the Turkish community increased with more labour migration and family reunifications. However, since both governments had not taken action to provide the necessary conditions for integration for both Turkish and German parties, the migrant community continued to live in their bubble.

Performing the diaspora With the growth of the Turkish diaspora, the musical productions also started to emerge. The first examples of these are labelled as ‘guest worker songs’ (gurbetçi türküleri). These songs were in the folk music style with lyrics about immigration issues, mostly about homesickness. They were telling their stories, starting with their immigration and singing about their daily lives 234

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through songs. As Öztürk suggests, looking at the gurbetçi türküleri gives us a more intimate view of the guest workers’ experience and presenting these in a musical form allows the transmission of the immigrants’ stories to later generations (2001). This is also a means to present how music acts as an agent to transmit both tangible (artefacts like musical instruments) and intangible cultural heritage which are both markers of collective memories. As BarthelBouchier argues in this volume: “People use the tangible remains of their heritage as well as the intangible traditions and practices as tools that help to shape collective memories, and to provide the narratives that explain and accompany them.” Another genre that was embraced by the immigrant community was arabesk, a style that became very popular in Turkey in the 1970s. The songs had similar lyrics to the guest worker songs: longing for home, being humiliated by the elites, and not being able to adapt to the city life were among the common topics. Stokes explains the context of arabesk song text as: [It] focuses a dense cluster of themes connected with the arabesk drama: gurbet (living alone as a stranger or foreigner, particularly as a worker), yalnızlık (loneliness), hicran, hüsran, and özlem (sadness and yearning), gözyaşları (tears), sarhoşluk (drunkenness), zülm (oppression), and finally kader (fate) [1992: 142]. The highly welcoming attitude of the migrants towards arabesk music was thus not surprising. This genre, still being popular among some social groups and influencing new genres nowadays, has played a major role in passing the feelings of homesickness and nostalgia from older generations to the younger ones, carrying on the idea of “homeland Turkey” as a place to be longed for.

Different generations and their places of shared listening experience The drastic change between generations was one of the things that gave rise to the diversity of the Turkish-speaking community. Mannheim puts an emphasis on the fact that a generation is a group of people of a similar age and connected to each other by sharing a powerful historical event (1952, cited in Olick 2007, p.47). In the case of immigrants of Turkish origin in Germany, we argue that the shared experience that unites a generation does not necessarily mean being in the same age group or other similar categorisation. The generations in this study have rather a complex formation and there are a number of different dynamics at work that would situate a person in different generations for different reasons. When we are talking about an immigrant community, the first idea of generation that comes to mind is that the first people coming to the host land constitute the first generation and their children and grandchildren become the second and third generations respectively. On the other hand, the matter of age is a very important variable. In a settled community, the shared experience of historical events (and therefore memories) constitutes an important factor that categorises people into the same generation. In this case, it is important that people are in a similar age group that would allow them to have a similar perception of the historical events because of their experience in life. Eyerman and Turner define the term generation as “initially … a cohort of persons passing through time who come to share a common habitus, hexis and culture, a function of which is to provide them with a collective memory that serves to integrate the cohort over a finite period of time” (1998: 93). According to our observations and the outcomes of this research, the change in the community is narrated through the transformation of generations. Therefore we choose to employ the generation idea, although it is a symbolic and imagined formation, which nevertheless 235

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still provides a tool helping analyse the groups of people. In their study, Eyerman and Turner attempt to understand “how generations are constituted through the institutionalisation of memory through collective rituals and narratives” (1998: 93). In our study, music is one of the main agents that constitutes generations by instituting a shared cultural memory. Güran-Aydin’s fieldwork in Berlin concentrated on the collective music events and places of the community, the most important being music schools; türkü bars; concerts; gatherings like weddings and other celebration parties related to marriage such as engagements, or kına (gatherings for the bride where her female friends and family members sing and dance together); and circumcision feasts (sünnet düğünü). The common aspect about these events and places are that they are where shared music experiences take place for the Turkish diaspora in Berlin in addition to their domestic musical activities. Private Turkish music schools are among the most important musical places that play a role in preserving the culture and therefore transferring memories within the community. Within these schools, the bağlama, a traditional stringed instrument, is the most popular among the students. Yet in spite of all the importance attributed to the instrument, the primary point that nearly all the teachers expressed is that the third-generation students younger than fifteen years old who take bağlama lessons usually don’t choose this instrument by themselves but because their families want them to learn. The teachers believe that this is because families think that by taking bağlama lessons their children can learn about their origins, and they can transmit cultural heritage to younger generations: “Bağlama is mostly preferred to play Turkish songs and teach the children about Turkish culture. Many kids come here to learn bağlama but then only a few of them get really interested in the instrument and music, and continue playing it,” says a music teacher and owner of a music school. As both carriers of tangible and intangible cultural heritage, similar to bağlama schools, türkü bars are the places where the traditional musics from Turkey are performed on a regular basis and these events create a medium to participate in the musical aspect of nostalgia. In addition to the musical repertoire, these places are decorated in a traditional sense with objects (such as instruments, pictures, carpets) related to Turkey’s folklore. For most of the respondents, participating in these events is sharing in the emotions that peak/emerge within the traditional songs and settings. It comes with a feeling of satisfaction for the need of belonging to the “home land.” Different than the türkü bars in Turkey, the ones in Berlin had diversity in the regions the türküs come from, as well as the languages the songs were sung in. They have songs from Turkish, Kurdish, Laz music repertoires and more in the same performance. One interviewee, a man in his thirties, mentions this diversity: “I like going to the türkü bars and listening to them and singing with them. They play different songs from different regions, but to me they are all my country’s music.… I learned different türküs here than I learned from my parents at home.” His younger sister adds: “We go there with my friends and we sing and dance. Our parents don’t worry about us when we are there, because we are with our people.” So türkü bars not only serve as places to listen to or perform music but also safe places where the Turkish community have a collective experience and in return build up moments and memories about the Turkish homeland. Needless to say, places of music are not limited to these two sites. On the contrary, various venues and occasions within the community bring people into contact with Turkish music. As is mentioned by many of our respondents, wedding parties (düğün) and other ceremonies like engagements, kına, or circumcisions play a significant role in the transmission of music, dances, and other traditions to younger generations. These are events where people come together within their immigrant communities, receive news from their people, mingle, and connect to Turkey. According to our respondents concerts have, naturally, always been 236

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among the most important musical activities. Concerts, just like weddings, are perceived as an opportunity to come together within the immigrant community so they have an emotional function in the community. Going to a concert is about more than just music consumption for immigrants. Güran-Aydin’s respondents used expressions like “it is as if your distant home is coming to you.” For some people, it feels like “disloyalty or shame” not to go to these concerts. These events have different emotional meanings for the migrants as van Dijck explains: “Shared listening, exchanging [recorded] songs, and talking about music create a sense of belonging and connect a person’s sense of self to a larger community and generation” (2006: 370). Above we described some of the most important places and occasions of shared music experiences for the Turkish community that allow for memory transfer between generations and new memory constructions for the new generations. However, when we look at respondents’ involvements with music we see shared listening experiences occurred more in the past and no longer happen on the same scale. The new generation is not as interested in learning bağlama as their parents were. Shared musicking events and locales like düğüns, concerts, and türkü bars or the private music schools still play a significant role in the musical life and memory of the community with Turkish origins today, but the numbers of musical events and places have been decreasing gradually in recent years. This concerns the new generations’ need to find their own ways to express themselves musically that would connect them with several different identities their migrant experience offers them like Turkish, German, Berliner, and others.

New memories and new selves: phase 1, hip-hop in the 1990s While protecting cultural heritage has been a continuing effort from the beginning of the immigration process until today, as we could observe in the places of music and musicking activities of the Turkish diaspora, we also witnessed several attempts that would mark what we call “generational breakings” throughout the migration process. Hip-hop culture, beginning in the 1990s, has become one of the most significant examples of music marking the territories of a generation in the German-Turkish community. Young people have created their own diverse musicking traditions and spaces, which connect them both to Turkey and Germany. This is a need that the young generation has felt in order to integrate into the life of their peers and raise their recognition in society, in terms of adapting to German life. The sound of this change was hip-hop, which has come to be the emblem of political and cultural opposition: opposition to conservative and nationalist German opponents and opposition to aspects of traditional Turkish life that barred them from pursuing opportunities for identity and advancement in Germany.2 This relationship between young German-Turks and hip-hop is now long-standing in Germany, and it has even triggered an interest in Turkey for German-Turk hip-hop. Involvement with hip-hop was one of the first markers of dissociation between young Turkish people born in Germany and their elders. Through hip-hop, young people called for their rights and protested hostile and racist attitudes towards immigrants. But they also created a space for themselves distinct from their Turkish ties thus aligning themselves more closely with their German peers. And yet, while this new Western music distanced them from their families’ musical tastes, it also allowed them to blend hip-hop with traditional songs from Turkey so as to build a hybrid cultural space, sometimes acting as a shelter, as a third alternative to the lives of both sides. The 1990s were thus a significant period in Turkish music history: hip-hop culture was introduced to the Turkish scene in Germany as well as in 237

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Turkey. The German-Turkish youth have enthusiastically been using hip-hop ever since as a gateway to reach the third space they needed to create their own culture.

Phase 2: music and media changing the scene from 1990s until today With the entrance of Turkish media in the 1990s, such as private satellite television channels and the Internet the decade after, the diversity of music consumption habits increased. This period of the media’s prolific entrance into people’s daily lives helped to form smaller and more specific Turkish-speaking communities in terms of musical taste, just as has happened with the music consumers and producers in Turkey. Unlike the first generations, who had mostly enjoyed folk music from Turkey, the young generations are rather diverse in their choices of musical genre, from arabesk to rap to rock, and music in English in addition to German. This was an expected development, similar and parallel to the music scene in Turkey. There were relatively few alternatives in the 1960s and 1970s in the Turkish music market. With the pop music boom in the 1990s, media developments, such as the launch of private radio stations and music channels like Kral TV and Number One, and access to foreign music via European and American television channels, such as MTV, MCM, and VH1, people in Turkey were introduced to a variety of music and developed different tastes. The Turkish music audience in Germany had a similar experience. This made a drastic difference in the diversity of music they could consume. The second development to inf luence the immigrants’ connection with music was, obviously, Internet technology in the 2000s. The Internet has an accelerating impact on the immigrants’ expected level of change in time, but in this case the story has at least two sides. We have observed that while immigrant generations’ relationship with culture is changing and the younger generations of German-Turks will have different cultural identities in the future, at present the Internet provides a constant and immediate bridge to the place known as the homeland. Here we present some extracts from our interviews with respondents from different age groups in order to compare their musical tastes and their access to music. It is also possible to see the change in the discourses for while the older generations put more emphasis on themes like nostalgia, integrity, and authenticity, the younger generations do not address these kinds of issues but are still interested in music from Turkey. For example, consider forty-year-old respondent Mehmet, talking about how he remembers his father and the music in their house: When I hear the türkü Çeke Çeke I think of my father, I remember how he gets emotional and carried away.… I know that when he listens to that song or sometimes when he plays it on his bağlama, he goes to Erzincan. His body stays here, but his mind is gone to his köy. When I was a child, I knew that this song was related to Erzincan so I thought of Erzincan too.… I keep a copy of these albums in my house, and I’m trying to build a good Turkish folk music archive. Mehmet’s relationship with music from Turkey mostly involves old songs, the songs he had heard at home, and therefore involves nostalgia. His connection with music is also interwoven with his relationship with his family and things he considered related to home. However, for the members of the young generation who are interested in popular culture and especially music from Turkey, they have access to the new culture being produced in Turkey concurrently with people in Turkey. Unlike Mehmet, younger people’s relationship with music is far from the nostalgic emotions of their families’, but they build their new and own connections. 238

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For the same reasons, the cultural memories of the present are taking on a very different shape to those of the near past. Most people with Internet access have their own relations and connections to Turkey and they are building up their own virtual memories. We thus suggest that the constructed memories of the second and third generations, which we claim to be inf luenced by the older generations, are transforming and becoming virtual memories for the younger generation who engage new media technologies. So, in addition to the inf luence of the family and the community, young German-Turks today are creating their own, third-space memories via new media. In fact, we would still call this new form of memory a construction, it is just that the building blocks of these constructions are changing. In this new construction the collective character of the remembrance is joined by an individual memory-forming experience. When we compare the experiences of the people connected with Turkey between the 1960s and the 1990s, we observe that a physical effort was needed to acquire their homelands’ music along with other impossibilities. Among these efforts were the community members’ travels back and forth between Turkey and Germany once a year for the summer holidays. Our respondent Mehmet remembers these trips when he was a teenager: I remember my father driving us to Ankara every year.… On our way back, which took a few days, we would listen to the new albums we bought from Turkey.… Everybody had their own favourite: my sister and I liked pop music, my mum liked folk music, and my father liked folk and art music. We would listen to them all in turn. For most people their access to new music was limited to those trips. In addition to this, there were German-Turkish musicians playing live and recording albums on which they usually performed their own compositions written around the theme of the immigrant experience, such as gurbet songs and other similar styles. Very few radio programmes played Turkish music; some music stores imported albums and video films from Turkey. The 1990s ushered in access to TV channels from Turkey via satellite. Finally, the Internet now provides a path to most media material that is distributed in Turkey. The point here is that there had to be a physical transfer, which was inconvenient and limited compared to today’s sources. People had to choose between albums and instruments to take with them, and they then had to wait until the next visit. There was physical construction, too, with the material brought from Turkey, and emotional bonding with these objects that became physical evidence of the past. Our respondent Özlem told us how valuable are these cassettes brought from Turkey: I was waiting all year and saving money to buy cassettes of my favourite Turkish musicians when we went to Turkey for the summer holidays.… They were my most valuable belongings.… Now I don’t even have a cassette player at home, but I still can’t throw them away. They were once my connection to Turkey, when I was a teenager. They have sentimental value. This is one of the reasons why old songs are more valued by Turks in Germany than they are in Turkey. These cassettes are both items of tangible heritage and “audio recordings as a community resource for accessing intangible cultural heritage” as Marontate et al. present them in their work (see this volume). In Turkey, these products are consumed faster. Apart from people’s individual connections with songs for specific reasons, greater meanings are attributed to them simply because they come from Turkey, again a part of the immigrant 239

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experience. However, with today’s technology the physical transfer has mostly stopped or decreased drastically. The Turkish space people want to be in no longer needs to be physically imported, because it already exists in the Turkish neighbourhoods in Berlin. People do not have to buy albums from or in Turkey because they can find them online if they are not already on sale in their local music shop. Though all communities experience change within the population in the process of time as a matter of course, the social and cultural gap between generations in the Turkish diaspora is greater because of the older generations’ harsher and poorer circumstances and the timidity and fear of the new produced by these conditions. The old generation of Turks in Germany were in stasis because of the bubble they were trapped in. Music naturally stayed in this closed bubble and therefore remained static as well. According to our respondents some people were especially proud that the authenticity of the music has been better preserved in Germany. According to Olick in studies on national identity, cultural heritage, or collective memory, the meaning attributed to memory has to do with the fear of forgetting and the desire for authenticity (2007). It is also possible to observe in our study’s case that the emphasis on the authenticity of music is more important in that it shows the need for information that is authentic rather than its actual musical form or value. It suggests a direct and true connection between music (and everything music stands for) and the audience. Accordingly, the older generations nowadays are hoping that the authenticity will prevent them from forgetting the songs by providing the assurance that they will always remember them the way they used to sing them when they were in Turkey. One might be tempted to ask to what degree the musics in Germany are authentic or culturally important, but this question presupposes that authenticity can be predefined. Connell and Gibson make this point clear when they suggest that “some music has been constructed as authentic because it suggested a directness of communication between artists and audiences—an emotive ‘honesty’ in words and sounds” (2003: 46). However, the authenticity that some people are very proud to preserve in Germany is at risk, since the consumption of Turkish popular culture is becoming similar in Turkey and Germany. The young generation’s attitude toward and relationship with music in particular will make it more difficult to maintain “authenticity.” Nevertheless, the consumption of the same musical material concurrently will not offer the same comfort to the listener, because many Turkish people in Germany have the feeling of belonging to a diaspora, even if only subconsciously. This situation brings certain mistrust of belonging to a German society, so the GermanTurk’s expectancy from music may be different from that of the ordinary listener in Turkey. Therefore, music continues to provide a space for nostalgia, belonging, safety, or whatever is needed, but the kinds of music that provoke emotions have changed. The face of the musics people choose for self-care is adjusting. Today the youth who are listening to musics from Turkey prefer popular songs, and this is mostly because of the new media technologies. As we can see in Castells’ discussion on the new information technologies and their role in the change of meanings, not only are immigrants’ habits affected, but all societies exposed to new technologies: New information technologies are not in themselves the source of the organisational logic that is transforming the social meaning of space: they are, however, the fundamental instrument that allows this logic to embody itself in historical actuality. Information technologies could be used, and can be used, in the pursuit of different social and functional goals, because what they offer, fundamentally, is f lexibility. (2010: 348) 240

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So the new technology of the Internet provides a whole new space for music consumption, and for immigrants this becomes virtual worlds and memories. People can easily access video clips of current popular artists, TV series, and other visual and aural materials, building up their own personal visions as well as the collective information they have. This creates a virtual idea of Turkey as a place, as the homeland of their families, in young people’s minds. How is this altering the relationship between music and cultural memory for immigrants today?

Old musics, new musics, mixed memories In the earlier sections we briefly mentioned how music consumption habits changed as a result of new media technologies. Essentially, the two important developments that impacted upon these habits were satellite TV technology in the 1990s, which brought access to TV channels from Turkey, and the Internet in the 2000s. Let us look brief ly at how the new media changed the scene and the new music that the immigrant community is interested in. Güran-Aydin simply asked people what kind of music they like listening to. Sometimes, if we saw that the person had some kind of a music listening device like an mp3 player, or simply a mobile phone, we asked: “What do you have on your playlist on your mp3 player?” In response to the latter question, Betül replied, “I love Sezen Aksu, I try to follow everything she does.…” We asked Betül how she finds Sezen Aksu’s music in Germany: It is not difficult to follow her work because now you have access to everything if you have a computer and an Internet connection. But since Sezen is the biggest pop star in Turkey, her recordings are always available in music or book shops here as soon as the album is released in Turkey. When asked why she thought she was so interested in this musician’s work, her answer led us to a personal connection with this music: My mother was a real fan, so my love for Sezen Aksu is a gift from my mum.… I think if I had not heard her songs at home all the time when I was a child, I would still like her music, but I wouldn’t feel such a connection. Now, every time I hear Sezen Aksu I feel like I’m sharing something with my mum in that moment. And I remember how she got emotional sometimes when listening to Sezen, because her music reminded her of her youth. Betül was a second-generation immigrant, meaning that her mother came to Germany in the 1970s when she was thirty-two years old, which makes her slightly younger than most in the second generation. She described how she remembered the times when the only source of music from Turkey was going to a Turkish music shop or bringing cassettes back when they went to Turkey for holidays. They also exchanged cassettes with friends and copied them. According to her that era has ended because everything can be found online. Cemal, a music shopkeeper, told us something similar about cassettes. He was upset that his business was going down, that many other music shops had shut down, and they were only able to keep the business running by selling liquor and cigarettes as a side business. Another interviewee, Nedim, is from a big family and the youngest of five siblings. He is around the same age as Betül. The same question was put to him. Like Betül, he described his love of all these 241

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phenomenal artists of Turkey who have been popular for many years now and loved by people from a wide range of ages: I always had a great admiration for İbrahim Tatlıses and Müslüm Gürses. They became well-known around the year I was born and I heard them in our house all the time.… My brother used to save his pocket money to buy their latest albums as soon as they arrived at the music store in our neighbourhood. Here we see the common point between Betül and Nedim’s answers is that they are both fans of well-known and well-established artists who also have their families’ admiration along with many other people’s in their community, which may be the real reason of their fandom in the first place. These musicians are members of the shared history and memory of these families. According to Bilgin (2013), our memories are expected to have a social quality as long as they are shared by a group of people and are used in interpersonal communications. Our social memories are not constructed through collecting the experiences that actually happened, they are formed by the meanings emerging from the dynamics of communications of people or groups. In Nedim and Betül’s cases, these shared listening experiences affected the meaning that these musics bear for them. These melodies carry along their memories with their families. They remember their parents’ longing for their home country and culture when listening to these songs and they inherit these feelings along with admiration for these artists. They take on these memories to their own repertoire without questioning, and music is the agent causing that with its great potential to be internalised easily. On the other hand, contact with younger people enabled Güran-Aydin to observe the shift towards new interests, new popular forms of music from Turkey, how they are perceived, and what kind of impact this has on the youth. The respondents at a hip-hop school aged fourteen and fifteen described how they liked rap music and they mostly liked it because it was energetic (not because of its lyrical content) and the cultural space it had provided for the migrant youth in the 1990s. One girl said: “I usually follow music from the US and Europe. I like dance music and I love watching the video clips. Turkish music videos are OK too, but the American ones are much better.” Then she went on: “I like Turkish stars like Hadise and Atiye, they’re great dancers.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, Hadise and Atiye are both children of Turkish immigrant families. Hadise was born in Belgium and Atiye in Germany and raised in Holland. Both women are in their twenties, and they usually produce popular, energetic dance songs. They sing in Turkish, but their looks, dances, and video clips have a European feel. Hadise was chosen to represent Turkey at the Eurovision song contest in 2009, mostly for her international looks—a presentation of how “European” Turkey can be at the time of the debates surrounding Turkey’s bid to join the European Union. The other musicians the girls mentioned are mostly new stars in their twenties. They said that if they liked the song a lot, they watch the video on YouTube. They do not buy albums. When asked about the musical preferences of their households, one said: My mum likes Turkish folk music, so I am familiar to the tunes, but I am not a fan. My older sister likes them and can usually sing along.… My elder siblings used to hear these Turkish songs in düğüns, they used to go to lots of düğüns every summer. Now it is not that often. 242

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The other girl said: My father wanted us to be modern, he wanted us to be open and integrate better. So he encourages me to come to this school to learn about hip-hop music.… He doesn’t mind that I speak German in the house with my brother; he wants to make sure that we speak good German.… He doesn’t want us to go through what my parents did.… So I guess I turned out to be more German than Turkish, and I listen to whatever my friends listen to. In addition to the changes in musical taste, their answers point to a miscommunication in some way between children and parents in terms of transferring and sharing musical knowledge, which could result in a disconnection in the transmission of cultural memories as well. So how does music mediate what is remembered for the new generations today?

Cultural memory formation in the new era Güran-Aydin began her research with the assumption that music has a vital role in regulating cultural memory in immigrant communities. In this chapter we have suggested that music is one of the tools used both consciously and unconsciously in the process of generational transmission of memories. We have claimed that a generational breaking point is occurring in the era of digitised music and global media; we can also see its reflections in the younger generations’ musicking activities. Therefore, there should be a change in the transmission and formation of cultural memory as an outgrowth. At this point, we will try to distinguish the memory transmission experience of the past and then explore how it has evolved to the present. Music has always been an integral part of the immigrant experience from the start, intentionally and unintentionally. When they settled down in Germany, Turkish immigrants felt the need to develop strategies to protect and pass on their cultural memories to their children. Music was the one cultural element to which they turned to preserve their heritage. The latest form of this behaviour is best observed in parents’ choice to send their children to bağlama schools, an intergenerational conf lict of desires. A quick glance at our findings from the bağlama schools shows that parents say they want their children to learn about Turkish culture, learn Turkish music, socialise with people like them (that is, people with origins in Turkey). National identity is important for these parents, and they see it as a connecting ground. They feel that their children are safe in these environments, where they learn about music from Turkey and spend time with similar children. So in this equation, families see Turkish music as a way of protecting and transferring their culture and cultural memories. The conf licting desires show up when we look at this story from the children’s perspective. As shown in our interviews, teachers mostly tell us that children do not enjoy going to the bağlama school. They are not interested in the instrument or the music, they do not fit in, and therefore they usually quit the course after a short while. In this picture we see different generations and two different desires. We acknowledge that some of the children may just not want to continue because they are not interested in music in general or for some other reason; we also particularly take into account that the teachers we spoke to often emphasised that the children were not interested because the music and instruments were not those their German peers knew. At this point it is critical to say that looking at the issue from an angle that compares Turkish children and their German peers is not the right thing to do today. The younger generation, especially children of primary school age, does not see the separation of

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“us and them.” On the contrary, they are as “German” as it is possible to be after fifty years of the immigration process. Therefore, it is also not surprising that children are not interested in a music they cannot relate to. Halbwachs (1980) described memory as a phenomenon that is not only formed in the past but is mostly shaped in the present time. According to him, memory is not stable but changes continuously. The way in which it is formed and what is remembered changes according to the inf luence of numerous social and cultural agents, in addition to other biological factors inf luencing our memories. So, how does music interfere with cultural memory and what happened in the case of Berlin’s Turkish immigrant community at a time we claim to be an era of generational breaking point? We understand memory as the constructed wholes of experiences. These constructed wholes are also a production in space just as those created with music. Cultural memory is not related to what is happening in everyday life but is at a distance from the reality of everyday life. It is a space emerging from the needs of the immigrants, needs such as belonging, identity, and safety. This way of thinking helps to see the relationship between music and cultural memory more clearly. From this perspective, how does the relationship between music and cultural memory alter in time? The first generations of immigrants sought refuge in music, but the form of music has kept changing. This refuge is rather a way to establish a connection within the family, and shared experiences gain greater importance. This is what lies behind families sending their children to bağlama schools to learn or not forget their “culture” and feel connected to the family or community. On the other hand, there are immigrants who have a completely different approach to music, although they were in the minority. The change in media has also changed the way cultural inheritance is transferred. The numerous methods of accessing music today allow people to construct a cultural identity through other means than family connections. Individuals can create “virtual” memories that differ from those of their families, as can be seen in the cases presented above. The immigrant society of Turkish origins has grown a lot in its more than fifty-year history to become the largest immigrant society in Germany today, and has become culturally and socially diversified in the process. The types of relationship between Turkey and the immigrants and motivations for travelling back and forth to Turkey have also increased with the growing connections in education and in art. Therefore, young people’s access and interest in the music of Turkey may have changed due to both physical and technological means. People have brought thousands of mp3s to Germany on tiny hard-discs or acquired the means to download them via the Internet. Thus the phenomenon of constructing or transferring memory through music that has accompanied the immigration process continues in various new ways. However, the key point for the formation of cultural memory is that collective and shared experiences are decreasing. The musicking experience of the younger generation is more personal today. The popular songs accompanied by visual materials from Turkey are one click away, and they are usually more synchronised with Turkey in terms of music consumption compared to older generations. The scene is moving away from the picture drawn by respondents of the immigrant community clinging to old songs, old styles, old dances, and praising their authenticity. It is changing in such a way that although younger generations might still be inf luenced by their families, we can assert that future generations who keep in touch with the music scene of Turkey will have a predominantly “virtual” memory of the country and of anything related to “Turkishness,” rather than one borrowed from older generations. In our attempt to analyse these issues we have seen how the community in Berlin thrived and today is too diverse to be seen in a general migrant picture. The young generation is 244

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developing its own culture inf luenced by its migrant background and its German side. The Internet makes possible interaction with Turkish popular culture on a more parallel basis to Turkey than ever before. The easy access to music makes Turkish songs an ordinary thing in young people’s lives; they are no longer the treasured musical items of times past. Young people are closer to Turkey’s music than ever before, yet their relationship with it makes it similar to any other music from around the world. The generational gaps, language issues, and other similar transformations are decreasing the significance of the shared experience of Turkishness so important to the older generations, and creating new ones. The new developments in the community are determining how cultural memories take shape. The Turkish diaspora in Germany presents a good example of how memories and the way they are formed are variable, not constant.

Conclusion We have described how the Turkish diaspora has been utilising music for remembering, for preventing memories from being forgotten, and for transmitting them to the next generations since the beginning of the guest worker agreements in 1961. We have suggested that this process is now undergoing a generational breaking point, in which the second generation’s efforts to introduce their children to Turkish culture through learning Turkish music at private schools is now confronting a much more diverse array of practices by which young people are creating new “traditions” of musicking that articulate new links to Turkey and to Germany. Developments in technology have assisted younger generations to forge alternative paths back to the music of their “homeland.” For this reason, building cultural memories via shared music listening experience is decreasing today as young people with ties to Turkey create new “memories” and for this process tap new forms of Turkish media. Memory is inevitably sociocultural; it takes shape in relation to available imageries and other cultural resources, among them music, and the case study here simply confirms that existing sociological wisdom. Where we think this case adds to discussions on memory and its socio-cultural construction is in its focus on the changing patterns of the distribution of resources for memory work and on the importance of mobile musicking practices for subsequent generations of migrants around the globe. What is remembered and how memories come to be transmitted has, as we hope we have shown in this discussion, currently been undergoing profound change.

Notes  1  This chapter is based on PhD research conducted by the first author, with only a small amount of support from the second in terms of how the article has been drafted. The research, conducted by Güran-Aydin, consisted of participant observation and in-depth interviews mostly with second- and third-generation German-Turks in Berlin between 2009 and 2011.  2  For more information on this subject Ayhan Kaya, Martin Greve, and Tom Solomon are among scholars with detailed research on hip-hop in the German-Turkish case.

References Batt-Rawden, K. B., 2006. “Music: A Strategy to Promote Health in Rehabilitation? An Evaluation of Participation in a ‘Music and Health Promotion Project.’” International Journal of Rehabilitation Research, 29(2), pp. 171–3. Bilgin, N., 2013. Tarih ve Kolektif Bellek. İstanbul: Bağlam Yayıncılık. Castells, M., 2010. The Rise of the Network Society: The Information Age. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 245

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Connell, J. and Gibson, C., 2003. Sound Tracks: Popular Music, Identity and Place. London: Routledge. Connerton, P., 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DeNora, T., 2000. Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eyerman, R. and Turner, B. S., 1998. “Outline of a Theory of Generations,” European Journal of Social Theory, 1(1), pp. 91–106. Greve, M., 2006. Almanya’da Hayali Türkiye’nin Müziği. İstanbul: İstanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi. Hagen, T., 2012. “From Inhibition to Commitment: Politics in the Czech Underground.” Eastbound, Special Issue: Popular Music in Eastern Europe. Available online at http://www.eastbound.eu/site_ media/pdf/EB2012_Hagen.pdf (accessed 7 September 2014). Halbwachs, M.,1980. The Collective Memory. New York: Harper & Row. Irwin-Zarecka, I., 1994. Frames of Remembrance: The Dynamics of Collective Memory. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Olick, J. K., 2007. The Politics of Regret: Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility. New York: Routledge; London: Taylor & Francis. Olick, J. K., 2008. “From Collective Memory to the Sociology of Mnemonic Practices and Products.” In: A. Erll and A. Nunning, eds., A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, pp. 151–62. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Öztürk, A. O., 2001. Alamanya Türküleri: Türk göçmen edebiyatının sözlü, öncü kolu. Kültür Bakanlığı. Radley, A., 1990. “Artefacts, Memory and a Sense of the Past.” In: D. Middleton and D. Edwards, eds., Collective Remembering. London: Sage. Stokes, M., 1992. The Arabesk Debate: Music and Musicians in Modern Turkey. New York: Oxford University Press. Stokes, M., 1997. “Introduction: Ethnicity, Identity and Music.” In: M. Stokes, ed., Ethnicity, Identity and Music. Oxford/New York: Berg. Sturken, M., 1997. Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tota, A. L., 2004. “Ethnographying Public Memory: The Commemorative Genre for the Victims of Terrorism in Italy.” Qualitative Research, 4(2), pp. 131–59. Urry, J., 1996. “How Societies Remember the Past.” In: S. MacDonald and G. Fyfe, eds., Theorizing Museums: Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World, pp. 45–68. Oxford: Blackwell. Van Dijck, J., 2006. “Record and Hold: Popular Music Between Personal and Collective Memory,” Cultural Studies in Media Communication, 23(5), December, pp. 357–374. Wagner-Pacifici, R., 1996. “Memories in the Making: The Shapes of Things That Went,” Qualitative Sociology, 19(3), pp. 301–21.

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21 Cinema and memory studies Now, then and tomorrow Carrie Collenberg-Gonzalez

Introduction Generally speaking, memory studies is a relatively new discipline whose analysis of cultural phenomena and modes of memory began by taking history, literature, and art as its objects. Since the turn of the century, novels and films that thematize memory and mimic its form and content have reinforced that we are in the midst of a “memory boom” (Radstone, 2000). These include novels such as W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001), Orhan Pahmuk’s Istanbul: Memories and the City (2003), and Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending (2011), and films such as Memento (2000), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), and the Bourne trilogy (2002; 2004; 2007). These films are often the starting point of new work that is beginning to examine the relationship between film and memory specifically. Given the technological changes that have brought and are bringing memory and its practices to the forefront of personal and public debate, it makes sense that memory scholars now consider the potential of visual media and its storage, communication, dissemination, and interpretation a viable object of study. These ideas are becoming more and more important in the multifaceted, interdisciplinary, and relatively new field of memory studies but there remains much work to be done. Scholarship on cinema and memory almost always begins by situating the project within the context of previous scholarship in order to justify the significance of the new ideas. While this can be understood as standard practice, it is indicative of tensions and gaps in the field and also a way to highlight the significance of the scholarship. Often, scholars seem to be up against entrenched twentieth-century paradigms or disciplinary methodologies that seem inadequate. For example, in her ethnohistorical study of cinema and cultural memory, Annette Kuhn addresses what is missed in film studies that downplays the potential of memory studies: “To the extent that film studies privileges the film text, for example, it will downplay not only the reception of films by social audiences but also the social-historical milieux and industrial and institutional settings in which films are produced and consumed” (Kuhn 2002: 4). In another example, Janet Walker aims to overturn “the roadblocks of positivism and binarism at the intersection of catastrophe, memory, and historical representation” in her book on trauma and cinema (Walker 2005: xix). While such statements may belong to disciplinary protocol and the rigors of marketing book projects, their adamancy deserves 247

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attention and reveals a lack in scholarship that privileges the relationship between film and memory and its cultural impact within certain frameworks. It also suggests that these scholars want more than to articulate the relationship between film and memory and that they are interested in radically redefining the field in order to ask and explore different areas. The structure of this essay mimics the opening sequence of a classic film with regard to the framing and distance of the camera to the object (Bordwell & Thompson 2012). In order to orient the viewer, a film will often begin with an establishing shot (also called a long shot) in which the subject is barely visible, zoom in to a medium shot, and then to a closeup. For example, imagine a shot of a skyline, then of an apartment building with a window, then of the person’s face standing in the window. I imagine the structure of this essay along these lines. Beginning with an establishing shot, the first section offers a panoramic picture of memory culture and focuses on texts by Susannah Radstone, Astrid Erll, and Stephanie Wodianka. After a survey of the visual in memory studies, Radstone focuses on something she calls “cinema/memory,” a methodology that privileges and advocates subjective experience as a means of “illuminating the intimate ‘micro’ processes through which subjectivity binds itself with culture, place, and nation” (Radstone 2010: 338). Erll and Wodianka are interested in the practices of memory culture and coin the term memory film (Erinnerungsfilm) to describe films that thematize memory and are seeped within a memory culture as demonstrated in the types of documentaries, making of, and marketing paraphernalia that encourage remembering. The second section of the paper moves in to a medium shot that focuses on three book projects by Paul Grainge, Russell Kilbourn, Amresh Sinha, and Terence McSweeney that take the relationship of cinema and memory as their subject. Instead of focusing on close readings of the individual chapters, this section focuses on how the chapters are structured and grouped in order to reveal trends within the field that have moved from history to trauma and from popular films to transnational and art films. The third section can be understood as a close-up that focuses on subjective experience. It first focuses on how trauma studies has developed and taken film and photography as its object in works by Janet Walker, E. Ann Kaplan, Thomas Elsaesser, Ulrich Baer, and Marianne Hirsch. It then moves to ideas put forth by Alison Landsberg, Maureen Turim, and José van Dijck that question the authenticity, potential, structure, and transmittal of memory in a post-9/11 culture. This structure situates subjective experience as the object of the close-up, insinuating that the rest of the project, if there were one, would continue to tell its story. Just how that story unfolds and is represented remains to be continued.

Establishing shot: memory culture The relationship between film and memory is both created and reinforced in daily interactions with the media and sources of news and information, in documentation with photographs and videos, and in the consumption of films for entertainment and knowledge. And yet, despite these pervasive practices in visual culture, articulating the relationship between film and memory in broad strokes, especially when considering these practices together, is challenging because of their inherent interdisciplinarity and inextricable connections. The rapidly shifting potential of these various practices, media, and technologies over time challenges paradigms that are based on linear time or focus on origins, referents, and authenticity. Aware of these challenges, some scholars have referred to the turn of the millennium as a memory culture that calls for new ways of understanding the complex relationship between film and memory. This section focuses on ideas put forth in “Cinema and Memory” (2010) 248

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by Susannah Radstone and in Film und Kulturelle Erinnerung: Plurimediale Konstellationen (2008) by Astrid Erll and Stephanie Wodianka, who locate the intersection of cinema and memory in subjective experience and cultural practices that also recognizes and reinforces a memory culture at work. As a source of information about cinema and memory, Radstone’s essay is essential reading and very accessible. In it she refers to recent trends in scholarship on cinema and memory that focus on transitional and hybrid approaches, a trend she refers to as “cinema/memory.” She divides her essay into four sections: memory as cinema; cinema as memory; cinema/memory; and future directions. Her third section on cinema/memory is most relevant here but since the first two set up her ideas, they deserve some attention. In the first section, she charts the progression of thoughts on memory as a form of imprintation. Beginning with Plato’s wax tablet to the invention of photography, to Sigmund Freud’s mystic writing pad, and Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Henri Bergson, she relates memory to cinema’s modes of production by focusing on the perception of memory as a rational (not intuitive) process akin to the workings of film (before digital) through a camera and projector. Her second section addresses the pervasive role memory has played in both cinema form (flashback) and narrative. She relates this to a memory crisis experienced in the 1930s and articulated by theorists such as Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin and brings it to present notions and the perceived inability to synthesize the past with the present put forth by postmodern theorists. Given these philosophical underpinnings, she touches on nostalgia, heritage, history, and trauma films that approach cinema as a mode of memory and ends by addressing the dissolving borders brought about by prosthetic memory (Landsberg 2004) and the digital age (van Dijck 2007), and by theories that question the use of film with regard to its power structures and dystopian and future potential. After establishing a genealogy of cinema and memory studies, her third section entitled “cinema/memory” focuses on transitional and hybrid approaches as the most productive. To demonstrate these explorations, she relies on ideas put forth in projects by Annette Kuhn (2002) and Victor Burgin (2004) that explore the apprehension associated with interdisciplinary approaches to film theory and the incorporation of subjectivity into the cultural experience of watching movies. Referring to their ideas, Radstone writes: Such recent accounts of the cinema-memory relation do not merely mobilize conceptions of memory and its processes in order to deepen our understanding of the cinema, nor do they simply illuminate memory by recourse to understandings of the cinema. In place of formulations that give primacy to the cinema or to memory, what emerges is a liminal conception of cinema/memory, where the boundaries between memory and cinema are dissolved in favor of a view of their mutuality and inseparability. By exploring the world of cinema/memory, this strand of film theory dissolves conceptual boundaries between the inside and the outside, the personal and the social, the individual and the cultural, and the true and the false. (Radstone 2010: 336) Radstone’s imperative to name and articulate the parameters of “cinema/memory” demonstrate a perceived lack in scholarship thus far. A number of assumptions are implicit in this passage. First, it is made clear that film is a viable object of memory studies that is here to stay. Second, studies up to this point in time (and she named a number of them in her first two sections) have only reinforced conceptual boundaries. Third, our current memory culture demands a new approach. Fourth, a new methodology that privileges subjectivity might be able to pierce through paradigms of twentieth-century theory and shed light on 249

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the nuances of film and memory. For Radstone, cinema/memory can be understood as a cultural experience that “illuminates the intimate and ‘micro’ processes through which subjectivity binds itself with culture, place, and nation, while noting how these processes may be prompted or facilitated by films that share in the aesthetics, languages, and textures of memory” (Radstone 2010: 338). The third section of this paper focuses on subjectivity, but in this section it is important to understand that Radstone places subjectivity within a larger cultural experience and memory culture. Although their approach differs from Radstone’s, Astrid Erll and Stephanie Wodianka also suggest a methodology that would allow scholars to better understand the significant role that film plays in the construction of cultural memory. Separating themselves from traditional film analyses that focus on innate technologies specific to the form of film itself, Erll and Wodianka advocate what they refer to as a transcendental approach that considers film in relation to its marketing, critical reception and meaning, censorship, and integration into school curricula. They argue that a deeper understanding of the multimedia processes and networks involved in film is essential to establishing its meaning as collective memory. With this in mind, they coin the term “memory film” (Erinnerungsfilm). A memory film is a film about memory intrinsically but also, and more importantly, it is the product of its communicative, social, cultural, and historical context—much like cultural memory itself. However, while films about memory can be found within any genre, national cinema, and period in time, Erll and Wodianka suggest that memory films are a specific product of the recent media boom and media culture that has been around since the 1980s. As examples, they note the interviews, docu-dramas, making-of videos, bonus materials, and interactive websites that contribute to the proliferation of these films. A number of studies, such as Maureen Turim’s Flashbacks in Film (1989), Marita Sturken’s Tangled Memories (1997), and Damian Sutton’s Photography, Cinema, Memory: The Crystal Image of Time (2009), also examine the materiality and form of film as a means of understanding its cultural implications and their relationship to memory. In addition, Annette Kuhn and other sociologists are concerned with the relationship between the film industry and viewing practices and how they impact and ref lect individual and cultural practices. The memory film is a societal phenomenon that thematizes memory and history both within the content and form and has seeped into a culture of memory that both reinforces and creates its status. Radstone, Erll, and Wodianka recognize a culture of memory in which films are considered significant objects of study and are deeply concerned with how films fit into disciplinary paradigms, or alternately, how current disciplinary paradigms cannot adequately articulate questions that are now relevant. By demonstrating how integral subjective experiences and cultural practices are to obtain a better understanding of the relationship between film and memory, they suggest that the moment is rife for new ideas to shift otherwise limiting boundaries and reassess aspects of modernity that are so dependent on the technological innovations of our memory culture.

Medium shot: trends in scholarship While the first section on memory culture was conceived as an establishing shot that provides an overview of the larger context of memory culture, the second section provides a medium shot that focuses on overarching patterns within three books on cinema and memory: Paul Grainge’s Memory and Popular Film (2003), Amresh Sinha and Terence McSweeney’s Millennial Cinema: Memory in Global Film (2009), and Russell Kilbourn’s Cinema, Memory, Modernity: The Representation of Memory from the Art Film to Transnational Cinema (2010). Each of these 250

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books provides a series of essays or chapters that focus on specific films or genres and relate them to memory. Within this structure, certain trends emerge that demonstrate how cinema has been approached within memory studies and what the main concerns are. In Memory and Popular Film, Paul Grainge locates his project between a newly articulated “memory boom” (Radstone 2000) and established discussions on history and film. Divided into three sections on public history and popular memory, the politics of memory, and mediating memory, Grainge and various contributors—including early essays by Alison Landsberg and Robert Burgoyne—explore Hollywood films depicting American history and the cultural history of the United States. Given the changes in technology, production, and dissemination of films, and the upsurge of memory films since 2003, when the book was published, Grainge’s book may feel somewhat outdated but the chapters address topics that are still relevant. Grainge cites the beginning of ideas about film and memory in the 1970s (with the Popular Memory Group), but his book itself also marks a crucial moment in the history of film and memory studies, a time when films were just beginning to be considered subjects of critical inquiry, when historians were debating the ambiguity of grand narratives, and memory was gaining importance. This constellation initiated an increase in scholarship on film through history, memory, and trauma frameworks put forth in Grainge’s edited volume. Grainge and the other contributors were inspired by the surge of history films in the United States in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These films include Glory (1989), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Dances with Wolves (1990), JFK (1991), Malcolm X (1992), Schindler’s List (1993), Forrest Gump (1994), Nixon (1995), Lone Star (1996), Amistad (1997), Titanic (1997), Pleasantville (1998), and Saving Private Ryan (1998). Commenting on the significance of this surge of history films, Grainge writes, “whether or not these films represent an anxious response to the ‘end of history’, a revisionist programme of alternative remembrance, or something more benign, memory has garnered a powerful currency in the discursive operations of contemporary American film” (Grainge 2003: 4). At the same time these films were released, prominent historians and cultural critics like Hayden White (1996), Frederic Jameson (1990), and Andreas Huyssen (1995) were discussing the narrative structure of history, pastiche, and amnesia. These dystopian views of history and modernity are representative of a deep skepticism premised on fantasies of authenticity and loss and deeply entrenched in memory debates. A passage from Robert Burgoyne’s essay gives an example of what is at stake and preconceives changes in memory studies. Referencing Thomas Elsaesser, Burgoyne questions whether and how future generations will be wrong or misguided if their perception of twentieth century history is founded in their experiences with films and visual media. He then puts forth an interesting idea that maybe truth will not be privileged as a category of analysis in the same way that it is today (Burgoyne 2003: 236). While such a statement may seem appalling, it is worth exploring, especially with regard to the focus on subjective experience and the desire to dissolve conceptual boundaries put forth in Radstone’s essay and in Alison Landsberg’s notion of prosthetic memory discussed in the last section. But if Russell Kilbourn’s 2010 book is any indication, that is not yet the case. Informed by postmodern critiques of representation and modernity, Kilbourn’s interdisciplinary contribution leaves Hollywood blockbusters to offer a nuanced and theoretically complex view of how post-war art films (as defined by Bordwell) can be understood within memory studies. As the title Cinema, Memory, Modernity suggests, modernity plays an equal role and one that allows Kilbourn to focus both on positive modalities of memory and also on negative ones, which he describes as “memory in its most radical function as the only means of ‘measuring’ the incommensurable gap between the self and an absolutely absent other” (Kilbourn 2010: 224). Kilbourn is not necessarily interested in privileging subjective 251

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experience but in recognizing the loss associated with identity at the nexus of film, memory, and modernity. One of the most useful aspects of Kilbourn’s book is its presentation of theories on memory that have inf luenced understandings of visual representations and his articulation of ways in which film engages with memory. He writes: First, there is memory represented via specific formal-stylistic features, a specific cinematic vocabulary or set of codes, typified by such temporally disjunctive strategies as the ‘f lashback’.… Second, there is memory as (cinematic) intertextuality, in which cinema’s own past (and ever-present present) constitutes an archive potentially accessible within or through any film, but which tends to operate in specific, motivated instances of intertextual appropriation and recontextualization.… Third, there is memory as cultural context within which individual films signify as objects within a larger cultural matrix…. And fourth, there is cinema itself as memory, or ‘meta-archive’; ‘prosthetic memory’ writ large; collective cultural memory: the totality of signs and meanings that make up a given culture. (Kilbourn 2010: 45) The films Kilbourn considers include Casablanca (1942), Citizen Kane (1941), Wild Strawberries (1957), Vertigo (1958), Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), La Jetée (1962), Wings of Desire (1987), Blade Runner (1982), The Ring (2002), City of God (2002), and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). His chapters examine themes such as redemption, traumatic identity, global memory, surveillance, prosthetic memory, and transnational cinema. Kilbourn’s choice in films and the division of his chapters demonstrate a critical self-aware approach that parallels the development of scholarship to move from western-centric themes (popular American films) to art films, global memory, and transnational cinema. This development is also apparent in Millennial Cinema: Memory in Global Film (2009), by Amresh Sinha and Terence McSweeney, who present a collection of essays on global films that came out around the turn of the century that thematize memory. Among the films they analyze are In the Mood for Love (2000), Memento (2000), Mulholland Drive (2001), City of God (2002), Irreversible (2002), Oldboy (2003), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Moolaadé (2004), Caché (2005), Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), and The Namesake (2006). Like Kilbourn’s book, the essays are informed by theorists such as Pierre Nora (1989), Henri Bergson (2012 [1896]), and Gilles Deleuze (1986, 1989) and therefore ref lect their privileging of time, marginality, and notions of interiority/exteriority. The book is divided into three sections, virtual and prosthetic memory, traumatic and allegorical memory, and historical and cultural memory, divisions that are similar to Kilbourn’s book (one section even contains a shorter version of Kilbourn’s last chapter). The purpose of this section was to provide an overview of existing literature on film and memory but also to demonstrate how they relate to memory studies in general. For the emergent scholar, it is important to consider the structure and theoretical underpinnings of these anthologies on a timeline that also shows developments in memory studies and places these contributions in context of a memory culture, and to ask what questions are important at what points in time and why. In 2003, Memory and Popular Film began with an overview of Hollywood history films within a framework that both relates and distinguishes memory studies from historical inquiry, which was important at a time when those distinctions were just beginning to be theorized. By 2009 and 2010, we have moved far from Hollywood and ventured into post-war art films and global millennial cinema. In the latter texts, the relationship between history and memory is still important but pales in comparison to the 252

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relationship between trauma and memory. Trauma plays a large role in Cinema, Memory, Modernity and Millennial Cinema, as does the idea that trauma and memory studies can function as frameworks for global and transnational experience and catastrophe as well.

Close-up: subjective experience In film, a close-up isolates or magnifies an object and traditionally focuses on a gesture, object, or portion of the face (Bordwell & Thompson 2012). To demonstrate this close-up, this section focuses on trauma, photography, and digital media and how they relate to the intersection of film and memory studies. One of the most distinguishing aspects and battlegrounds of memory studies in general is its willingness to privilege and explore subjective experience on multiple levels, in multiple disciplines. And, when perceived through the lens of memory studies, films also become a site through which such subjective experiences are explored in ways that were not previously available in criticism because of the ambiguity inherent to such an approach. Resonating with feminist literature, psychology, and a post 9/11 Internet culture, numerous studies have focused on subjective approaches to film, offering a “close-up” to how individuals remember and interact with film. Memory studies and trauma studies have developed a fraternal twin relationship. They were born of the same parents and have similar inf luences in their exploration of how individuals and cultures process the past and yet approach these from different perspectives. While Freud was the first to refer to the process of trauma in his work on hysteria, which was further explored by Laplanche and Pontalis, trauma studies first developed in relation to individual traumas (child abuse, incest, etc.), and to historical traumas like the Holocaust and the recognition in psychology of post-traumatic stress syndrome of soldiers returning from Vietnam. Most cite the theoretical development of trauma as a cultural symptom in ideas put forth by psychologists Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (1992) and Cathy Caruth (1996), but E. Ann Kaplan credits Kaja Silverman as the first to develop, in 1987, the concept of historical trauma as it is commonly used today (Kaplan 2005: 73). Firmly rooted in modernism with a surge of theoretical advancements taking place in the 1990s, trauma studies has recently approached cinema as a medium through which these concerns are addressed and depicted in texts such as Janet Walker’s Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust (2005), E. Ann Kaplan’s Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature (2005), and Thomas Elsaesser’s German Cinema—Terror and Trauma: Cultural Memory since 1945 (2014). In Trauma Cinema, Walker is concerned with the primary paradox of trauma: its representation and the ensuing loss of referent and how certain films can “externalize, publicize, and historicize traumatic material that would otherwise remain at the level of internal and individual psychology” (2005: xix). Aware that aspects of trauma cinema are found in many genres and national cinemas, she defines trauma cinema in relation to its content and structure. She writes: By trauma cinema I mean a group of films that deal with a world-shattering event or events, whether public or personal. Furthermore, I define trauma films and videos as those that deal with traumatic events in a nonrealist mode characterized by disturbance and fragmentation of the films’ narrative and stylistic regimes.… Trauma films … ‘disremember’ by drawing on innovative strategies for representing reality obliquely, by looking to mental processes for inspiration, and by incorporating self-ref lexive devices to call attention to the friability of the scaffolding for audiovisual historiography. (Walker 2005: 19, italics in original) 253

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Walker’s definition demonstrates her ambition to synthesize debates about the representation of history and film studies in order to overturn what she refers to as “the roadblocks of positivism and binarism at the intersection of catastrophe, memory, and historical representation” (Walker 2005: xix). As her decision to focus on films about incest and the Holocaust—two of the main subjects of texts on trauma—implies, Walker incites discussion on a number of disciplinary fronts and encourages critical personal responses. While the success of Walker’s provocation may remain questionable, her work was nonetheless pioneering as the first of many texts that dared to gather the strings of these competing disciplines and make them dance in the face of an audience that said they couldn’t. Following suit, though not entirely a result of Walker’s provocation, E. Ann Kaplan premises her book as a means of working through personal experiences and examining trauma in literature, art, and film. Kaplan’s autobiographical testimony is indicative of larger trends in post-9/11 scholarship that often begin with testimonials about where and how the events were experienced. Thomas Elsaesser understands 9/11 as a divide within trauma debates and offers two reasons for this divide. First, he claims that it was ushered in with new vitality because it reversed the idea of belatedness by “making it appear—not unlike Hollywood disaster movies—that the catastrophe had already been anticipated in virtual form, as trauma theory, before it occurred in actuality, reversing the usual belatedness of trauma into a special kind of predictive prescience” (Elsaesser 2014: 308). Second, he writes, “trauma also filled a gap, answering to some of the aporias or deadlocks that had arisen from social constructivism, postmodernism and deconstruction” (Elsaesser 2014: 308). While these may ring true, it is hardly surprising that trauma and cinema studies developed post 9/11 when people were coming to terms with individual experiences witnessing terrorism that was represented in film and in the media and delivered to a global audience with unprecedented speed and ease of dissemination. Behind these studies remains a deep concern for how personal experience is mediated and shared through representation and how this manifestation of history can bridge individual and collective experience. The trend within memory studies to understand cinema’s structure as a metaphor for mnemonic processes or its content as a ref lection, representation, preservation, and transmittal of autobiographical, subjective experiences, experience a sort of parallel life in explorations of photography. This is neatly demonstrated by Olga Shevchenko in her essay in this volume. Works such as Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida (2010 [1979]) and Susan Sontag’s On Photography (1977) paved the way for more recent contributions, such as Ulrich Baer’s Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma (2005) and Marianne Hirsch’s Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (1997) and The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (2012). While Baer is interested in how the structure of photography mimics the structure of trauma in that a photograph represents the inability to locate a referent, Hirsch is interested in the relationship between representation and associated practices and family narratives. For Hirsch, postmemory is a term that “describes the relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before—to experiences they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up” (Hirsch 2012: 5). Hirsch is concerned with her own postgeneration (Hoffmann 2004: 187) of the children of Holocaust survivors whose inherited memories of the war come from narratives, photographs, and other cultural artifacts of their family members. While she acknowledges a number of nuanced arguments within memory studies that focus on received memories—memories of something that one did not experience personally—her groundbreaking study questions notions of authenticity, not just whether 254

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something is historically accurate, but whether or not one can have a memory of something they did not experience personally. Moving back into the intersection of film and memory studies, Alison Landsberg’s Prosthetic Memory also focuses on ways in which individuals can experience memories that they themselves did not live. She writes: 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. The resulting prosthetic memory has the ability to shape that person’s subjectivity and politics. (Landsberg 2004: 2, italics in original text) By not restricting the experience of memory of an historical event to a particular group, Landsberg’s study unfetters notions of authenticity put forth in Hirsch’s idea of postmemory. She writes, “the memories forged in response to modernity’s ruptures do not belong exclusively to a particular group; that is, memories of the Holocaust do not belong to Jews, nor do memories of slavery belong solely to African Americans. Through the technologies of mass culture, it becomes possible for these memories to be acquired by anyone, regardless of skin color, ethnic background, or biology” (Landsberg 2004: 2). Focusing on American Culture and topics such as immigration, slavery, and the Holocaust, Landsberg’s text examines how this suturing can have a progressive, empathetic structure that unites instead of separates cultures. Ideas of suture have long circulated in psychoanalytic and film theory. While most ideas focus on how an individual relates to the narrative of the film through its materiality, i.e. the editing, the space between images and representation, and the mechanics of the camera, few have discussed the transference of this identification structure to memory. Landsberg’s text marks a watershed moment in the field when new dimensions of subjectivity and identity formation could be discussed and focuses on the empathetic potential of individually experienced public memories put forth in films. That said, theories about prosthetic memory introduce as many questions about the structure of identity, authenticity, materiality, and memory as they do possibilities. Where (and how) do we draw the line between lived experience and prosthetic memory and how can we tell the difference between what is real and what is not real? Under what circumstances are the outcomes of such public memories “progressive” and when do they hinder “progress”? Can evocations of empathy just as easily breed intolerance? Why must prosthetic memories be limited to historical narratives about the past? Couldn’t one just as easily remember otherwise traumatizing or banal scenes? Susannah Radstone also raises these questions and is concerned by the one-sidedness of theories of prosthetic memory. To counter Landsberg’s “utopian” ideas, she offers insights by Michel Foucault and Robert Burgoyne whose dystopian visions warn of the power of false popular memories and of cinema as an agent of the ruling powers (Radstone 2010: 335). In addition, she also criticizes prosthetic memory for failing to integrate theories of spectatorship with a “full analysis of films and their complex webs of meaning, allusion, and affect” (Radstone 2010: 336). Despite their differences, both Radstone and Landsberg are interested in hybrid forms that express the desire to and the difficulty of reconciling personal and collective experience within cinema and memory studies. 255

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Although Landsberg’s 2004 text understandably lacks insight into the impact of digital media, her ideas continue to resonate in the current digital landscape where social networking platforms have revolutionized practices of production and dissemination of film and memory. Marking this transition in Mediated Memories in the Digital Age, José van Dijck focuses on how individual and shared memories are mediated through technology and its devices. She defines “mediated memory” as “the activities and objects we produce and appropriate by means of media technology for creating and re-creating a sense of past, present, and future of ourselves in relation to others” (van Dijck 2007: 21). By questioning how and whether practices have changed simply because objects we produce for storing memories ( journals, photographs, music) have gone digital, she also questions the potential of social media platforms and questions how and under what circumstances individual memories become social. How technology shapes our constructions of identity, memory, time, and space is increasingly relevant when one considers the impact of rapidly shifting technology on our practices and interactions with media. On the brink or in the midst (one is never sure) of a technological revolution, it remains vague whether the need to reclaim the self is indicative of a sense of loss, a symptom of an individualist, integrated, Internet culture, a revolutionary methodology, or something entirely different. Is the recent slough of texts on cinema and memory that begin with personal witness testimony (Marianne Hirsch, E. Ann Kaplan, Elsaesser, and nearly every text about 9/11) the equivalent of a critical selfie? This section outlines projects that locate the intersection of memory, trauma, and cinema in subjective experience and represent more than the questions they pursue. Greater than the sum of their parts, the studies are also symptomatic of the culture and technologies that produced them as much as their predecessors were.

Conclusion The first few shots of a film orient the viewer and allow for certain assumptions about the film’s characters and narrative to be made. With this in mind, the establishing shot of this essay illuminated various aspects of the so-called memory boom. Radstone places cinema in memory studies and demands a hybrid approach that privileges subjectivity and its relationship to film and memory while Erll and Wodianka focus on the memory film as a technology whose form and means of dissemination and marketing both reinforce and create its status in memory culture. The medium shot focused in on three separate projects whose theoretical underpinnings range from Plato to Deleuze and whose analyzed films range from Hollywood blockbusters to post-war art films to global films and include all genres and national cinemas. The close-up showed the relationship between subjectivity, trauma, and technology within cinema and memory studies. Given the structure of these three shots, many assumptions can be made about the possibilities of the characters and themes involved. How that story unfolds and is represented remains to be continued. What has been made clear is that cinema and memory studies is a relatively new interdisciplinary approach that has, in its short lifespan, already demonstrated that its questions can be applied to all genres and national cinemas and explored through the methodologies of many disciplines. The theoretical contributions on cinema and memory outlined here demonstrate that both the content and form of the film are relevant, and that they are deeply entrenched within frameworks of subjectivity and technology and questions of authenticity and time. As is the case with groundbreaking ideas, it is sometimes difficult to imagine that there was a time before those ideas were accepted. Seeped in trauma studies and its notion of deferred 256

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action, memory and cinema studies seem to have assumed similar approaches to concepts of time and memory. For example, although the intersection of cinema and memory studies is relatively new, we know that they are now, and have somehow always been, inextricable. This f lexible understanding of time, especially as it developed in tandem with trauma studies, even extends into a “memory for the future” when one considers the arguments put forth by E. Ann Kaplan in this volume. Coupled with Landsberg’s problematic and fascinating idea of prosthetic memory, Kaplan’s idea that one can remember the present moment by witnessing future dystopian scenarios put forth in films may seem, at first glance, unrealistic. And yet, given the trends demonstrated so far, these ideas seem entirely possible, and I look forward to the new directions that will be discovered in the field.

References Baer, U. (2005). Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma, Cambridge: MIT Press. Barnes, J. (2011). The Sense of an Ending, New York: Vintage. Barthes, R. (2010). Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1979), New York: Hill and Wang. Bergson, H. (2012). Matter and Memory (1896), New York: Dover Publications. Bordwell, D. and Thompson K. (2012). Film Art: An Introduction, New York: McGraw Hill. Burgin, V. (2004). The Remembered Film, London: Reaktion Books. Burgoyne, R. (2003). “Memory, History and Digital Imagery in Contemporary Film,” in P. Grainge (ed.), Memory and Popular Film, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Caruth, C. (1996). Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Deleuze, G. (1986). Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. (1989). Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Elsaesser, T. (2014). German Cinema—Terror and Trauma: Cultural Memory since 1945, New York: Routledge. Erll, A. and Wodianka, S. (eds.) (2008). Film und Kulturelle Erinnerung: Plurimediale Konstellationen, Berlin: de Gruyter. Felman, S. and Laub, D. (1992). Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, New York: Routledge. Grainge, P. (ed.) (2003). Memory and Popular Film, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hirsch, M. (1997). Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hirsch, M. (2012). The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust, New York: Columbia University Press. Hoffmann, E. (2004). After Such Knowledge: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust, New York: Public Affairs. Huyssen, A. (1995). Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia, New York: Routledge. Jameson, F. (1990). Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Post-Contemporary Interventions), Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kaplan, E. A. (2005). Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Kilbourn, R. (2010). Cinema, Memory, Modernity: The Representation of Memory from the Art Film to Transnational Cinema, New York: Routledge. Kuhn, A. (2002). An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory, London: I. B. Tauris. Landsberg, A. (2004). Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture, New York: Columbia University Press. Nora, P. (1989). “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations, 26:7–24. Pahmuk, O. (2003). Istanbul: Memories and the City, New York: Vintage. Radstone, S. (2000). “Working with Memory: An Introduction,” in S. Radstone (ed.), Memory and Methodology, Oxford: Berg Publishers. Radstone, S. (2010). “Cinema and Memory,” in S. Radstone and B. Schwarz (eds.), Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates, New York: Fordham University Press. Sebald, W. G. (2001). Austerlitz, New York: Random House. 257

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Sinha, A. and McSweeney T. (eds.) (2009). Millennial Cinema: Memory in Global Film, London: Wallflower Press. Sontag, S. (1977). On Photography, New York: Picador. Sturken, M. (1997). Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering, Berkeley: University of California Press. Sutton, D. (2009). Photography, Cinema, Memory: The Crystal Image of Time, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Turim, M. (1989). Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History, New York: Routledge. van Dijck, J. (2007). Mediated Memories in the Digital Age, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Walker, J. (2005). Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust, Berkeley: University of California Press. White, H. (1996). “The Modernist Event,” in V. Sobchack (ed.), The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event, New York: Routledge.

Filmography Amistad, 1997. Directed by Steven Spielberg. USA: DreamWorks SKG. Blade Runner, 1982. Directed by Ridley Scott. USA: Ladd Company. Born on the Fourth of July, 1989. Directed by Oliver Stone. USA: Ixtlan. The Bourne Identity, 2002. Directed by Doug Liman. USA: Universal Pictures. The Bourne Supremacy, 2004. Directed by Paul Greengrass. USA: Universal Pictures. The Bourne Ultimatum, 2007. Directed by Paul Greengrass. USA: Universal Pictures. Caché, 2005. Directed by Michael Haneke. France/Austria: Les Films du Losange. Casablanca, 1942. Directed by Michael Curtiz. USA: Warner Bros. Citizen Kane, 1941. Directed by Orson Welles. USA: RKO Radio Pictures. City of God, 2002. Directed by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund. Brazil/France: O2 Filmes. Dances with Wolves, 1990. Directed by Kevin Costner. USA: Tig Productions. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, 2004. Directed by Michel Gondry. USA: Focus Features. Forrest Gump, 1994. Directed by Robert Zemeckis. USA: Paramount Pictures. Glory, 1989. Directed by Edward Zwick. USA: TriStar Pictures. Hiroshima Mon Amour, 1959. Directed by Alain Resnais. France: Argos Films. In the Mood for Love, 2000. Directed by Wong Kar-wai. Hong Kong: Block 2 Pictures. Irreversible, 2002. Directed by Gaspar Noé. France: 120 Films. JFK, 1991. Directed by Oliver Stone. USA: Warner Bros. La Jetée, 1962. Directed by Chris Marker. France: Argos Films. Lone Star, 1996. Directed by John Sayles. USA: Columbia Pictures Corporation. Malcolm X, 1992. Directed by Spike Lee. USA: Largo International N. V. Memento, 2000. Directed by Christopher Nolan. USA: Newmarket Capital Group. Moolaadé, 2004. Directed by Ousmane Sembene. Senegal: Ciné-Sud Promotion. Mulholland Drive, 2001. Directed by David Lynch. France/USA: Les Films Alain Sarde. The Namesake, 2006. Directed by Mira Nair. India/USA: Fox Searchlight Pictures. Nixon, 1995. Directed by Oliver Stone. USA: Cinergi Pictures Entertainment. Oldboy, 2003. Directed by Park Chan-wook. South Korea: Egg Films. Pan’s Labyrinth, 2006. Directed by Guillermo Del Toro. Spain/Mexico: Estudios Picasso. Pleasantville, 1998. Directed by Gary Ross. USA: New Line Cinema. The Ring, 2002. Directed by Gore Verbinski. USA/Japan: DreamWorks SKG. Saving Private Ryan, 1998. Directed by Steven Spielberg. USA: DreamWorks SKG. Schindler’s List, 1993. Directed by Steven Spielberg. USA: Universal Pictures. Titanic, 1997. Directed by James Cameron. USA: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp. Vertigo, 1958. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. USA: Alfred J. Hitchcock Productions. Wild Strawberries, 1957. Directed by Ingmar Bergman. Sweden: Svensk Filmindustri. Wings of Desire, 1987. Directed by Wim Wenders. W. Germany: Road Movies Filmproduktion.

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22 Memory and future selves in futurist dystopian cinema The Road (2010) and The Book of Eli (2010) E. Ann Kaplan

In this essay, I offer the lens of an expanded trauma theory in addressing dystopian cinema. This entails focusing on future time in thinking through the meanings and the cultural work (including that pertaining to race and gender), that futurist dystopian imaginaries perform in our newly uncertain historical era. I undertake two related but distinct discussions. First, as regards individual futurity, I explore the future selves viewers are invited to identify with in disaster films and their potential impact (psychic, political) on their current selves. In addition to this focus on individual futurity, I explore ways such fantasies also function as warnings, what I call “memory for the future,” now in relation to the self as part of the human species. The collective fantasies raise anticipatory anxieties beyond the individual because all human life is at risk. Finally, I include discussion of what future memory itself has as the fictional humans come to the end. Disaster scenarios upend humans’ customary sense of a predictable relationship amongst past, present, and future. Protagonists are thrust into a devastated present cut off from past and future, raising questions as to memory’s own future. Viewers vicariously experience the losses linked to there no longer being a cultural, historical, and political past, along with there being no future for cultural as well as personal memory. I found cognitive psychology research by Adam D. Brown and his colleagues useful in thinking about the impact of viewing future selves in dystopian films. The concept of future-tense trauma dovetails in interesting ways with the team’s work with war veterans on future selves. Brown’s research does not dwell on future selves in the context of climate catastrophe, and his temporal focus is different, but the project nevertheless made me think newly about my concept of pre-traumatic stress. Brown’s research explores the impact of PTSD on subjects’ imagined futures, or (as some research puts it) “possible” selves (Markus and Nurius, 1986), while I am interested in the experience of identifying with future selves in traumatic situations and how that changes viewers. In 2011, Brown et al. found that “individuals with PTSD viewed their … pre-trauma self more favorably than their current or anticipated future self” (Brown et al., 2011; Abstract). Meanwhile, Markus and Nurius found that “the pool of possible selves derives from the categories made salient by the individual’s particular sociocultural and historical context and from the models, images, and symbols provided by the media and by the individual’s immediate social experiences” (954). The authors go on to argue that “Possible selves … reflect the extent to which the self is socially determined and constrained….” (954). Further, they suggest that 259

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“possible selves are important because they function as incentives for future behavior (i.e., they are selves to be approached or avoided) and second, because they provide an evaluative and interpretive context for the current view of self” (955). This latter idea that imagined future selves have an impact on one’s current view of self is important for the future selves viewers encounter in Pre-Traumatic Cinema. Dealing with textual representation, I study the impact through theorizing spectator experiences viewing traumatized subjects in futurist fictional worlds. Although our temporality and methodologies are different—those of the psychologists involving experiments about past trauma with living subjects, mine theorizing viewing traumatized selves in futurist fictional contexts—the synergy is revealing. For my project, the question would be: What is the impact on the viewer watching a pre-traumatic futurist scenario in regard to that viewer’s sense of her future self? If the veteran’s traumatic war experience, being lived as Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome once back in the U.S., is shown to change how the veteran views her future, what about these pre-traumatic visions of the viewer’s future? The question Brown’s research raises for me is, then, in what ways do these identifications also alter the subject’s idea of her future as a human being facing possible catastrophes? How does the situation of living vicariously in uncertain times in film scenarios change people? While it would take a team such as Brown’s to approach answers to my questions in regard to living subjects, I found useful a comparison of two films—John Hillcoat’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and the Hughes Brothers’ The Book of Eli, in the sub-genre I call “Pre-Traumatic Climate Disaster Film.” I learned from exploring the image of future selves in what are, for the characters, post-traumatic worlds (pre-trauma for viewers) that figure forth a catastrophic social collapse. While both films are commercial Hollywood productions, their politics differ in degree of collusion with normative social codes (race, gender) and reworking of the American Dream.1 The politics of how futurist selves in the two films are represented in dealing with such collapse will be central along with theorizing what impact these selves may have on the viewer. Brown’s work is unidimensional, while mine involves two levels: First, I study the depiction of memory in relation to a future self on the part of characters within the dystopian narrative as such; second, I infer spectator reaction to futurist traumatic selves on the screen and discuss what this implies about memory for humanities’ collective future (and the future for social memory), as well as how these selves might impact current concepts of self. Raffaella Baccolini’s suggestion that “memory plays a key role in the dystopian opposition and locates at least one utopian node not in what could be but in what once was” (Baccolini and Moylan 2003: 149) is a useful place to start, along with Tom Moylan’s expansion of the thought. Moylan notes that “the dystopian protagonist often reclaims a suppressed and subterranean memory that is forward looking in its enabling force, liberating in its deconstruction of the official story, and in its reaffirmation of alternative ways of knowing and living in the world” (2000: 150). I would like to put this concept to the test in discussing temporality in the two films in the sub-genre I am studying. I argue that the concept of “memory for the future” is a better way of understanding how the past is used in these films. The more complex idea of the “future for memory” may be linked to Moylan/Baccolini’s formulation in some cases, but in others, the question of what memory is good for in situations of collapse is pertinent (Ortiz and Schwab, 2008: 69, 72).

Memory and protagonist’s future selves in The Book of Eli The Book of Eli perhaps comes closest to what Moylan/Baccolini have in mind in terms of a “subterranean memory that is forward looking in its enabling force”—at least within the 260

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film’s own terms. The entire project of the protagonist, Eli (played by Denzel Washington as a rare African American hero in the genre),2 is based on his having memorized a large holy book (not specified as the Bible, but implicitly such). Memory is then foregrounded here in Eli’s remarkable retaining of the entire Bible in his mind during the thirty years of travel. His mission is to bring himself and his memory to the West Coast where a white-haired Professor is diligently collecting by whatever means all the essential lost books, music, and cultural objects, mainly from western history (Shakespeare, Mozart, Wagner) or re-writing them, as in the case of Eli and his memorized Bible. The assumption is that re-creating the history of western culture and all its art, science, and knowledge will enable life on Earth to be renewed. Humans will start afresh, on the basis of memories of their past culture. In my terms, this conceit offers an example of there being a future for memory. “This is where we are going to start again,” the Professor says. “We are going to teach people about the world they lost.” The labor of the process is detailed in the time-lapse scenes at the end of the film showing Eli recounting what he has remembered as the Professor writes down every word. In its improbable and sentimental ending, we find Eli finally dying of exhaustion after the Professor has recorded the last lines of the book that Eli has remembered. The Hughes Brothers bow to political correctness in having the camera zoom in on a shelf where the Holy Bible is placed next to the Torah, the Qur’an, and the Saints on the Seas. Yet the Professor’s entire project seems closer to another Great Western Books collection rather than any possible attempt to recoup the extensive multi-cultural western heritage that has (in the film’s narrative) been lost. As against Moylan/Baccolini’s idea of such subterranean knowledge offering alternatives to the normative story, here it’s normative knowledge itself that’s being recreated, as perhaps is inevitable in a Hollywood blockbuster project. The future for memory here, then, is conservative if productive. But at least as one of the most hopeful films in the genre, a utopian note is established and a future for human society suggested, leaving viewers relieved as they exit the cinema. If Eli offers a future self that is heroic and self-sacrificing in his determination to complete his mission at whatever cost (the film essentially rewrites the classic Hollywood Western, with the moral hero battling evil), viewers also have to experience the utter desolation of the environments Eli moves through as being potentially what could happen (see Atwood, 2012). Through images of a kind of “bare” life (Agamben, 1998), many scenes ask viewers to remember what humans now have and what we have lost or are in danger of losing (see Morton, 2013). The tense opening sequence of Eli (for me the highpoint of the film), offers a terrifying future scenario of a depleted world. Before the credits, the camera pans slowly, at ground level, along a forest with bare trees, a few final leaves f loating down. Everything is bathed in an eerie green light. The camera catches a dead man. As it pans the body, there’s a screech of some kind, and a weird animal comes into the frame, and starts to eat the body. As the camera continues slowly to move, the sound of heavy breathing pervades the sound track. The camera pans to a huge heavily coated figure lying on the ground propped up, his breathing heavy because of his gas mask. A quick cut takes us back to the animal; the man takes shot at it, and with the camera slowed down even more, viewers see the implement slicing through the forest to plunge into the animal. It’s a shocking but effective sequence, with enough affect to make viewers jump. There follow equally effective scenes of a destroyed world, such as one where Eli finds a truck with a skeleton in it. There’s nothing to scavenge, but he soon comes upon an abandoned house. Here at least he finds shoes on a man who hanged himself. With his remaining oil, Eli is able to cook the animal he shot and even use his old 1990s iPod. Music from the era f loods the sound track, giving viewers a slice of pleasure—memory of a strangely nostalgic 261

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kind, inserted as it is into a weirdly contrasting context. By the morning, the battery has run out. For Eli as for us, memory of the world the music conjures up provides only momentary comfort. He will enter a shantytown later on, partly with the hope of getting his iPod battery recharged. Eli continues his journey, and the Hughes Brothers give us powerful wide-angle images of roads blocked with wrecked, abandoned cars, and a desert landscape burned by the raging sun (everyone has to wear strong sunglasses to protect their eyes). Inevitably, Eli gets embroiled, as all other protagonists in this genre, in deadly encounters with vile men ready to rape, steal, and kill for whatever anyone else has. These encounters are particularly nasty: Twice a woman about to be raped is used as a decoy to halt Eli on his journey, distract him, and leave him prey to the killers. The film employs female rape (or near rape) in more than one occasion. But at least in regard to ecological politics, the Hughes Brothers insert a few scenes that offer some explanation for the destroyed universe and memory of the world before. In Eli’s discussion with Solara, a woman he bonds with while trapped in the shantytown by the local warlord and who follows Eli when he manages to escape, we learn that she was born long after the “f lash.”3 Whatever this was, it evidently killed almost everyone, and Solara has not met many people as old as Eli. She asks what it was like before. “People had more than they needed,” Eli says, “we didn’t know what was precious, what not. We threw away what people will kill one another for now….” Bearing this out, earlier in the shantytown we’ve seen that shampoo is an incredible luxury, when Billy (the crazed leader) bribes his wife Claudia with it. Lip balm and lotion, too, are enough to kill for. Eli has talked about “the war” and the “f lash” before as having killed most people, with the exception of those who managed to hide out.4 Since he has been walking for thirty years, one understands how very long the revival of the destroyed world is taking. Memory here may function for Solara at least as enabling in the sense of determination to survive and look towards renewal. The film ends after Eli’s death with Solara grasping his large black cudgel and, inspired by Eli and all that she has seen at the West Coast retrieval center, setting off back East to engage in renewal. The low angle show of her about to take off marks an unusual gendered moment: A powerful female protagonist to be.

Memory and protagonist’s future selves in The Road In his adaptation of McCarthy’s The Road, Hillcoat and his scriptwriter, Joe Penhall, took up the challenge to capture McCarthy’s desperate vision of what is already facing humankind, inviting us to take notice and remember. If The Book of Eli would have us believe that we can always come back to the American Dream, The Road provides scant hope for human survival. While the experience of watching the film is utterly different from reading the novel due to the contrasting media (vision/sound/words versus rich use of verbal language), nevertheless the film stages select scenes from the novel effectively, if not in the same order (see Penhall, 2010). As in The Book of Eli, within the film protagonists encounter the ghostly remains of the world we now know—roads littered with wrecked, abandoned cars; crumbling bridges; a barren landscape devoid of vegetation. The Road features in addition violent storms and falling trees; wrecked houses, nearly torn apart by marauding, starving humans; remains of gas stations, where every remaining drop of oil is a godsend; roads now covered in ash, burnt by raging fires; the desolate ruins of a consumer society.5 As in the novel, the future selves on display here face tremendous challenges in a lawless world, where food, clothing, and other resources are nowhere to be found. The Road is the story of two humans—father and son—struggling to survive desperately harsh conditions—conditions all but impossible to imagine outside, for example, concentration 262

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camp scenarios (which both the novel and film call to mind at various points). It is also the story of the death of humanity. If leaders of concentration camps deliberately produced death, here humans have together (if not equally culpably) brought about the deprived universe, and commandants, dictators, and presidents are now nowhere to be seen. The Road (novel and film) offers a much darker fantasy than Eli. Through his rich uses of metaphor, McCarthy implies that there is an inherent link between humans’ capacity for at least ethical memory and humans living in a natural environment alongside living plants, waterways, varied species, and linguistic diversity.6 While such a link is hard to translate in visual terms, Hillcoat is able to show that without a viable natural environment most humans become inhumane. They mimic the violence of a dying nature. The Road (the film) shows a natural environment no longer anything approaching a landscape, but also revealing a social world more advanced in deterioration than in other films in the genre. The social contract, which normally controls and orders a community and keeps it functioning, is no longer viable. The situation has grown even worse in this regard than in The Book of Eli. The natural world, in tandem with the social deterioration, has also become far more violent and hostile to humans, hindering any renewal of human life. The filmic imagery of trees falling with loud cracking sound, thunder roaring, fires lighting up the horizon, comes perhaps closest to representing Timothy Morton’s (2013) conception of “hyperobjects,” by which he means the nonhumans that surround us without our full awareness of them. As in The Book of Eli, beings who were once human (here they mimic zombies)7 pounce on the protagonists, ready to murder for their meager food and clothing; humane relationships are nowhere to be found, except in the relationship between the protagonists, which I return to below. Since the social world has all but disappeared, there is little room for any action-hero: Instead we simply have characters, significantly named just “Man” and “Boy” and (in scenes remembering the past where she figures), “Woman” to indicate that even being a specific human subject is all but impossible in the completely deprived environment the Man and Boy find themselves in. Memory has several different levels in the novel and takes varied forms for Man and for Boy. I suggest that for McCarthy at least (we’ll see how Hillcoat translates the novel in this regard) memory has no future once the natural world is destroyed and humans have given up on the species having a future. Memory disappears or is seen as useless. But even in regard to Man, how he views memory is not consistent. Implicitly, like Simon J. Ortiz and Gabriele Schwab (2008), he is insistently questioning what uses memory has in his situation. Sometimes he sees memory, far from being “forward looking in its enabling force,” as something that he struggles to control, and wishes he could do away with. Indeed, in this view memory is as dangerous as the siren calls Odysseus confronted with his men on the journey back home to Penelope. For example, early in the novel, following a glowing dream of his wife coming to him “out of a green and leafy canopy,” in a dress of gauze and her dark hair carried up in combs of ivory, Man says he “mistrusted all of that.” And the text continues: “He said the right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of peril and all else was the call of languor and death” (McCarthy, 2006: 18). He was learning to wake himself from his dreams of “walking in a f lowering wood where birds f lew before them he and the child and the sky was aching blue” (18). Again, later on, in a similar dream we learn that he has: “Rich dreams now which he was loathe to wake from. Things no longer known in the world.… Memory of her crossing the lawn toward the house early in the morning in a thin rose gown that clung to her breasts” (131). But now Man’s response to his memory is a bit different from before: “He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins…. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not” (131). This memory of 263

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his wife is the last reference to her in the novel (the film allows one final dream vision as Man dies), and this implies that there is no future for memory after a certain point of deprivation. But I anticipate. Temporality in both film and novel is extremely complex. From time to time, Man and Boy find remains of life before the catastrophe, such as when they come upon a destroyed roadside gas station. In the novel, to Boy’s amazement, Man picks up the phone “and dialed the number of his father’s house in that long ago” (7). Later, they arrive by chance it seems at the house where Man grew up. Boy is scared but Man is drawn to his past and enters. In telling detail, McCarthy describes how Man “felt with his thumb in the painted wood of the mantle the pinholes from the tacks that had held stockings forty years ago….” McCarthy continues: “The Boy watched him. Watched shapes claiming him he could not see. We should go, Papa, he said” (26).8 This last quotation pinpoints another aspect of memory in the novel, namely that Boy only knows the present, destroyed world. He has no memory of his father’s world before the catastrophe, and thus is often learning from his father’s memories. “Sometimes,” we learn, “the child would ask him questions about the world that for him was not a memory. He thought hard how to answer. There is no past. What would you like?” (54). In other words, Man is reaching a point where his own sense of any real past is also going. “There is no past,” includes himself as well as Boy. He leaves Boy to his own fantasies of “how things would be in the south. Other children” (54). At one point, when Man is checking the dilapidated map he uses as a guide, he shows Boy that the black roads are the ones they follow, the state roads. Boy queries, “Why are they state roads?” (43). He knows nothing of states or roads and asks what happened to them. From time to time, McCarthy gives us Man’s extended memories of his past in nature, triggered by something in the present. As against his sense that memories of his wife are dangerous and disabling, some of the memories of the natural environment (before the big f lash destroyed all) offer a peaceful moment that he can accept. But the long memory about “the perfect day of his childhood” going to collect firewood in the fall (12–13) is ambiguous. It arises from Man wanting to protect Boy from seeing the ghastly dried up corpses they come upon moving through a city. “Just remember,” Man says, “that the things you put in your head are there forever.” Boy however queries, “You forget some things, don’t you?” To which Man replies, “Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget” (12). The point Man is making arises from his desire to shield Boy from the horrible sights so that they won’t stay in his mind. But at the same time he is thinking about what purpose his memories of his past serve—which of them he does or does not want to remember. The “perfect” day Man remembers follows directly from his comment to his son. Does he not want to remember this day? On the surface, it offers memory for a nature before the Fall that is unsentimental and peaceful. In this memory, Man and his uncle silently shared the calm of the natural world (12–13). Similar brief memories of nature in the past emerge from time to time, often prefaced by reference to how long ago it was: “In that long ago, somewhere very near this place he’d watched a falcon fall down the long blue wall of the mountainside and break with the keel of its breastbone the midmost of a f light of cranes.…”9

Memory, morality, and future selves in The Road But most powerful for me in The Road is the depiction of there being no future for memory once sociality and infrastructure are gone. This is a terrifying idea for viewers to face in terms of imagining their own future selves should the world of The Road come to be. Increasingly, 264

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Man despairs of there being a future for the world, and if there is no such future, then memory too has no future. McCarthy communicates this sense of no future brilliantly in a passage where Man carves a flute for Boy from a piece of roadside cane. He hears Boy playing: “A formless music for the age to come. Or perhaps the last music on earth called up from out of the ashes of its ruin” (McCarthy, 2006: 77). The passage ends with a chilling metaphor, in which Man sees the child with his music as “announcing the arrival of a traveling spectacle in shire and village who does not know that behind him the players have all been carried off by wolves” (78). The scene that demonstrates giving up on memory is the one in which Man finally lets go of the picture of his wife that he has carried all this time in his billfold, now reduced to “a sweatblackened piece of leather.” He throws the billfold away but sits looking at the picture of his wife. “Then,” we are told, “he laid it down in the road also and then he stood and they went on” (51). A bit later on, “He thought about the picture in the road and he thought he should have tried to keep her in their lives somehow, but he did not know how” (54). Clearly, the photograph itself was not enough to keep his wife in their lives, but implicit here is a giving up on memory because, as Ortiz might say, what use is it?10 Such a view is supported by Man’s more philosophical thoughts that suggest indeed no future for memory: “He thought if he lived long enough the world at last would all be lost. Like the dying world the newly blind inhabit, all of it slowly fading from memory” (18). Again, after McCarthy describes the couple plodding toward a distant strand of trees, which are “skylighted stark and black against the last of the visible world,” Man, we are told, “… had this feeling … beyond the numbness and the dull despair. The world shrinking down around a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true” (125). Man fears that ultimately, ethics, values, meanings, cannot hold as around him the environment crumbles. Both Simon J. Ortiz and Man in such a situation find a necessity to live in what Ortiz calls “immediate, actual, and intimate experience,” which Ortiz at least trusts more than memory (Ortiz and Schwab, 74).11 And from about this point in the novel, the present takes over. There are brilliant scenes describing intense details of how Man manages to build something, to discover ways to repair their broken cart, and much more. Once memory is gone, the entire tone of the novel changes. It moves from the philosophical to an increasingly desperate need for Man, seriously ill with tuberculosis, to muster every last ounce of his energy to survive, while saving Boy from harm and getting him to the coast where he might have a chance to stay alive. Not surprisingly, it is this latter, materialist aspect of the novel that Hillcoat could most readily translate into the visual media of film. All of the dramatic scenes in the novel—scenes where marauding men nearly entrap Man and Boy, or those where they enter houses and discover starving humans locked in cellars, screaming for Man’s help—translated into film have viewers on the edge of their seats. These scenes merge with Hollywood’s zombie and horror genres, making The Road generically complex. Hillcoat also seizes on the relationship between father and son (purportedly based on McCarthy’s own relationship with a son born to him in his later years) that is only too easy to sentimentalize in the manner common to Hollywood melodrama.12 I view this story about the relationship as inseparable from the main story which deals with what it means to live in a destroyed world and raises questions about ethics and memory in such a situation. Hillcoat makes effective use of cinema’s ages-long narrative technique—the f lashback— to dramatize Man’s memories of his life before the catastrophe. While most of these would 265

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fall into the category of “Biographical Sound Flashback” (Turim, 1989:110), filling in a protagonist’s past life, some f lashbacks also dramatize Man’s traumatic situations. Such f lashback-memories—for example, the day the clock stopped and a huge f lash caught the world on fire; or the day his son was born in appalling conditions to his resisting wife; or when his wife, not able to stand how they were living, left him and the child to commit suicide—ref lect Man’s post-traumatic stress along with providing narrative background. Even the clearly biographical f lashbacks—such as Man remembering playing the piano with his wife or being at a concert with her—ref lect Man’s experience of traumatic loss. But all of these, because they are about concrete events, make powerful movie sequences while having a narrative function.13 Hillcoat comes closer to the meditative feel of the novel when occasionally using a voiceover narration by Man,14 as in the long beginning sequence. The sequence follows opening shots (we later realize these are Man’s dreams) of an idyllic summer day with a husband and wife happy together, followed by the sudden contrast of a catastrophe at night when the “f lash” happens and all goes dead. Man’s voice-over accompanies establishing shots of Man and Boy moving through a devastated environment. As Man talks about the past, viewers witness the destroyed world, the stark deadness of the natural landscape, the cold and wet the two are exposed to, the desolation of it all. Man describes the clock stopping at 1:17, the f lash and the power outage leaving them without electricity and water, and then each day getting more and more grey, colder and colder, crops failing, and the trees beginning to fall. He describes the refugees on the roads, the terrifying gangs, the threat of cannibalism, food being the constant problem. The context for the plot is thus established, and the following scenes take us into the present of the narrative, with Man reading to Boy, followed by the next day’s search for food in a farmhouse. The deeper meanings as regards memory in the novel were all but impossible for Hillcoat to translate into film. There is no way for Hillcoat to introduce Man’s thoughts about his dreams and memories, for example, although he might perhaps have tried via using more of the voice-over strategy. It is left to the viewer to make the connection to PTSD noted above, and it’s possible that for many viewers the sequences just fill in the narrative. However, there is one scene in regard to memory that Hillcoat makes much more of than McCarthy did in the novel and that powerfully marks a change in Man. If the f lashbacks indeed were utilized largely for the plot, still we understood that Man was haunted by his apparently happy and fulfilled prior life. The scene in question is that where he looks in his billfold at the photo of his wife and, in Hillcoat/Penhall’s innovation, takes off his wedding ring. Penhall makes this a pivotal moment for Man, since here we understand via the sequence some of the meanings about memory in the novel. It starts with Man and Boy finding a large truck stuck on a ruined f lyover bridge where they seek shelter for the night. Boy comments that he wishes he were with his mother, which Man interprets as Boy wishing he were dead. As they prepare to sleep, he tells Boy not to think that way. We cut to Man’s dream—an idyllic scene of Man and his wife playing the piano together in his prior life. We just see their hands touching fondly as they play and their soft voices on the sound track. Man wakes abruptly to the usual grey dawn. Hillcoat brilliantly selects total silence for this scene, as he shows Man emerging from the truck and looking over the edge of the bridge. At this point, Hillcoat changes his prior shooting style dramatically. Where before the majority of scenes have been close-ups of Man and Boy together, or long wide-angle shots of them trekking in desolate, ruined environments, suddenly now we are given an extremely low-angle shot of Man from way down below the bridge. He appears as a mere speck way up on the concrete ledge. The entire world seems to 266

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open up. There’s a cut to Man in medium shot; he takes out his billfold, looks at the photo of his wife for a while; then, again from that low-angle shot, we see him throw the photo away. Next, from an extreme high angle shot over Man, we see him taking off his ring. We cut to an extreme close-up shot of the ring on the bridge with Man’s fingers gradually pushing it to the edge. Hillcoat stops there so we never actually see the ring fall. What’s interesting is how the film paradoxically opens up with these astounding and contrasting low- and high-angle shots of Man at the very moment that we are being shown memory shut out. It seems that Man is freed by the act of disowning memory—a freedom Hillcoat expresses visually by opening up to shots of enormous spatial height and depth. The imagery suggests also a paradoxical freedom for Man from the social contract—even from morality—to enable him simply to focus on saving his son at all costs. McCarthy suggests (and Hillcoat attempts also to convey) that human caring in the present can be elicited through imagining future catastrophe, even if most people regress. Is he suggesting then that staying human is possible? While the film suggests that memory was disabling rather than enabling in Man’s context, the question again emerges: “What is memory for?” As in the novel, after this sequence Man mainly lives in the present, focusing on survival and his mission to bring Boy to the coast where things might be better and where he might survive.15 Living in the present and abandoning everything about his past appears to be the only way to survive the catastrophe. Just as he now abandons memory, Man was forced to abandon morality to survive. Critics debate the apparent higher morality on the part of Boy, who always wants to help wretched people they meet while Man—with survival desperately in mind—sees helping as dangerous and as hindering his and Boy’s chances of surviving. It’s a situation many faced in the concentration camps and many no doubt are facing now in refugee camps everywhere. Boy wants to help a burnt man they meet staggering along the road as well as an old man (played brilliantly by Robert Duvall), with whom they do share some food at Boy’s urging. Such sequences culminate in the Boy’s shock at his father’s excessive punishing of the thief who, towards the end of the film, steals all of their stuff while Boy sleeps. Like Boy, we as viewers also cannot bear the extreme to which Man goes, when he insists on the thief stripping so as to be left out in the cold naked.16 Only at Boy’s urging does Man return and leave the thief ’s clothes for him; Boy adds a can of food.17 Critics ask how Boy can be moral without memory of a past social contract that he never knew. But hasn’t Man taught his son this morality by his words if not his deeds? We learn that at night Man often “told the boy stories. Old stories of courage and justice as he remembered them….” (McCarthy, 2006: 41). Man has also taught Boy a great deal through his love and caring for him, so that Boy transfers the treatment he’s had to others in his world without fully understanding Man’s deep awareness that in crises humans cannot be relied upon. It is in this caring, and Boy’s memory of it over the years they have traveled, that reveals what’s most significant about memory and its uses for creating future selves. Boy exists with a future self that, because he remembers horrific scenes his father has alluded to, including men eating children, fears not so much being eaten himself as he and his father becoming cannibals out of starvation. A constant refrain from Boy is asking reassurance that he and his father are “the good guys.” “We’ll never eat anybody, right?” he asks. This suggests another future self Boy has, namely being moral. In a sense Boy tests this future self—a self that cares about others—each time he meets someone struggling to survive. As we saw, it is the caring connection with his father that he remembers in these situations. Simon J. Ortiz offers a similar understanding in his essay with Gabriele Schwab. The piece starts with Ortiz’s nephew saying to him: “I remember the day the river died” 267

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(Ortiz and Schwab, 68). The nephew’s focus on this memory leads to Ortiz’s meditation on the uses of memory and his ambivalence about memory. On the one hand, Ortiz finds that “the significance of memory is the actual lived experience itself, not the fact it recurs mentally or intellectually later on” (74) and, further, that he trusts “the immediate, present moment more than anything else, more than memory, more than memory of the past” (76). Yet on the other hand he realizes that memory is a way of connecting to others—that Ortiz’s own future self needs the connections that memories provide. The piece ends with Ortiz visiting an old high school friend. In reconnecting with the friend and others there, Ortiz answers his own question about what purpose memory serves. He realizes that: “It is the connection with each other that we have, and it is with memory that we maintain that connection” (79). The Road, both film and novel (despite many different ideas about memory at different points in each text), supports the view that what matters about memory is connecting to others. This has nothing to do with the kind of sentimentality found in The Book of Eli. Boy and Man are linked by memories of their about ten-year-long struggle to survive in desperate circumstances, and by Man’s conveying to Boy values from the past even if it is difficult to activate those values in their catastrophic context. The situation of collapse forces ethical questions to the fore, and it is these questions that define the relationship between Man and Boy. The problem about memory is necessarily foregrounded as Man struggles with his disastrous present. He struggles to come to terms with the fact that the long-assumed synergy among past, present, and future, that has both defined human life and made it stable for a very long time, is now destroyed. The absence of history involves becoming a different kind of human.18 But without properly realizing it, Man enacts an inter-generational connectivity that speaks to what Man’s generation has left for his son. Man valiantly tries to redeem his guilt by bringing his son to the coast.

Conclusion: Viewers’ future selves and memory for action The sub-genre of such dystopian films, I have argued here, serves as memory for the future for audiences watching. We are invited to live for two hours in desolated environments identifying with desperate humans seeking to survive. This offers spectators a way to remember what we have now—and may already be losing. The invitation to identify with fictional future selves may incite viewers to do what they can to avoid such potential future selves in their lives, or at least to attend to humans’ uncertain reality that might result in such future selves. If “memory for the future” involves remembering past happiness as a way to forewarn against future catastrophe, the “future for memory” is also at stake in the fictional dystopian world of some of these films. Memory of past ecological and personal happiness may serve at first to sustain energy for a protagonist to move forward, but what happens when she gives up on the past? What happens when, as Simon J. Ortiz put it, “Sometimes you even think memory is a useless and pointless utility. Sometimes you even dare to think: What is memory good for anyway?” (Ortiz and Schwab, 2008). This provocation leads to rethinking memory’s overall function in sustaining a possible future self in situations of climate catastrophe. The question the film and novel raise, and ask viewers to contemplate, is how memories of connections one no longer has, or memories of lives one can no longer live, can be pertinent or useful. What implications does this have not only for individuals but for humans as a global collectivity of historical cultures? What if anything should we do with memories of planet Earth as it was before humans acted on it, or before the result of our actions became visible? This question arises dramatically as the credits to The Road roll on.19 Very softly, but nevertheless audible, sounds of a summer evening in a cozy neighborhood dominate the sound 268

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track. We hear a lawn mower, cars going by, Man’s voice asking what someone did all day, other sounds of doors shutting, etc. We are reminded of the film’s opening dream, although these sounds suggest more activity and more people around than in that early f lashback. It is as if Hillcoat/Penhall are asking, indeed, what use are such memories, when all is destroyed? Are the sounds there to prompt us to take heed of what the family lost in the film and that we might lose too? That novel and film raise these crucial ideas is part of their importance to us in the context of challenges that humans face. If, as Markus and Nurius observed (1986), possible selves function as incentives for future behavior, does identifying with the futurist protagonists in either The Book of Eli or The Road change viewers’ future ways of being? Are viewers’ contexts for their current views of self also changed through the experience of probable dystopian fantasies? As noted, it would take a research project like that of Adam Brown and his team to provide concrete data either way. However, from a personal perspective, I can say that my idea of my future self has been radically changed during the context of studying dystopian future-tense cinema, reading widely about the science of climate change, and absorbing the increasing humanities and social science scholarship about the implications of humans moving into the Anthropocene. While not exactly vicariously traumatized, I worry a great deal about future life on planet Earth, and especially about the world that my grandchildren will be living in as adults and possibly parents themselves. The dramatic upturn in public discourse about the realities of climate change since the publication of the 2014 IPCC Report is at once encouraging (notice is finally being given to the crisis) and profoundly depressing in its projected outcomes unless humans start urgently to adapt and take vital, extensive measure to cut fossil fuels, fracking, and other dangerous practices, while conserving water and taking every advantage of alternate energy sources. If films like The Road studied here really do invite spectators to rethink their future selves and those of their children, grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren, they have served a purpose. Unfortunately, too many Hollywood productions, like The Book of Eli, offer false comfort so as to attract audiences. While I have interpreted both films as subtly implying enormous collective and cultural losses as well as individual ones, Hollywood films still mainly construct narratives that focus on individual journeys without drawing implications for the larger world. And they usually believe they must end with at least a sliver of hope for humanity’s survival. Yet, if the terrifying future selves stay in the audience’s minds despite the sliver of hope, perhaps they will find the energy for serious changes in daily practices, and go even further into the activism Bill McKibben calls us toward.20

Notes   1  Unfortunately, in this context, I cannot explore the serious issues regarding gender and race in the films. Please see my forthcoming Rutgers Press book, Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian in Film and Literature.   2  Will Smith is another rare example as the protagonist of Francis Lawrence’s I am Legend (2007).   3  Interestingly, the destruction of the world in The Road also starts with a “flash.” Although this genre (I think productively) deliberately avoids any precise causes for the climate catastrophe, horrendous fires seem to be a trope directors adopt.   4  In a deleted scene, there’s an image of a Time Magazine with a picture of an atomic bomb explosion, suggesting at some point in the film’s construction the directors wanted to be more specific about the catastrophe. Other deleted scenes suggest the bombing resulted from a war in the Middle-East.   5  As a colleague pointed out, such wastelands offering remains of a consumer society—the detritus of prior wealth and fecundity—can be found already as one travels around the United States today. Indeed, Hillcoat and cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe found precisely such wastelands (what Variety 269

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terms “scorched-earth vistas”) in Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Mount St. Helens, and Oregon in which to film. Hillcoat does not offer a political reading of this. The lack of any awareness of class consciousness is indicative of the genre, a lack endemic to it. But McCarthy himself suggested in one of the interviews on Oprah Winfrey’s TV show that the book was partly inspired by looking out from his hotel room in El Paso and seeing a landscape such as those noted here.   6  Research regarding links between biodiversity and linguistic diversity is huge. For a recent summary, see Penn State, “Endangered Species, Languages Linked at High Biodiversity Regions.” ScienceDaily, May 7, 2012. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120507154112.htm. (Accessed May 27, 2015).   7  “Zombies” have moved to the center of popular discourse as never before, partly because of the increasing number of zombie movies but because of a new fascination with creatures who are neither fully human nor non-human. The beings’ in-between status captures the imagination. Many of the futurist dystopias include zombie images that seem to go back to the Charlton Heston trilogy starting with Omega Man (1971). I Am Legend (2007) perhaps started the trend of zombie renewal.   8  While this is one of the scenes the film elects to show, there is no way that the image of Man and Boy in the house can communicate what’s going on in Boy’s mind as he watches his father remembering his long lost past and struggles to grasp what it means for his father.   9  Doesn’t this sound like an homage to the poet Gerald Manley Hopkins and his poem “The Windhover”?: I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, kingdom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!   10  I’ll return to this scene when discussing memory in the film. In the film adaptation, Hillcoat chose to make the implicit meaning regarding no future for memory in the novel quite clear.   11  I found the synergy between my reading of McCarthy’s novel and Simon J. Ortiz and Gabriele Schwab’s profound 2008 essay, “Memory Is Key,” fascinating. The piece clarified what I have been trying to say about “the future for memory,” and its impact on future selves. It’s also uncanny that a colleague responding to my talk on this chapter remarked that some of Hillcoat’s scenes looked like what one could find out west around Native American reservations. Note that Ortiz and Schwab collaborated but wrote their own sections, interlaced. The words I quote in this essay were written by Ortiz in the context of their many discussions together.   12  It was this relationship together with a veneer of Christianity that drew Oprah Winfrey to the novel, which was selected as one of the books featured on her show. She even managed to get McCarthy to do an interview about the novel with her.   13  In a sense, the flashbacks in The Road combine two categories of the cinematic device studied with such depth and historical overview by Maureen Turim in 1989. The biographical flashback became a staple of Hollywood narrative techniques, but before the concept of PTSD entered into film scholars’ discourse, Turim discussed “Holocaust Flashbacks,” looking at trauma and repression in flashbacks in films about World War II. See her chapter “Disjunction in the Modernist Flashback,” in Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History (1989).   14  Significantly, this voice-over was kept in the film at the behest of McCarthy himself. As Joe Penhall, the script-writer, notes in his piece on his adaptation of the novel, neither Hillcoat nor the star actor in the film, Viggo Mortensen, liked the voice-over Penhall had created. However, when McCarthy was shown the film early on, he especially praised the voice-over, and so it remained. See Penhall, 2010.   15  There are just a couple of flashbacks in the film after the bridge sequence. One happens when the two finally hit gold with the deep bomb shelter filled with unbelievable amounts of food, etc. Searching through Boy’s bag, Man finds a hair comb that belonged to his wife. As he smells it, we get a flashback of them happily watching a concert and making secret sexual contact. At the end of the film, as Man is dying there’s a final flashback to tenderness between him and his wife. These do not occur in the novel, however. Penhall, since he is making a commercial film, here departs somewhat from the idea of memory McCarthy presented because of the need to tug at viewers’ heartstrings.   16  It is odd that Hillcoat cast an African American actor in this role of the thief. Is it possible that he wanted to make an indirect statement about slavery and racism in America by having Man be so unnecessarily brutal? The scene can be read, then, either as racist or as a subtle larger political point being made. 270

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  17  A colleague suggested that perhaps Man’s behavior is not so much a matter of being freed from the social contract as such, although this is part of what’s going on with survivors on the rampage for food and resources. In Man’s case there is guilt in freeing himself from his wife’s memory, and my colleague suggested this left scars that emerge in Man’s cruel behavior.   18  For detailed and carefully thought work on implications for history of humans becoming a geologic force, see Chakrabarty, 2009.   19  It is interesting that Alfonso Cuarón adopts the same strategy as the credits roll in Children of Men.   20  Bill McKibben, “What Would Thoreau Do?,” The New York Review of Books, June 19, 2014: 51–52. See also his subsequent essay, “Climate: Will We Lose the Endgame?,” The New York Review of Books, July 10, 2014: 46–48. Activism amongst students and others in regard to the environmental crisis is increasing as I write this.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Daniel Heller-Roazen, trans. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Atwood, Margaret. In Other Worlds: Science Fiction and the Human Imagination. New York: Doubleday/ Anchor, 2012. Baccolini, Raffaella, and Tom Moylan, eds. Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination. New York: Routledge, 2003. Brown, Adam D, Janine P. Buckner, and William Hirst. “Time, Before, and After Time: Temporal Self and Social Appraisals in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.” Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry 42, no. 3 (2011): 344–8. Brown, Adam D., J. C. Root, T. A. Romano, L. J. Chang, R. A. Bryant, and W. Hirst. “Overgeneralized Autobiographical Memory and Future Thinking in Combat Veterans with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.” Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry (2012): 1–6. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35 (winter 2009): 197–222. Gutman, Yifat, Adam D. Brown, and Amy Sodaro, eds. Memory and the Future: Transnational Politics, Ethics and Society. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Kaplan, E. Ann. Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005. ——. “Global Trauma and Public Feelings: Viewing Images of Catastrophe.” Consumption Markets and Culture 11, no. 1 (2008): 3–24. Keough, Peter. Interview with John Hillcoat, director of The Road. Outside the Frame (Blog), Boston Phoenix, November 23, 2009. Accessed October 3, 2012. http://blog.thephoenix.com/BLOGS/ outsidetheframe/archive/2009/11/23/interview-with-john-hillcoat-director-of-quot-the-roadquot.aspx. Markus, Hazel, and Paula Nurius. “Possible Selves.” American Psychologist (September 1986): 954–69. McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Vintage, 2006. Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Moylan, Tom. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction and Utopia, Dystopia. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000. Ortiz, Simon J., and Gabriele Schwab. “Memory Is Key.” Kenyon Review 30 (fall 2008): 68–81. Penhall, Joe. “Last Man Standing: What Cormac McCarthy Made of My Adaptation of The Road.” The Guardian, January 4, 2010. http://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/jan/04/the-road-cormacmccarthy-viggo-mortensen. Accessed May 27, 2015. Turim, Maureen. Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History. New York and London: Routledge, 1989.

Filmography The Book of Eli. Directed by the Hughes Brothers. USA: Alcon Entertainment, Silver Pictures. 2010. 118 min. The Road. Directed by John Hillcoat. USA: Dimension Films, 2929 Productions, Nick Wechsler Productions. 2009. 111min. 271

23 “The mirror with a memory” Placing photography in memory studies Olga Shevchenko

Introduction A commonsensical way of relating photography to memory is one that assumes that photographs in some way “preserve” or “capture” memories for posterity. A photograph album with the inscription “Treasured Memories” on the cover, or a Kodak ad promoting the camera “as a means of keeping green the Christmas memories” (Paster 1992: 138), are perhaps the most quotidian instantiations of this assumption. But the same equation can be found in academic texts as well. Thus, in their classical study of the significance of objects in US homes, Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton (1981: 67) summarize the significance of photographs as personal possessions by saying that, “obviously, photographs are the prime vehicles for preserving the memory of one’s close relations.” And yet, while it is hard to deny that much vernacular photographic practice is motivated by a desire to capture a moment to be remembered, this intuitive equation between photography and memory is not a ref lection of anything that is inherent or inevitable to the act of photography, but is rather itself a product of a particular history. Exploring this history is one of the tasks of this chapter. A second, equally important task is to move beyond the simple memory-photography equation to explore the range of complex entanglements photographs, both as images and as material objects, have with the lived experience of the past. What is at stake here is not necessarily deconstructing the tentative link between remembering and photographic images, but rather questioning the static notions of memory and photography on which commonsensical assumptions of this link so frequently rest. This chapter covers a range of approaches that do not, at present, constitute a coherent field. Explorations that touch on photography as a medium of memory occur, indeed, in a range of disciplines. Scholars in visual and media studies, art history, communications, literature, anthropology, sociology and history all have an interest in how photographic visual representations both inf lect and inform remembering, but they often explore this question with the tools distinct to their disciplines, and in ways that seek to contribute to distinctively disciplinary conversations. The notions of memory that these studies draw on also range widely, from the more encompassing category of cultural memory that embraces all forms of objectivized archival preservation,1 to the more narrowly defined and necessarily subjective 272

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sense of historical consciousness which presupposes the existence of the perceiving and feeling subject. Another important divide concerns the point of entry, because the layer of works engaging with memory in photography theory does not always acknowledge the range of works engaging with photographs in memory studies. Still, despite the internal heterogeneity of the discussion that occurs around memory in, through, and of photography, some recurrent concerns emerge. One such concern pertains to issues of medium specificity (i.e., the indexical relationship assumed to exist between the photograph and its referent), and its relevance for the significance a photograph can be claimed to have for memory. Another has to do with the processes of mediation that occur on the level of photograph (as an aspect of the world is translated into a two-dimensional image), on the level of memory (as lived experience gets packaged and processed for posterity), and on the level of their interaction (as individual memories inform perceptions of an image, while an image informs, and indeed sometimes shapes, relevant memories of the period). Indeed, examining approaches to photography and memory over time allows us not only to gain insights into these questions, but also to see how both memory and photography are entwined with issues of truth, subjectivity, technology, and practices of mediation that themselves change over time.

Photography and memory: histories of a relationship The link between a photograph and an act of remembrance was heralded in the first decades of photography’s history by Oliver Wendell Holmes, who famously dubbed the photograph a “mirror with a memory” (1859). It is notable that Holmes’s formulation construed memory as a property of the physical photograph itself. However, the metaphor of photograph-as-memory offered a range of expressive possibilities that were rapidly utilized. Indeed, some of the early daguerreotypes feature individuals displaying or contemplating daguerreotypes of their loved ones in an act of performed remembrance, where the image plays the role of memory itself that the sitter “holds onto.” The daguerreotypes in this case work not as externalized memory of what the camera has seen, but rather as a metaphor of the cherished memories that remain in the minds of the living. Yet, as perceptively noted by Geoffrey Batchen, the material culture of early personal photography, in which images of the deceased or distant relatives and friends are so often accompanied by admonitions to “remember and not forget” as well as material remains, such as an individual’s lock of hair, testify to a persistent anxiety and fear of being forgotten, rather than a comfortable taken-for-granted assumption that a photograph ensures lasting personal memory. In Batchen’s own words, the photographs he probes represent “not their subjects, but rather the specter of an impossible desire: the desire to remember, and to be remembered” (2004: 98). This anxiety over the photographs’ capacity to preserve memories is part and parcel of a more general anxiety over memory that marked the intellectual climate of the 19th and early 20th century. This is a point made compellingly by Batchen (2004: 94–96, passim), as well as Jeffrey Olick, who observed that “it is by now well documented that the nineteenth century experienced something of a memory crisis [Terdiman 1993; Kern 1986]. And it is also the case that the new technologies of photography were, if not caused by that crisis, at least associated with it” (2014: 22). Central to this memory crisis was an acute awareness of the irreversible f low of time, and a corresponding preoccupation with preserving and accurately representing the past—a project to which the new technology of photography was mobilized 273

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Figure 23.1  D  aguerreotype of a man in a coat, holding a tinted daguerreotype. Unknown author Source: Published with permission from David Chow.

to contribute. While this may seem a natural move to the contemporary reader, it is worth noting that it came at the expense of imagining photography in alternative ways: as a field of aesthetic expression modeled on painting, as pictorialist photographers have sought to define it, or as a performative medium that is “less … an instrument for pinning down the ‘real’ than a means to generate imaginative worlds,” as Karen Strassler characterizes the spirit of postcolonial photography in her study of photography and national modernity in Java (2010: 147). Arguably, this preoccupation with the accurate rendering of the past in both memory and photography has informed the habits of thought not only in the late 19th century, but up to the present day. Indeed, as Olick points out, lay understanding of both memory and photography imagines them as static: memories (and photographs) are either accurate (and thus “correct”) or inaccurate (and thus “f lawed,” or “distorted”). What these imaginings overlook is the possibility that both remembering and photographs are inherently dynamic, “a process, not a thing” (Olick and Robbins 1998: 122), and that as such they are best explored not as imperfect approximations of a remote original, but as creative processes in their own right, in their production, circulation and reception. A telling case of the deepening investment into photographs as the “anchors” of the ever failing memory is offered by the history of Kodak advertising traced by James Paster (1992) and Nancy Martha West (2000). The original promise of photography (as contrasted, for example, with daguerreotype technology) has been its ability to freeze movement. Correspondingly, 274

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the two pitches made by the advertisers when the Kodak Brownie camera was first introduced to the public in 1888 were the ease of the camera’s operation (thus the slogan “You press the button, we do the rest”) and the instantaneity of the resulting snapshot that enabled arresting motion. It was not until the early 20th century that the idea of stopping movement translated into the notion of stopping time and preserving the memory of past events for posterity. By the 1950s, Paster notes, “the snapshot was presented almost exclusively as a means of dealing with the inexorable passage of time,” as exemplified in such slogans as “Snapshots remember—when you forget/Snapshots help your heart remember,” and “Count on today’s Kodak cameras and Kodak film to make any moment extra special—a memory to live over and over again” (Paster 1992: 138-139). In an era of anxiety over memory, the snapshot here is offered as an insurance against memory’s inherent failings, and an antidote to the passage of time (see Figure 23.2). While Kodak advertisements positioned photographs as conduits of personal memory, a range of other institutions placed photographic technology front and center in the task of constituting cultural and collective memories. In the now-classical discussion of the archival practices of two key 19th century figures, Alphonse Bertillon and Francis Galton, Allan Sekula (1989) underscored the role photography played as a way of measuring, regulating and knowing human beings. Notably, Sekula underscored that photographs had originally been deemed insufficient for providing a comprehensive record of an individual, and were thus supplemented by a range of standardized verbal descriptors. Yet the authority that eventually accrued to the institution of the archive could not but inf lect the power of photography itself, enhancing its evidentiary appeal and status as both a carrier and a building block of cultural memory. How stable is the presumed connection between memory and photography in the digital era, when the production of photographic images speeds up exponentially, and any pretense for a natural relationship between the object before the camera and the resulting pattern of pixels in a computer file is tenuous at best? Some scholars suggest that the cultural role of personal photography is changing rapidly in the sense that it moves away from the implicit equation between photography and memory. Photographs increasingly circulate digitally as means of communication about the present, rather than forms of referencing the past, momentos rather than mementos, in José van Dijck’s (2007) felicitous phrasing. Perhaps the most dramatic instantiation of these changing cultural expectations for photography is the photo messaging application Snapchat which offers its users an opportunity to exchange photographs that are programmed to disappear within seconds of their viewing. Snapchat (with its icon featuring a cartoon ghost) thus highlights the f leeting nature of images, not their promise of permanence, and frames photography as a way of staying in touch in the current moment, rather than freezing and preserving a record of a moment gone by (see Figure 23.3). These shifts in everyday uses of photography are paralleled by the increased emphasis on manipulability of the images that circulate publicly. The postmodern writing on simulacra and simulations that lament the “weakening of historicity” and loss of the referent have been around for decades (Jameson 1984; Baudrillard 1995), and the more recent commentary translates these concerns into the language of popular culture. For example, Adatto (2008) suggests that “the age of the photo-op” has made manipulation and staging of images the default cultural expectations of the present moment.2 This has obvious repercussions for the presumed connection between photography and memory, for the new mindset asserts that, to cite Linda Williams: “What was once a ‘mirror with a memory’ can now only ref lect another mirror” (1993:10). Yet there are reasons to believe that the realist expectations, and the cultural investments into photography as a medium of memory are still very much with us. For one, the ease and 275

Figure 23.2  K  odak ad from Life magazine, December 18, 1950. Unknown author Source: Published with permission from Eastman Kodak Company.

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Figure 23.3  Snapchat logo Source: Image courtesy of Snapchat. Published with permission.

speed with which digital images circulate often enhance, rather than undermine, the problematic expectation that photographs guarantee an accurate visual record of the past. This is the point made by Errol Morris (2011), who uses the example of Abu Ghraib photographs to demonstrate the ease with which questionable inferences about the past are made and naturalized by recourse to seemingly unambivalent photographic evidence. Morris, whose own commitments are very much on the realist side (what he questions is not the desire to make evidentiary use of photography, but the temptation to make wrong inferences), nonetheless is concerned not with the public’s embrace of f loating signifiers but, on the contrary, with its overinvestment in photography as means of accessing the lived reality of the past. Domestic uses of digital photography also suggest that there is at least as much continuity as discontinuity in the ways people construe and communicate their past through the digital medium (Pauwels 2002). While technology may have made it easier to edit out a family member or to enhance the lushness of greenery in the background of a travel photograph, these types of manipulation are not significantly different from the enhancements of reality analog photographs had allowed. In this sense, the cultural uses of digital photography in what W.J.T. Mitchell (1992) has dubbed a “post-photographic era” are as preoccupied with the creation and consumption of “desired pasts” (Pauwels 2002) and thus with the capture and making of memories as their analog precursors had been.

How photography matters What the cursory review above makes clear is that the customary link drawn between memory and photography has long historical and cultural roots, and that the precise articulations of 277

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this link have been reflective of the technological and cultural developments of a particular moment. But it also gives an indication of why this taken-for-granted link is fundamentally problematic. This is why much critical writing on photography has been engaged in questioning and qualifying the commonsensical assumption that photographs are (perfect) containers of (perfect) memories by pointing out that, in David Campany’s words, “the photograph can be an aid to memory, but it can also become an obstacle that blocks access to the understanding of the past” (2003: 124). These works take seriously the mediated nature of both memory and photography, inquiring into the specific mechanisms and logics that made photographs resonate historically. Although a number of trends emerge in this large, interdisciplinary body of work, the discussion below will focus on two strands that transcend disciplinary boundaries and persist throughout different eras and technologies. These strands are largely parallel to the distinction proposed by anthropologist Karen Strassler (2010) for the field of photography theory writ large. Broadly characterizing two polar extremes in approaches to photography, Strassler contrasted those she called “technological essentialists” with those she described as “social constructionists.” While the former, she suggested, seek to “identify a singular, transcultural ‘essence’ of photography,” the latter “refuse altogether the notion of photography as a ‘medium,’” and “dissolve it entirely into its myriad social, institutional, and ideological contexts” (2010: 19). The poles she identifies are admittedly ideal types, and in Strassler’s discussion they do not automatically entail any assumptions regarding photography’s relationship to processes of social remembering. But they do turn one’s attention to the much-discussed topic of medium specificity in photography in a way that applies directly to the literature on remembrance and commemoration. Indeed, much like with writing on photography more generally, sources that discuss the way in which photography bears on memory tend to fall on a continuum. On the one hand, you have those texts that take up the question of photography’s coherence as a medium, suggesting that the irreducible historicity is inscribed in this practice by definition, and exploring the way this historicity bears on the memory discourses and mnemonic practices it gives rise to. Applying Strassler’s distinction to the corpus of texts that pertain directly to memory, it is easy to identify as “essentialist” the writings of Siegfried Kracauer and Roland Barthes, among others. These works focus on various properties of photography, most notably on the indexicality of the photographic image, as well as on photographs as physical objects, exploring how these properties translate into a specific way of relating to the past. The term essentialist applies here insofar as this inquiry aims to locate photography’s resonance for memory in its essence as a medium. On the other hand, there are those works and authors that concentrate on the uses images receive as they are put to support or counter particular mnemonic projects, but these uses are derived from, and explained by, not something inherent to photography as a medium, but rather a constellation of social and cultural factors external to it (be it the particular group carriers, media environment, or the arenas on which the particular mnemonic battle may be playing out). This tradition, best exemplified by works of John Tagg and Elizabeth Edwards, suggests that there is no essence to photography itself, and that its relevance to memory is entangled in a variety of institutional practices and embedded in spaces, archives, and albums. Departing slightly from Strassler, I will call this emphasis contextualist, to emphasize that its interest in the uses and ends of photography looks first and foremost to the social and cultural contexts of its production and circulation. While this remains a simplified distinction, something of a necessary evil, it is nonetheless a useful way to organize a discussion of a messy and heterogeneous area of inquiry. Still, it is worth remembering that most generative contemporary writers on memory and photography fall somewhere in-between these two poles. 278

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The essence of the medium The authors who take seriously the specificity of photography as a medium tend to emphasize several of its features as particularly relevant. Key among these is the “quasi-automatic nature of photographic depiction” characteristic of photography that seems to bring the viewer “‘closer’ to the indexical trace of the subject of the image” (Roth 2009: 87). Or, as put somewhat differently by John Berger, “the material relation between the image and what it represents (between the marks on the printing paper and the tree these marks represent) is an immediate and unconstructed one. And it is indeed like a trace” (2002: 51, italics in the original). Unlike a painting, which entails a process of transformation as the painter selectively interprets what to render and how, the camera registers indiscriminately everything in front of the lens, making the image appear as “message without a code” (Barthes 1977: 36), something “directly stenciled off the real” (Sontag 1977: 154).3 However, the indexicality of the photographic image does not, in itself, guarantee photography a privileged status in regards to memory. In the case of one early commentator on photography and history, Siegfried Kracauer, this skepticism is rooted in his insistence on the distinctly selective nature of memory, which Kracauer contrasted with the mechanical completeness of the photographic image. A photograph, to Kracauer, was always something both more and less than historical perception: something richer on details, but thinner on meaning: Photography grasps what is given as a spatial (or temporal) continuum; memory images retain what is given only insofar as it has significance. Since what is significant is not reducible to either merely spatial or merely temporal terms, memory images are at odds with photographic representation. From the latter’s perspective, memory images appear to be fragments—but only because photography does not encompass the meaning to which they refer and in relation to which they cease to be fragments. Similarly, from the perspective of memory, photography appears as a jumble that consists partly of garbage. (2004[1927]: 60) It is thus not despite but because of the indexical nature of a photographic image that the memory analogy fails. A related view is expressed in the writing of perhaps the most eloquent commentator on photography, French theorist Roland Barthes, who stipulates in Camera Lucida (1982) that the poignancy of a photograph, its ability to stir and cause pain, are rooted not in the photograph’s bringing the past to life (“nothing Proustian in a photograph,” he insists), but rather in the image’s ability to confront the viewer with the realization that what she sees no longer exists. Throughout Camera Lucida, Barthes strives to formulate the elusive “essence” of photography and develop an argument and a method for the act of looking at it. Using documentary, photojournalism and personal photographs as examples, he introduces two terms, studium and punctum, to articulate how photographs work on the viewer. The studium refers to what could be glossed as the “informational content” of the photograph; something that could serve as evidence for a historian, but that fails to stir the viewer emotionally. Punctum, in contrast, is the detail or element in the image that breaks the studium and “pricks” the viewer. On a certain level, the punctum is always personal; the examples that Barthes gives refer him through a chain of associations to his own family photographs or prior viewing experiences.4 On another level, though, what unfailingly “pricks” a viewer in any photograph is the awareness of the inexorable flow of time and the fact that the moment an image references is always, already gone. This is the “that-has-been” aspect of the photograph 279

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that makes every image, Barthes insists, an image that anticipates the sitter’s (and the viewer’s own) death. Building on Barthes’s insights, Ulrich Baer (2002) suggests that photography has affinity not with memory, but with trauma. Baer juxtaposes the historical time of narration and continuity (something akin to Barthes’s studium) to the discrete, explosive temporality of extraordinary isolated events. It is the latter, he argues, that describes the nature of photography. This makes the medium uniquely fitted to encapsulate the experience of trauma that, like photography, has a character of momentary sudden disruption that resists narrative elaboration. In a way, trauma and photography have the same structure: The startling effect (and affect) of many photographs, then, results not only from their adherence to conventions of realism and codes of authenticity…. It comes as well from photography’s ability to confront the viewer with a moment that had the potential to be experienced but perhaps was not. In viewing such photographs we are witnessing a mechanically recorded instant that was not necessarily registered by the subject’s own consciousness. (2002: 8) The possibility of delayed and unintentional effects in photography was one that was articulated years before both Barthes and Baer by German literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin. In his essay “A short history of photography,” originally published in 1931, Benjamin writes about the peculiar temporality of photography. Photography, says Benjamin, by arresting a moment offers an opportunity to inspect it with the hindsight knowledge of the future that this moment led to, “to find the imperceptible point at which, in the immediacy of that long-past moment, the future so persuasively inserts itself that, looking back, we may discover it” (1972: 7). Benjamin dubbed this layer of perception “optical unconscious” and considered photography a medium uniquely suited to reveal it. While Benjamin does not address memory directly, this notion of the “optical unconscious” is certainly relevant to the historical resonance of photographs (Paschalidis 2003). It is indeed such miniature details, unregistered by the camera’s subjects at the moment of the photograph’s taking, that may eventually loom large in the minds of those who encounter the image, at times producing the kind of trauma effect explored by Baer, while at others offering multiple opportunities of reading images against the grain. It is this propensity of the photographic image that makes photographs, in the eyes of Christopher Pinney (2013), less likely to conclusively Orentalize its subjects. The implications of Benjamin’s observation for memory are obvious. Oral historians who draw on photographs in the course of interviewing, note that: Narratives woven around photographs are not merely additions to the stories told in “traditional” oral history interviews. Rather, they often run counter to what we could call “master life stories”—the life stories we feel comfortable telling ourselves and others. Memories evoked by photographs are not simply memories in addition to those recalled through narrating. These are often repressed or suppressed—rather than simply “forgotten”—memories that undermine and contradict personal “master memories” as often as they enhance or nuance them. (Freund and Thomson 2011: 5) The images’ propensity to give rise to suppressed (one may say, counter-) memories complicates and enriches the notion of photography as a trigger of remembering by introducing questions of what, how and to what ends one remembers through photography. 280

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While the scholars interrogating the essential features of analog photography thus take seriously the peculiar temporality of the photographic image, which arrests one moment in a f low of time to offer it up to scrutiny and ref lection, as well as the indissoluble relationship that exists in a photograph between the trace and its referent, they emphasize the ways in which these relationships can complicate, rather than ensure, remembering. Their discussion also brings to light the complexity of the process of remembering itself—a process that functions, as Paul Connerton (1989) has long argued, both on the level of the narrative and that of the body and affect. Indeed, different aspects of photography are relevant for these different kinds of remembering. Narrative memory, the kind that can be transmitted verbally, requires a strategy of emplotment (White 1978), which locates the isolated instance referenced in a photograph in a longer synthetic narrative. It is closer to Barthes’s notion of the studium in that it calls for a process of narrative meaning-making on behalf of the viewer. This is the process of meaning-making that John Berger refers to when he says that “an instance photographed can only acquire meaning insofar as the viewer can read into it a duration beyond itself. When we find a photograph meaningful, we are lending it a past and a future” (Berger 2002: 49). The process of locating a photograph on a temporal continuum (placing a high school graduation portrait onto the plotline of someone’s romantic development, as opposed to a plotline of their educational attainment or social status) is only one of many operations required to lend an image meaning. It is also true that a photograph, despite its irresistible individuality (referencing a unique moment in the life of an individual person) also lends itself to serving as representative of a particular period, condition or a group. As Zeynep Gürsel observes, “[e]ach body in a photograph is highly singular and indexed to a particular individual, and yet many of the bodies in news images … circulate as stand-ins for large numbers of bodies sharing the same condition—bodies that are metonyms for body politics” (2014: 67). While Gürsel speaks specifically about news photography, the mental operation that enables one to look at a yellowed image from a family album and then make an observation about “the 60s” is not substantively different. In fact, this is exactly how Sarkisova and Shevchenko (2014) observed teenage Russians make generalizations about their parents and grandparents’ lives under socialism (and by extension, the nature of the socialist project itself ) in their study of the afterlife of Soviet family photography. In this case, too, the instantaneity and indexicality of the photograph gave rise to fanciful memorial constructions that went well beyond the instances referenced by the image. But perhaps a more powerful and confounding aspect of photography is the way it works on the level of emotion and affect—the level referenced by Barthes’s punctum. As Ernst Gombrich noted (for all visual images, not just photographs), “the visual image is supreme in its capacity for arousal, … its use for expressive purpose is problematic, and … unaided it altogether lacks the possibility of matching the statement function of language” (1996: 42). Indeed, one would be remiss not to acknowledge the significant differences between photographs and, say, the narrative arts taken up in some detail by Ann Rigney elsewhere in this volume. While narration allows a coherent, more or less controlled marshalling of evidence in support of a particular point, a photographic image offers an infinite range of material details co-present at a particular scene, and thus a much broader range of possible interpretations (a range that the captions to the image usually seek to delimit and restrict). At the same time, the effectiveness of a photograph in conjuring a sense that the events and people they reference “really existed” is unmatched, and so is its emotional appeal. As such, a photograph’s ability to stir affect is considerable. This is because photographic images, as Marianne Hirsch points out (drawing on Georges Didi-Huberman), are simultaneously indexical and symbolic. 281

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Because of their indexical relation with the referent, they authenticate the past’s existence and provide tangible evidence of the factual reality of their subject (this is Barthes’s “that-hasbeen” element). But at the same time, photographs allow for projection and approximation, and their fragmentariness and two-dimensionality make them, as Hirsch points out, “especially open to narrative elaboration and embroidery and to symbolization” (2008: 117). In other words, photographs not only expose the viewers to the emotional states experienced by the people on the image (although they do that as well—insofar as these states are perceptible). They also invite the viewers’ own emotional projections and identifications, grounding and legitimating them at the same time in the indexical status of the image. This is an argument that is very much at the heart of Margaret Olin’s work (2002), whose primary interest is in investigating the photographs’ ability to touch the viewer, but the relevance of this observation to memory is especially closely explored by Hirsch in her seminal work on postmemory. Hirsch defines postmemory as a “structure of inter- and trans-generational transmission of traumatic knowledge and experience” (2008: 106, italics in the original). Her original interest was with the way in which memory of the Holocaust affects not only the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, but also more broadly those in the second and third generation who “grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated” (1997: 22). Photography for Hirsch is one of the ways in which the members of these later generations inhabit and, in a way, appropriate the trauma of their parents and grandparents by developing complex emotional identifications and attachments to, and through, the image. The power and emotional appeal of such photographs is considerable, even as they remain f lawed and problematic as historical documents. In fact, in her later, collaborative work with Leo Spitzer, Hirsch outlines just how little substance can be gleaned from an image that grips one so powerfully, and proposes to think of photographs as “points of memory” (yet again recalling Barthes’s notion of the punctum as the detail that “pricks” the viewer). This recognition both of the photographs’ limitations and of their role as providers of “affective visceral connection to the past” (which itself partially derives from their limitations as historical document) shifts emphasis from narrative to affective register of memory, all the while remaining rooted in photography’s nature as a medium (Hirsch and Spitzer 2006).

Photographic contexts and memory While the theorists outlined above may disagree about the exact relationship between photography and memory, they all pursue this question through an examination of the photographic medium itself, its ontology, mechanics and specificity. In contrast, a different group of scholars concentrates on the distinct institutions and circuits through which photographs circulate as keys to their memorial significance (or lack thereof ). This approach was pioneered and most compellingly articulated by John Tagg, who famously argued that “the power [photography] wields is never its own” (1993: 64). Rather, it rests on the range of institutions that historically have relied on photography and, in the process, gave it the evidentiary and rhetorical appeal that it continues to exert. These institutions, for Tagg, are first and foremost the police, the asylum, the newspaper and the archive (the list could be continued), and thus the very history of photography devolves into distinct, although interconnected, strands (hence the multiple plurals in the subtitle of Tagg’s book: Essays on Photographies and Histories). From the standpoint of this approach, there is no essence to photography, and thus no essential way in which it is naturally aligned (or, to the contrary, inimical) to memory. What 282

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matters is the way photographs are used, the power relations in which they are embedded, the channels through which they circulate, and the publics involved in negotiating their meanings; all these may or may not have mnemonic relevance. Unsurprisingly, much work in this tradition is carried out by anthropologists. For example, Christopher Pinney (1997) has been deeply inf luential in turning the analytic attention of visual scholars to the historical and cultural contexts of photography. In his introduction to the co-edited volume Photography’s Other Histories (2003), Pinney points out that photography is a “globally disseminated and locally appropriated medium” that is practiced differently in different social and historic settings. The turn to postcolonial and colonial uses of photography by local populations that this inf luential collection exemplified and catalyzed is informed by the understanding that photographic practices can be understood only in their social, cultural and institutional contexts. Scholars working in this tradition (e.g., Morris 2009, Strassler 2010) examined the impact of local image ecologies, cultures of memory, visual traditions, and cultural and social legacies on production and uses of photographic images around the world (oftentimes discovering that memorialization occupies a relatively lesser place in the spectrum of local expectations for photography than it does in the industrialized West, as can be seen in MacDougall [2006] and Pinney [2003]). Other authors have scrutinized a further range of contexts that have a clear bearing on the culture and processes of remembrance. Among them are the museum (Edwards 2001, Thomas 1998), the archive (Sekula 1989), the media (Gürsel 2010, 2014; Tota 2014; Zelizer 1992, 1998), the photo album (Bourdieu 1990; Langford 2001, 2006; Chalfen 1987, 1991) and, more recently, social media (van Dijck 2007). Pioneering work on the intersection between journalistic photography and social memory is done by the communications scholar Barbie Zelizer. Zelizer’s earliest work (1992) was on the role of the media in the shaping of America’s collective memory of the Kennedy assassination, but if this work concentrated on the framing and meaning-making done through narrative, her second book, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye (1998), addressed the place of photography in shaping public memory head on. In a recent volume, About to Die (2010), Zelizer examines the changing public response to news images featuring individuals right before the moment of their death, noting that the increasing sense of discomfort with these images may ref lect a changing set of expectations from news photography, and an evolving relationship between the journalists and their readers/viewers. While Zelizer construes photography as fundamentally constitutive of public memory (see also Tota 2014, Hariman and Lucaites 2007), David Bate (2010) emphasizes photography’s “negative relation to memory.” Bate speaks in particular of public or collective memories in which artificial mediated memories embodied in photo collections, archives, and monuments are often at odds with popular memories. The former, in Bate’s apt terminology, are taken to represent nothing but “a public ideology of memory,” that which ought to be remembered (but not necessarily what was).5 This possibility is f leshed out by Strassler (2010), who follows the institutional context traversed by photographs of student protests in Indonesia, in the course of which images, originally fueled by the photographers’ desire to bear witness, become incorporated into a sanitized narrative of state modernization that treats them as undifferentiated instances of student self-expression throughout Indonesian history, thus depriving them of their critical political edge. While the variety of institutional and situational contexts in which photographs are examined in this tradition is too great to describe in detail here, the common denominator that unites these studies has to be underscored. It is described by Elizabeth Edwards as the “relational approach to photographs”—an approach that stresses “spaces of relationship onto 283

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which entries are placed.” This approach is “intrinsically anti-essentialist, because those relationships are made up of multiple intersections of intention, process and action” and as such it “allows the re-viewing and re-appropriation” of the images under study in the course of their production and circulation (2006: 31). This inherent openness to the contexts in which images are consumed pre-supposes that they change their meaning as they traverse through different institutional and social domains, and thus opens the possibility that they continuously create, rather than ref lect or support existing memory discourses. In other words, in contrast to the essentialist approach, a contextualist one tends to attribute simultaneously less and more power to the photograph. Indeed, from a strictly contextualist perspective, photography as a medium has no ontological essence, and thus no independent agency in how it encapsulates or communicates the past; everything depends on its uses, and in that sense, it is determined by rather than determining its circumstances. At the same time, images appear more powerful in the sense that they are perceived not only to encapsulate, in however imperfect form, the presence of the past, but also to actively shape the notions of that past in their viewers, enabling particular interpretations while making others less likely. Still, the opposition between the two approaches should not be overdrawn. Many writers on photography discussed above balance their work attention to the spaces of relationships into which images are projected with a sensitive and subtle understanding of photography’s specificity as a medium. Zelizer’s About to Die (2010) is exemplary in this regard, in the sense that her interest in journalistic and media practices goes hand in hand with a discussion of the peculiar subjunctive mood fostered by journalistic photographs that so often pause on the threshold of a tragedy, prompting the viewer to ask, “what if ” the reported events ended safely against all odds. Similarly, Pinney’s attention to indigenous uses of photography does not negate, but rather builds on a nuanced understanding of the photographic medium and its “optical unconscious” (2013). Adding to this effort to integrate the relational context and the medium specificity of photography, Elizabeth Edwards and her colleagues (2004, see also Kuhn and McAllister 2006) look beyond the two-dimensional frame of the photograph as a visual object, noting that the images’ power and appeal also come from their materiality and their physical existence, as well as histories in specific sites. These works demonstrate that close attention to the phenomenology of the image does not detract from, but rather enhances analysis of their movements through institutional and social contexts.

Conclusion Insights obtained by the scrutiny of photography as a technology of memory have a great potential to illuminate not only the stakes in the struggles over cultural and communicative memory in particular historical cases but also the nature and logics of social memory itself. These studies tend to pay close attention to photography’s coherence as a medium, and highlight the coexistence and interdependence of narrative and affective levels through which the processes of remembering work. They undermine the simple-minded equation between memory and photography and urge us to inquire into the historical, cultural and social roots of this perception. At the same time, these studies posit that in more complex and contradictory ways, photographs do matter for memory: both are mediated, inherently unstable in their meaning, embedded in other institutions and processes, and put in service of different groups of social actors. The reverse is true as well. The processual approach currently taking hold in the study of social memory (looking at the practices of articulation, negotiation and contestation as key aspects of social remembering, and at memories themselves as inherently situational and never 284

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firmly fixed) can be fruitfully applied to photographs. This destabilizes the photographic image, whether by highlighting the instability in the interpretations it inspires or by inquiring into the afterlife of iconic images and into the professional routines and choices that produce them. Indeed, the very strands of essentialism and contextualism that characterize scholarship on photography can be traced in social memory studies as well; both are similarly preoccupied with the degree to which the meaning of the past is inherent in the event itself or is to be located in the framing and meaning-making done retrospectively. In this way, too, there are important intellectual dividends inherent in thinking about memory and photography together. In order to better understand the complexity of this synergistic and processual relationship, scholars continue to ask questions. What can image politics reveal about memory politics and vice versa? What kinds of exchanges, transactions, and/or contestations happen around the making and circulation of photographs and why? What are the historical, generational, corporeal, institutional, and professional logics behind image f lows, and how do they matter for the historical imagination these images foster? How do the images socialize their viewers into particular ways of seeing their families, communities, nations and their past? How do the properties of photographic images—their indexical relationship to the referent, their status as “certificates of presence” (Barthes 1982: 87, see also Roth 2009), as well as the photographs’ “traversal of intimate and public domains” (Strassler 2010: 4)—augment their symbolic power and efficacy as tools of memory work, and how does all of this change in the digital era? What is the impact of advancing technologies and their increasing speed on our notions of the past itself? Because photographs commonly accompany historical accounts—from History Channel documentaries to family scrapbooks—we should continue to interrogate the mechanisms and practices that lend them meaning and efficacy, as well as the collective narratives they enable. A photograph might not represent a perfectly fossilized memory in the end, but photographs continue to matter as wonderfully complex and deeply felt tools of communication, commemoration and communion.

Notes  1  On cultural memory, see Rigney in this volume.  2  The Obama administration’s decision not to release the images of the killed Osama bin Laden is significant in this regard as a manifestation of a new self-awareness about the doubts that can be cast on the truth value of images. This is a radical reversal of the prior image politics of the War on Terror, as examined by Gürsel (2014).  3  For a discussion that takes issue with the assumption of indexicality as a core property of photography, see Elkins (2006).  4  In a remarkable article, Margaret Olin makes a compelling case that many of Barthes’s identifications are in fact semi-intentional misidentifications, concluding that “the most significant indexical power of the photograph may … lie not in the relation between the photograph and its subject but in the relation between the photograph and its beholder”—power that enables the latter to build relationships and communicate, identify and feel communion with the people the images refer her to (2002: 114; see also 2012).  5  Bate cites Foucault’s critique of the media for showing people “not what they were, but what they must remember having been,” but the opposition is just as close in spirit to Pierre Nora (1989).

References Adatto, K. (2008) Picture Perfect: Life in the Age of the Photo Op, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Baer, U. (2002) Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Barthes, R. (1977) ‘Rhetoric of the image,’ in Image—Music—Text, New York: Hill and Wang. 285

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——. (1982) Camera Lucida, translated by Richard Howard, New York: Hill and Wang. Batchen, G. (2004) Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance, New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Bate, David. (2010) ‘The memory of photography,’ Photographies, 3(2): 243–57. Baudrillard, J. (1995) Simulacra and Simulations. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Benjamin, W. (1972) ‘A short history of photography,’ Screen, 13(1): 5–26. Berger, J. (2002) ‘The ambiguity of the photograph,’ in K. Askew and R. Wilk (eds.) The Anthropology of the Media, Oxford: Blackwell. Bourdieu, P. (1990) Photography: A Middle-Brow Art, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Campany, D. (2003) ‘Safety in numbness,’ in D. Green (ed.) Where Is the Photograph?, Brighton: Photoworks/Photoforum. Chalfen, R. (1987) Snapshot Versions of Life, Bowling Green, OH: Popular Press/University of Wisconsin Press. ——. (1991) Turning Leaves: The Photograph Collections of Two Japanese American Families, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Connerton, P. (1989) How Societies Remember, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Csikszentmihalyi, M. and Rochberg-Halton, E. (1981) The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Edwards, E. (ed.) (2001) Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums, Oxford: Berg. ——. (2006) ‘Photographs and the sound of history,’ Visual Anthropological Review, 21(1-2): 27–46. Edwards, E. and Hart, J. (eds.) (2004) Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images, London: Routledge. Elkins, J. (ed.) (2006) Photography Theory, London: Routledge. Freund, A. and Thomson, A. (eds.) (2011) ‘Introduction,’ Oral History and Photography, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gombrich, E. H. (1996) ‘The visual image: Its place in communication,’ in R. Woodf ield (ed.) The Essential Gombrich, London: Phaidon Press. Gürsel, Z. (2010) ‘U.S. Newsworld: The rule of text and everyday practices of editing the world,’ in E. Bird (ed.) The Anthropology of News and Journalism: Global Perspectives, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ——. (2014) ‘Framing Zarqawi: Afterimages, headshots, and body politics in a digital age,’ in O. Shevchenko (ed.) Double Exposure: Memory and Photography, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Hariman, R. and Lucaites, J. L. (2007) No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hirsch, M. (1997) Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ——. 2008. ‘The generation of postmemory,’ Poetics Today 29(1): 103–28. Hirsch, M. and Spitzer, L. (2006) ‘What’s wrong with this picture?: Archival photographs in contemporary narratives,’ Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 5(2): 229–52. Holmes, O. W. (1859) ‘The stereoscope and the stereograph,’ The Atlantic Monthly (June). Online. Available at http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1859/06/the-stereoscope-and-the-stereograph/303361/ (accessed 31 March 2014). Jameson, F. (1984) ‘Postmodernism and the cultural logic of late capitalism,’ New Left Review, 146: 53–92. Kern, S. (1986) The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1918, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kracauer, S. (2004) ‘Photography,’ in V. Schwartz and J. Przyblyski (eds.) The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader, London: Routledge. Kuhn, A. and McAllister, K. E. (eds.) (2006) Locating Memory: Photographic Acts, New York: Berghahn Books. Langford, M. (2001) Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in a Photographic Album, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. ——. (2006) ‘Speaking the album: An application of the oral-photographic framework,’ in A. Kuhn and K. E. McAllister (eds.) Locating Memory: Photographic Acts, New York: Berghahn Books. MacDougall, D. (2006) ‘Photo hierarchicus: Signs and mirrors in Indian photography,’ in The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography and the Senses, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. (1992) The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 286

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Morris, E. (2011) Believing Is Seeing: Observations of the Mysteries of Photography, New York: Penguin Press. Morris, R. (ed.) (2009) Photographies East: The Camera and Its Histories in East and Southeast Asia, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Nora, P. (1989) ‘Between memory and history: Les lieux de mémoire,’ Representations, 26: 7–24. Olick, J. (2014) ‘Willy Brandt in Warsaw: Event or image? History or memory?,’ in O. Shevchenko (ed.) Double Exposure: Memory and Photography, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Olick, J. and Robbins, J. (1998) ‘Social memory studies: From ‘collective memory’ to the historical sociology of mnemonic practices,’ Annual Review of Sociology, 24: 105–40. Olin, M. (2002) ‘Touching photographs: Roland Barthes’s ‘mistaken’ identification,’ Representations, 80: 99–118. ——. (2012) Touching Photographs, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Paschalidis, G. (2003) ‘Images of history and the optical unconscious,’ Historien, 4: 33–44. Paster, J. E. (1992) ‘Advertising immortality by Kodak,’ History of Photography, 16: 135–9. Pauwels, L. (2002) ‘Communicating desired pasts: On the digital (re)construction of desired histories,’ Journal of Visual Literacy, 22(2): 161–74. Pinney, C. (1997) Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——. (2003) ‘Notes from the surface of the image,’ in C. Pinney and N. Peterson (eds.) Photography’s Other Histories, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ——. (2013) ‘What’s photography got to do with it?,’ in A. Behdad and L. Gartlan (eds.) Photography’s Orientalism: New Essays on Colonial Representation, Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute. Pinney, C. Peterson, N. (eds.) (2003) Photography’s Other Histories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Roth, M. (2009) ‘Photographic ambivalence and historical consciousness,’ History and Theory, 48: 82– 94. Sarkisova, O. and Shevchenko, O. (2014) ‘Soviet past in domestic photography: Events, evidence, erasure,’ in O. Shevchenko (ed.) Double Exposure: Memory and Photography, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Sekula, A. (1989) ‘The body and the archive,’ in R. Bolton (ed.) The Contest of Meaning, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Sontag, S. (1977) On Photography, New York: Penguin. Strassler, K. (2010) Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tagg, J. (1993) The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Terdiman, R. (1993) Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Thomas, J. A. (1998) ‘Photography, national identity, and the ‘cataract of times’: Wartime images and the case of Japan,’ American Historical Review (December 1998): 1475–1501. Tota, A. (2014) ‘A Photo that matters: The memorial clock in Bologna and its invented tradition,’ in O. Shevchenko (ed.) Double Exposure: Memory and Photography, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. van Dijck, J. (2007) Mediated Memories in the Digital Age, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. West, N. M. (2000) Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. White, H. (1978) ‘The historical text as a literary artifact,’ in Tropics of Discourse, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Williams, L. (1993) ‘Mirrors without memories: Truth, history, and the new documentary,’ Film Quarterly, 46(3): 9–21. Zelizer, B. (1992) Covering the Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the Media, and the Shaping of Collective Memory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——. (1998). Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——. (2010). About to Die: How News Images Move the Public, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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24 Bone, steel and stone Reification and transformation in Holocaust memorials Zachary Metz

“No … I want them to see what they have done to Jack.” Jacqueline Kennedy, on refusing to remove her pink dress, spattered with the blood of John F. Kennedy1

Introduction Memorials offer a bridge between atomized, individual experiences of trauma, loss and suffering and collective shared memory, affect and meaning. They allow us to recall at once a fallen victim and our relationship to that death. This chapter explores key dynamics, dilemmas and opportunities in memorial projects, using a selection of Holocaust memorials to develop a deeper understanding of their sociological roles. The study of social or collective memory has illuminated its inherent plasticity. Pierre Nora, a foundational scholar of collective memory, asserts that it “remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectics of remembering and forgetting” (1989: 8–9). Huyssen emphasizes that memory is infused with more than the “facts” as time passes from. The anchor of “history” lifts and memory drifts to explore meaning, public culture, and even healing (1994: 9). Young underscores the wanderlust and ongoing “work” of memory, asserting that “memory never stands still” (1993: x). Memorials play a powerful role in memory work. They are cultural artifacts crafted, erected or simply named in order to “give shape to a certain past” (Tota, 2011: 947). Tragic or heroic events, victims, martyrs, movements and even ideas are the subjects of memorial projects throughout the world. Given the vitality of memory, memorials might therefore be expected to ref lect evolving narratives, such that relevant experiences and transformations are ref lected in diverse, divergent and even conf licting memorial projects. However, an appraisal of Holocaust memorials built since 1948 reveals a dilemma that challenges the dynamics of memory evolution. I term this dilemma “ortho-memorial practice,” by which I mean memorialization that privileges a limited and reified range of emotion or affect, narrative and meaning. This involves marshaling a circumscribed set of rhetorical tropes. Ortho-memorial practice is observable across a vast range of diverse aesthetics, media,

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and spatial and temporal settings. In other words, memorials that look radically different are at their affective core very much the same. My critique here is not of any specific memorial or genre. Rather, I am concerned with how the delimiting of acceptable tropes, and the affect they transmit, have become constrictive for generations of memorials. This interrupts the functioning of memorials as f lexible vessels for f luid memory. In the case of Holocaust memorials, the result is a lack of ref lection on seven decades of intergenerational memory evolution (Danieli, 1998). There is a dearth of memorials that grapple with the reconstruction of meaning and belief, which make up a fuller story of trauma and healing (Herman, 1997: 213). This contributes to a number of identity-related problems. Particularly alarming is the fusing of memorials to rhetorics of nationalism and militancy, which claim to offer the only redemption from suffering and victimhood. These memorials and the narratives of national projects assert that, as we are still victims, we still need saviors. Therefore, memorial practice devoid of pluralism needs to be interrogated, given the consequent impact on public culture and discourse. In order to problematize ortho-memorial practice, I bring several pieces into conversation with Garden of Stones, a Holocaust memorial installed in the Museum of Jewish History in New York in 2003. I show how this memorial breaks with key elements of ortho-memorial practice by marshaling new, but also ancient and Jewish, tropes. Through its gentle transgression, it offers an “archive” of transformation (Doss, 2010: 13) that opens space for new affect and meaning. At the heart of my analysis is the view that a primary (though not the only) memorial function is to activate the “transmission of affect” for viewers (Doss, 2010). Beyond codifying a version of historical events, memorials serve a powerful affective role: they endeavor to tell us how to feel and the meaning we should make about events, people and, importantly, ourselves. Through the transmission of affect, memorials have the potential to act as liberating opportunities, or reifying and retrograde monoliths.

Memorial forms Memorials are an ancient form of human expression, creatively integrating classical elements of earth, air, fire and water. For instance, Reflecting Absence, at the National September 11 Memorial, utilizes waterfalls and massive reflecting pools set within the footprints of the destroyed towers (see Delano and Nienass’s chapter, this volume). Fire is a powerful memorial material, for example candles lit at the time of death or anniversaries and “eternal flames” in military memorials. Cloth is utilized, sometimes torn, as in the Jewish keriah tradition of tearing clothing; or blood-stained, for example Jackie Kennedy’s famous pink dress; or bullet-ridden, as in the clothes displayed in a memorial to Jesuit priests murdered during El Salvador’s civil war. Sculptures, statues, plaques, gravestones (for example, shattered gravestones made into memorials in former sites of Jewish life in Poland), earth mounds, stones and collages are frequently used. Glass and paper (for instance, senbazuru, Japanese origami cranes), repurposed artifacts (teddy bears, prayer shawls, “Ghost Bikes” painted white and left at the site of a biker’s death, soldiers’ boots), and demarcated spaces (streets, parks, plazas, buildings, neighborhoods, towns, even entire states and countries) are sanctified to memory work. Some memorials incorporate artifacts of the violence itself, as in the Saharan memorial to the victims of UTA Flight 772, which uses one of the bombed plane’s wings to create a massive

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compass.2 Some incorporate living things, for instance trees and plants, or even children, named in honor of the dead. Many are intended to be permanent, while others are temporary, informal and ephemeral. Candles burn low, f lowers wilt, and paper decomposes. In an intentional mingling of permanence and impermanence in the Monument Against Facism in Harburg, Germany, the artists sank a massive pillar into the ground over six years, until it literally disappeared (Young, 1993). Impermanence can also be ref lective of the social, political or economic contexts of the moment, separate from the memorialized event. For instance, a memorial fountain in the Journal Square neighborhood of Jersey City, New Jersey, honoring residents killed on September 11 has been left dry and weed-choked for years, as the city has failed to fix it (Torres, 2010). Degraded as a memorial to the dead, it now “memorializes” the lack of official attention paid to this working class African American, Latino, and Arab area of the city.

Figure 24.1  Temporary memorial Source: © Erika Doss.

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Memorials are often destroyed or appropriated at moments of political upheaval. For instance, in December of 2013 a statue of Lenin in Kiev, Ukraine, was toppled and attacked with hammers during protests against then-President Viktor Yanukovich. As art forms, memorials range from highly figurative and literal to impressionistic, abstract and avant-garde. Some are deliberately and intensely crafted. Others are created by minimal manipulation, for instance crosses, pebbles, f lowers, pictures, notes, artifacts and f lags placed at memory sites. Some are “created” through non-action or even accident, for example bullet holes in some buildings in Beirut have been left unrepaired, implicitly reminding passers-by of the bloody civil war. An expansive definition of “sites of memory” includes museums, parades, gardens, commemorative fast days and moments of silence (Young, 1993). We might even view the one beautifully broken note sounded during the playing of “Taps” at John F. Kennedy’s funeral by bugler Sgt. Keith Clark as an accidental memorial in sound (Goldstein, 2002).

Memorial work What do memorials set out to do? The past is popularly viewed as a chronology of fixed and empirically “real” events that can be recalled with objective clarity. Therefore, memorials may be seen as artistic chronicles of “what happened.” However, the study of memory has problematized this view, and thus our understanding of the work of memorials. Memory is understood as constructed, contingent and plastic. Memorials must grapple with (or reject) the dynamism of their subject. Young (1993) shows that memorials serve as a repository of socially constructed and “collected” memory. They are attempts to collect, assign meaning to, and create coherence from plural, contested and chaotic memories of past events. In order to do this, memorials objectify and concretize a certain version of the past, acting as a memory filter. In the process, some events and narratives are privileged and included while others are excluded or silenced. In this vein, Tota (2011: 947) writes: “The memorial … represents the act of fixing the past in a specific cultural shape and is therefore a sort of ‘frozen’ representation of the past.” Memorials are attempts to try to solve a problem: How do we “never forget” as we live further and further away from the locus of memory? However, as they work to solve this problem, the “frozenness” of memorials creates a new sociological dilemma. As memorials hew to established and accepted memorial tropes, they resist the natural evolution of the phenomena they are typically attempting to concretize, namely suffering, trauma, identity and nascent nationalism (Nora, 1989; Young, 1993; Anderson, 2006; Dickinson, Blair, and Ott, 2010; Doss, 2010). These are inherently dynamic phenomena, defined more by change than frozenness. For instance, Doss (2010: 54) explains that: “Because it is a historical, political, social, cultural, religious and psychological construction, nationalism is also a highly unstable identity myth.” How do memorials grapple with instability? Typically by attempting to manage and circumscribe the narrative. I maintain that this ironically nurtures identities increasingly and singularly defined by mourning, victimhood and simplified nationalist solutions, rejecting transformation.

A cartography of memorial studies Memorials have been a central concern of memory scholarship. The field has been shaped by Halbwachs’s analyses, particularly his view of memory as primarily a social phenomenon (Doss, 2010: 46). Nora’s Les Lieux de mémoire (1984) set out many of the field’s foundational 291

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themes, including a tension between “history” and memory, the centrality of site and place to memory work and dynamics of metamorphosis in collective memory. The field now involves sociology, anthropology, art, cultural studies, political science (particularly analysis of public spheres and civil society), trauma studies, Holocaust studies, architecture and literary criticism (Doss, 2010). Memory is a focus in the subfields of international affairs termed “peace building” and “transitional justice” (Schirch, 2005; Smithey, 2011; Barsalou and Baxter, 2007; Ross, 2007). Young has developed a robust “archeology” of memorials, analyzing what he calls “the texture of memory” (1993). He illuminates the ways in which memorials are ref lective of their time, and how they are used as a stage for politics, separately from the memorialized events. Dekel’s Mediation at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin analyzes how memorials develop “an arena for individual and social transformation at the site” (2013: 18). She views the memorial through a primarily performative and theatrical lens, ethnographically analyzing what people do on the memorial “stage” and how such sites can open opportunities for ref lexivity and change. In Places of Public Memory, Dickinson, Blair and Ott analyze how rhetorics of memorials, which they define as “discourses, events, objects and practices” (2010: 2) can be analyzed to illuminate public culture and the dynamics of representation, power and privilege. In their examination of the national Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz (1991) investigate how memorials address intensely contested and fraught history and memory. The Vietnam War is laden with nationalist pride, but also shame, trauma and a lack of national closure. They look at “the negotiability of genre,” ways through which memorials grapple with a range of opposing social dynamics, which help to “render more explicit, and more comprehensible, a nation’s conf licting conceptions of itself and its past” (1991: 376). For instance, the memorial is crafted of a highly ref lective surface, so that we see our own image when we gaze at the etched names of fallen soldiers. Memorialization is utilized by victims’ groups, civil society, peace building and transitional justice practitioners, and states in efforts to build peace in the aftermath (or even during) long-term violent conf lict (Barsalou and Baxter, 2007; Brett et al., 2007). Barsalou and Baxter note that, as memorialization is a political and normative process, memorials “can either promote social recovery after violent conf lict ends or crystallize a sense of victimization, injustice, discrimination, and the desire for revenge” (2007: 1). As discussed, memorials have a close link to identity formation, which is particularly important in “identity-based” conf licts. In his analysis of Loyalist parades in Northern Ireland, archeological digs in Jerusalem, memorials in South Africa, and f lags and statues in the American South, Ross shows that identities are ritually reaffirmed through “mundane, everyday cultural practices such as parades, f lag display, language, clothing, religious practices, and public monuments that symbolically connect the past and present and are visible in a region’s symbolic landscape” (2007: 2). Smithey explores how some notorious memorials in Northern Ireland have been explicitly re-crafted to “soften” the intractable social and political symbolic landscape, allowing groups to “reconsider polarized ethno political identities” (2011: 6). For instance, a mural memorializing a Loyalist paramilitary figure was repainted to honor a beloved football player, and a stone was placed inscribed with the strikingly non-sectarian message, “In Memory of All Victims of Conf lict.” Smithey suggests that these changes in the symbolic landscape are ref lective of and also supportive to transformations of this historically intractable conf lict (2011: 3–6). Erika Doss’s Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (2010) explores the massive scale and accelerating pace of the American memorial enterprise. She argues that the country is 292

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Figure 24.2  Vietnam Veterans Memorial Source: © Erika Doss.

in the grip of “memorial mania,” meaning “an obsession with issues of memory and history and an urgent desire to express and claim these issues in visibly public contexts” (2010: 2). Doss argues that “mania” is the proper term for the phenomenon given the anxieties and passions infusing memorial projects. Debates about who, what and how to memorialize are so passionately engaged that the interactions take on an emotional, existential valence of the memorialized events. Indeed, Doss refers to memorials as “archives of public affect” (2010: 13), meaning that memorials curate, rank and illuminate some of the feelings associated with events. Here her analysis emphasizes an element I find partially lacking in many scholarly investigations, namely feelings. Doss’s focus on emotion reveals a dynamic which is at the core of all memorial projects. The “transmission of affect” is a bilateral relationship: feelings about the past, present and future shape the contestations about the memorial project, while the memorial is also a catalyst or transmitter of emotion for viewers. When we stand at a memorial we are supposed to feel something.3 Doss identifies the bilateral affective dynamic when she explains that: “Memorials are bodies of feeling, cultural entities whose social, cultural and political meanings are determined by the emotional states and needs of their audiences. Memorials also determine those felt states” (2010: 46). Memorial artists are uniquely positioned to participate in the transmission of intense public feelings. Goldsworthy speaks to this, maintaining that such work “releases unpredictable energy that is a shock to both artist 293

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and viewer—I do not mean shock in the conventional sense but an emotional tremor that articulates a feeling which has been in search of form” (Goldsworthy, 2004: 63). This recalls Durkheim’s concept of collective effervescence, in which “human beings feel themselves transformed, and are in fact transformed, through ritual doing” (Durkheim, 1995: xli). It is precisely the power to transmit affect, to “shock,” to generate collective effervescence that enables memorials to inform narratives, shape identity and create publics (Durkheim, 1995; Anderson, 2006; Doss, 2010).

Holocaust memorial language In her analysis of Polish feminist artists Matynia notes that the specific “language” that artists’ use of public art “facilitates their entry into a direct debate with the public, the media, political and cultural organizations and finally with the past” (2009: 142). In the context of memorialization, Doss calls this language “mourning codes” (2010: 98). In this section, I outline the mourning codes of some illustrative Holocaust memorials, starting with a description of Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, created by Nathan Rapoport in Warsaw, Poland, in 1948. This was the first formal memorial to both Jewish resistance to the Nazis and the liquidation of the entire Jewish population of Warsaw. It sits in a plaza on the site of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and is made up of two distinct faces of a massive freestanding stone wall. On the eastern side is a highly figurative and literal tableau of twelve archetypical Jewish figures (referencing the twelve Tribes of Israel) in various poses showing displacement and suffering, as they embark on The Last March. The bas-relief is a multi-layered reference to the many forced death marches of the Holocaust, the expulsion of the Jews from Jerusalem

Figure 24.3  Warsaw Ghetto Monument, The Last March, Nathan Rapoport, Warsaw Source: © James Young. Reprinted with permission from James E. Young.

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in 70 CE by the Romans and the broader golus or diasporic scattering suffered by the Jews of Europe for millennia. Rapoport includes three Nazi helmets and two bayonets looming behind the victims to clarify that this “last march” is also meant to be quite specific. On the western side of the monument, seven human images represent the armed resistance of the Ghetto uprising. The fighters are heroic, with bravery and resolve in their eyes and taut muscles. But they are also tragic, with signs of emaciation, perhaps referencing the starvation decree laid on the Ghetto in 1942 by the Nazis. The tattered clothes, feeble weapons, fallen fighter and the bare breasted woman and her baby framed by f lames show the martyrdom of the Ghetto fighters, and those they bravely rose up to protect (Young, 1993: 155–174). The literalism of the piece was embraced by commentators at the time of its unveiling as necessary to memorializing the real horror and abject suffering. There was a clear sense that this first memorial needed unmistakable tropes and codes in order to transmit the proper affect and trigger the appropriate public meaning-making. Rapoport’s conviction was that: I needed to show the heroism, to illustrate it literally in figures everyone, not just artists, would respond to. This was to be a public monument, after all. And what do human beings respond to? Faces, figures, the human form. I did not want to represent resistance in the abstract: it was not an abstract uprising. It was real (Young, 1993: 168).

Figure 24.4  Warsaw Ghetto Monument, resistance fighters, Nathan Rapoport, Warsaw Source: © James Young. Reprinted with permission from James E. Young.

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The tropes and rhetoric that served the first memorial so well have been repeated faithfully in thousands of memorials that followed. This became the mourning code and requisite affective transmission. It heavily shaped ortho-memorial practice. For instance, in George Segal’s The Holocaust (1984), all-white corpses are strewn on the ground as a lone survivor peers out at the memorial viewer from behind real barbed wire. In Rapoport’s later Liberation monument (1985) in Liberty State Park, New Jersey, we see even more graphic detail of one single emaciated and half-dead concentration camp survivor being carried by an enormous, heroic American soldier-liberator. Other constantly repeated tropes include broken stones, haunting stares, gaunt features and lists of names and numbers of victims and communities or sites of violence. In addition to fear, anger, sorrow, helplessness and victimhood, some contemporary memorials, particularly in Germany, strive to transmit absence or even nihilism. An illustrative example of this trend is the unambiguously titled Slide Projection of Former Hebrew Bookstore (Young, 1993: 46). The Monument Against Fascism, in Harburg, Germany, was methodically lowered into the ground over several years until it too was absent from view. The artist ref lects that the piece “no longer offers … consolation. It seems that the emptiness of the column is unbearable because, in fact, there is nothing else there” (Young, 1993: 75). While many of the same tropes and codes are used in Israeli efforts, memorials in Israel also make use of rhetorics of redemption through Zionism, the creation of the State, armed nationalism and the safe embrace of survivors by the new society and its institutions (Young, 1993).

Figure 24.5 The Holocaust, George Segal, San Francisco Source: © James Young. Reprinted with permission from James E. Young.

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Figure 24.6  S ilent Cry, Leah Michaelson, Yad Vashem, Israel Source: © James Young. Reprinted with permission from James E. Young.

The memorial dilemma Having sketched the basic elements of memorial practice and the standard rhetorics of Holocaust memorials, I turn to examine a particular dilemma in memorial work: certain memorials built to honor and mourn unspeakable horrors and trauma may also have the (likely unintended) impact of creating barriers to healing. Decades of change, growth, and transformation are unrepresented and, therefore, undermined. Sibylle Quack, former managing director of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe underscores the importance of ongoing contestation in service of memory: “Debates on the Holocaust and on Holocaust memorials are full of ambivalences, embarrassments, and often dissent. At the same time, these struggles keep memory alive and are part of the democratic decision-making process” (Brett et al., 2007:19). While certain debates are indeed vociferously negotiated (e.g., artists, aesthetics, sites, inclusion of certain victim classes), ortho-memorial practice tends to interrupt dialogue regarding emerging realms of affect and how to memorialize change. The result is a lack of dynamism of public culture linked to such projects. The need for saviors and consequent fealty to nationalist projects and regimes are reified and reinforced. Deviation is viewed as denial or self-hatred. To explore this dilemma and its alternatives, I use the Garden of Stones to show how that particular memorial has successfully transgressed to transmit a radically different affect and provide a “repository” for new meaning (Doss, 2010: 13). 297

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Figure 24.7  Statue of Mordechai Anielewicz, fallen leader of Warsaw Ghetto uprising, by Nathan Rapoport, at Kibbutz Yad Mordechai, Israel Source: © James Young. Reprinted with permission from James E. Young.

Rapoport once retorted to critiques of the highly figurative and anachronistically proletarian aesthetics of the Warsaw memorial: “Could I have made a rock with a hole in it and said ‘Voila! The Heroism of the Jews’?” (Young, 1993: 168). In 2003, Goldsworthy’s Garden of Stones Holocaust memorial embraced precisely the form and genre that Rapoport rejected in 1948, using boulders drilled out and planted with trees to memorialize ostensibly the same events as the first Holocaust memorial. Certainly the temporal shift (2003, not 1948), spatial shift (New York City, not Warsaw) and context (after the founding of Israel, European rebuilding and integration, the Cold War, and German reunification) distinguish contemporary memorials from those built in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. It is therefore not at all surprising that the two artists use divergent aesthetics, genres and tropes. What is striking (and revealing), however, is just how rarely a contemporary memorial has strayed from the ortho-memorial practice first set out in the seminal Monument to the Ghetto Heroes. As I discuss below, there is an overwhelming sameness observable in the thousands of Holocaust memorials built since 1948. As someone with Holocaust loss in my family history, I feel that memorials play a critical role in helping viewers to mourn, honor and respect that history and to “never forget.” However, in their use of a limited set of codes and tropes, I see them functioning as sites of replication and reification of the trauma narrative. This threatens to disallow healing and a dynamic, well-contested public culture. As Nadia Baesi, Director of the Monte Sole Peace School in Italy argues, memory 298

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work is most enriching for creating engaged publics when it grapples with dilemmas, opens dialogue and transforms towards action (echoing Dekel, 2013, and Freire, 2000): Memory poses questions to history … there is no answer to the question: how could all that cruelty be possible? This fact opens the discussion, the dialogue and the confrontation. It breaks that question into a thousand other questions, training our minds to doubt, which is the essential premise for accepting our own responsibility toward the past and learning to responsibly look at the present and the future (Brett et al., 2007: 7). This is the memory work of Garden of Stones. This memorial, and perhaps a small handful of others, is an archive of change, transformation and life. This is by no means to suggest that Garden of Stones is in any sense “better” as a memorial effort than any other, artistically or normatively. It is to assert, however, that, in its transgression, it offers something sorely lacking in the symbolic and memorial landscape, namely difference.

Experiencing Garden of Stones I turn now to a subjective reflection on a visit to the memorial. I include here some striking contrasts between this memorial and several other important sites of memory work.

Figure 24.8  T  he Garden of Stones memorial in springtime Source: Andy Goldsworthy Garden of Stones, 2003 Permanent, site-specific installation of boulders and dwarf oak saplings at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, Battery Park City, New York A project of the Public Art Fund and the Museum of Jewish Heritage Photo: Melanie Einzig © Andy Goldsworthy Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York

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Garden of Stones is installed on a mezzanine roof of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in lower Manhattan. We step through a glass door, through which we can already see the massive granite boulders. There are few visitors. The space is quiet but not silent, as city sounds drift up from the street. We walk into the sunshine, and view the wide space strewn with brown pebbles on which grey boulders have been placed. The site follows the rounded curve of the museum. It is shaped like a wide ramp, bordered by a walkway with benches on one side and planters on the other. Our eyes are drawn down the length of the space and out to the green waters of New York Harbor, where the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island are framed by the stones and trees of the memorial. Rather than a stone or steel wall at the end of the piece, which would create a sense of enclosure, Goldsworthy has erected clear glass, so we can see the iconic landmarks unobstructed. The site of memory work is itself a part of the memorial code. Garden of Stones uses the site as a rhetorical device to conjure freedom and welcome (Dickinson, Blair and Ott, 2010). The eighteen boulders are between four and six feet high and weigh several tons each. The mica and quartz imbedded in the rocks glint, contrasting with the rough, grey surfaces.

Figure 24.9  The Garden of Stones memorial covered in snow Source: Andy Goldsworthy Garden of Stones, 2003 Permanent, site-specific installation of boulders and dwarf oak saplings at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, Battery Park City, New York A project of the Public Art Fund and the Museum of Jewish Heritage Photo: Abby Spilka © Andy Goldsworthy Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York

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As we get closer variations in color, texture and size appear. The stones look organic but also crafted and manipulated, hollowed out at the core and placed with purpose by the artist. The boulders have not been polished, but many show signs of significant human intervention. While there is variation in the spaces between the boulders, they have been placed with great care. Even in the choices about stone placement, Goldsworthy breaks with ortho-memorial practice. For instance, these stones are not huddled together in a tight protective circle, as we see in the tragic Treblinka Memorial at that extermination camp in Poland. They also do not confine the viewer or recall mass graves, as in Yad Vashem’s Valley of the Communities in Israel, for instance. In that powerful memorial, stones are placed in a manner that generates a strong affect of isolation and imprisonment. Experiencing the Valley of the Communities memorial, visitors feel: Dwarfed by the … size of the monument, humbled by … insignificance and awed by the enormity of what was lost. The Valley … is a labyrinth … visitors will sense … insecurity, of being trapped in a frustrating maze which threatens to collapse upon them, of being caught in a place from which escape is difficult (Yad Vashem website). Likewise, in Berlin’s Holocaust memorial, the stones placed on uneven, sloping ground create an “unsettling” feeling. The creator of the memorial, Peter Eisenman, noted with satisfaction that “the ground is very uneven and difficult. My wife … got dizzy walking in the memorial because it slopes in several directions. It was really extraordinary” (Hawley and Tenberg, 2005). In contrast, Goldsworthy’s boulders interact with each other as a gathering or family, similar enough to suggest connection and intimacy yet distinct enough to evoke a sense of uniqueness and agency.

Figure 24.10  S  ymbolic cemetery and obelisk, by Haupt and Duszenko, Treblinka Source: Reprinted with permission from James E. Young.

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There are no other plantings, f lowers or decorative elements in the space. There are no plaques, lists of names, acknowledgments of donors or other markers, which is unusual for a memorial.4 Low granite benches jut from the wall along the length of the memorial, recalling the low benches people sit on during traditional shiva mourning in the home. The core of each boulder has been bored and filled with soil, in which grows a dwarf chestnut oak. The trees are reminiscent of the saplings planted to reforest land decimated by logging and forest fires, and of the tree plantings of the Jewish National Fund in Israel, which is itself a form of memorial practice. Trees growing from stones function as the central image of the entire piece. The Museum’s statement asserts, “Garden of Stones ref lects the inherent tension between the ephemeral and the timeless, between young and old, and between the unyielding and the pliable.”5 I disagree with this analysis, in that I see the piece working to resolve (rather than “ref lect”) these tensions, through references to symbiosis and evolution. In the memorial, trees grow from stone; they are not in tension with one another. The piece effectively resolves the memorial tension: How do we remember the dead while authentically affirming life? As we explore further, we see that Garden of Stones is built around many mourning codes of healing, affirmation and transformation, rejecting ortho-memorial practice in critical ways. For instance, the installation space has a ramp-like appearance. Might this be a reference to the infamous role of trains as tools of the Nazi génocidaires? We can see the use of train track images in several important memorials, including Denk-Stein-Sammlung (1989) in Kassel, Germany, which was the boarding area for deportation trains. (Young, 1993: 36) Likewise, the memorial at Treblinka is approached via sculpted concrete railroad ties which recall the transit of victims (Young, 1993: 26). Most literally, the actual Judenrampe, the railroad

Figure 24.11  Garden of Stones clustered trees Source: © Andy Goldsworthy

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Figure 24.12  One of the eighteen boulder/tree images from Garden of Stones Source: Andy Goldsworthy Garden of Stones, 2003 Permanent, site-specific installation of boulders and dwarf oak saplings at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, Battery Park City, New York A project of the Public Art Fund and the Museum of Jewish Heritage Photo: Melanie Einzig © Andy Goldsworthy Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York

tracks between the Auschwitz and Birkenau camps, is itself a dedicated memorial site. Perhaps Goldsworthy’s piece is intended to echo these memorials and their messages. However, there are significant elements in Garden of Stones that disrupt this reading. First, the space is curved, not straight, giving the viewer a sense of an organic pathway, rather than a straight line leading to a pre-destined and horrific end. Second, the path provides a visual link between the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, potent symbols of openness, renewal, and freedom, to Manhattan Island, the first stop for millions of immigrants to America. Again, the memorial’s rhetoric engages hope and life, while mourning death. Stones have a particularly powerful resonance in Jewish memorialization practice. For instance, visitors to a Jewish gravesite place small stones, rather than f lowers. The origins of this practice may be the Biblical story of Rachel, the wife of Jacob, and the “spiritual mother” of the Jewish people. In Genesis 35:19, Rachel dies in childbirth. The text says that “Jacob set up a pillar upon her grave.” Jewish tradition holds that each of Rachel’s eleven sons placed stones on her tomb. In addition, the Hebrew word for stone, tzur, is also one of the names for 303

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God in Jewish tradition, and the Hebrew hymn Ma’oz Tzur (“Stronghold of Rock”), sung at Hanukkah, is a song-form memorial to the history of the Jews. Cemeteries that were destroyed by the Nazis were transformed into memorial sites, in which broken stone matevoth (gravestones) were arranged to create memory markers both for murder and the desecration of graves by the Nazis. The use of gravestone and cemetery images is seen in many Holocaust memorials. The title Garden of Stones is itself a reference to the centrality of stones and cemeteries as totems for mourning and memory. However, even as it utilizes traditional mourning codes, the piece deviates in the message transmitted through those codes. For instance, consider the use of trees and stones as described in this narrative about the Israeli Valley of the Communities piece. In that memorial, visitors glimpse: The “surface” up above our heads, a f leeting look at a plant or a tree.… The impression transmitted is that life “up there” goes on—not for the victims who are forever trapped below in the mass graves … but for those who … lived in Jewish communities … beyond the reach of the killers (Yad Vashem website). The Valley of the Communities memorial transmits an affect of permanent victimhood. We are “forever trapped.” Using the same materials and motifs, Garden of Stones offers an entirely

Figure 24.13  B  roken tombstone memorial, Tadeusz Augustynek, Kazimierz, Poland Source: © James Young. Reprinted with permission from James E. Young.

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Figure 24.14  Valley of the Communities, Yahalom and Zur, Yad Vashem, Israel Source: © James Young. Reprinted with permission from James E. Young.

different narrative. I assert that, as both memorials capture variations in collective memory, the divergences between the two are signs of healthy (if sorely underrepresented) contestation in memory work. Why does this memorial use eighteen stones? Why not six (representing the 6 million victims),6 or fifteen (representing the estimated 15,000 camps created by the Nazis) or some other number that evokes the unspeakable violations of the Holocaust? In fact, Goldsworthy chose to install eighteen stones precisely because of the power of the number eighteen to powerfully and “Jewishly” reference life. In gematria, the Jewish mystical numeric system, each Hebrew letter corresponds to a numerical equivalent. Eighteen is equivalent to ‫ ַחי‬chai, the Hebrew word for “life.” The significance of this number would be instantly recognized by most Jews and others. For instance, Jews often give cash gifts and make donations in multiples of eighteen, so that the gift also implies a message for multiplying life and hope (Dossick, 1995: 278). In its use of the mystical and meaningful eighteen/chai, Garden of Stones “negotiates the genre” of memorial, working as a space for both mourning and a reaffirmation of life. What is the impact of all of this on affect? In my own experience, when I first counted the boulders, noted the ironic synergy of tree and stone, gazed at the pathway to other monuments to freedom and renewal, I experienced waves of sadness, curiosity and also optimism, prayerful hope and pride. The feeling was electric, what Goldsworthy refers to as “shock” and Durkheim termed “effervescent.” This memorial is one of sadly few that use memorial practice to allow for ref lection, evolution and transformation. 305

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Contrasts: Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe Built in 2005, Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin is far more widely known and studied. While the Berlin piece uses a unique site, and new forms and media, it still hews very closely to the mourning codes of ortho-memorial practice. The Berlin memorial is built over part of the former bunker of Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. It is made up of 2,700 concrete slabs, or stelae, which are traditional markers, erected for funerals or commemorations. They are normally inscribed with the names of dead or commemorated individuals or communities, as in Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall. Why are the stelae left blank in the Berlin memorial? The New Yorker’s Richard Brody called the omission of names on the stelae “astonishing” (he was also appalled that the title of the memorial names only victims, avoiding naming the murders) (Brody, 2012). That said, there appears to be a clear rhetorical and affective intention at work. The blank surfaces of the stelae transmit stark alienation and the erasure of identity. In addition to deprivation, violence and death, victims were stripped of even their names. In using blank stelae, Eisenman has created a post-modern, metaphorical mass grave for memory. As we walk through and even on top of the blank stelae, we feel and make meaning of existential alienation and namelessness. There are other illuminating contrasts with Garden of Stones. Whereas Goldsworthy chose a powerfully symbolic and life-affirming number for his piece as discussed above, the materials describing the Berlin memorial note that, “The number of 2,711 stelae is the result of the

Figure 24.15  M  emorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, aerial view, by Peter Eisenman, Berlin Source: © James Young. Reprinted with permission from James E. Young.

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Figure 24.16  Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (ground view) Source: © Beth Wilcox.

dimensions chosen by the architect for the site and has no symbolic meaning or relation to the number of victims” (The Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe website). Finally, in contrast to the contemplative setting of Garden of Stones, the memorial is installed on a sloping hillside in which the stones intentionally create a visceral feeling of dissonance and disorientation. Throughout the piece, the mourning codes of dislocation, alienation and suffering first seen in the Warsaw memorial of 1948 continue to be recapitulated in this contemporary memory site. Other than aesthetics and location, nothing has changed. Eisenman articulates his vision for the piece as affectively returning visitors directly to the hell of the Holocaust: It is amazing how these heads disappear—like going under water. Primo Levi talks about a similar idea … that the prisoners were no longer alive but they weren’t dead … they seemed to descend into a personal hell. I was … reminded of that passage while watching these heads disappear into the monument (Hawley and Tenberg, 2005). When we compare this with Goldsworthy’s vision for Garden of Stones, we see how divergent the two memorials are as memory paradigms: Amongst the mass of stone, the tiny trees will appear as fragile, vulnerable f lickers of life- an expression of hope for the future. The stones are not mere containers. 307

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The partnership between tree and stone will be stronger for the tree having grown from the stone, rather than being stuck into it. Trees draw and articulate the space in which they grow and the union between tree and stone has to develop over time. (Museum of Jewish Heritage website) The Berlin memorial is certainly a provocative and powerful piece that tackles memorializing at a site of profound evil. I am not questioning its success as a memorial effort. However, I assert that it is problematic (Brody, 2012, called it “inadequate”) when placed alongside the thousands of other memorials built since 1948, in as much as it fails to confront its own role in the reification of memory and identity.

Conclusions “You are not a hero. The only way for you to become a Hero is if your death does not go in vain; the only way for you to be a martyr for a cause is if your death causes a change.” Lebanese blogger Tarek Wheibi on the death of 16-year-old Mohammad Chaar in the bombing that killed former Minister Mohamad Chatah, December 28, 2013

As discussed in the introduction to this chapter, memorials guide us to make certain meaning of the past, inform identities in the present and “nurture a vision of the future” (Huyssen 1994: 9). In this way, memorials are a “time-weaving” practice:7 we are viewers situated in the present and through interaction with the memorial, we become victims, mourners, and future survivors and victors. It is the power to weave time that makes memorials important tools for political and cultural projects, generating powerful affect in highly charged, violent and traumatized contexts. However, I have shown how ortho-memorial practice tends to interrupt the “permanent evolution” of memory, recapitulating and reifying identity as suffering. What is lost is the incredible vibrancies, transformations and diversities of what Young calls “collected memory” (1993: xi). From Auschwitz to Oklahoma City, from Aleppo to Darfur, allowing for contestation and dialogue opens the way for memorials to realize their potential as places of healing. As Brett et al. argue: “Memorials must be understood not as art objects but as democratic spaces, analogous to other kinds of institutions that would be considered foundational to a healthy democracy” (2007: 22). Peace-building practitioners in conf lict-ridden societies have found that “Memorial projects that encourage survivors to explore contested memories of the past, promote learning and critical thinking, and facilitate ongoing cultural exchange are more likely to advance social reconstruction” (Barsalou and Baxter, 2007). Such memorials increase their impact toward a culture of peace and justice, in contrast to those that present triumphalist or reified victim narratives. This is a tall order for a lump of clay, a pile of stones, or a marker over bones. However, it is a task I believe memorials accomplish when public culture, art and memory work are allowed space for contestation. Writing about how a visit to the National September 11 Memorial in New York City changed her own pessimism about the spirit and energy of such sites, Tota (2012) summarizes the transformative power imbued in successful memorials: “Those big pools can collect all our pain, and those waterfalls that seem to last forever have the power to cleanse all the violence and all the blood shed.” In the traditional Jewish mourning ritual of shiva, mourners sit quietly for seven days. On the last day, visitors console mourners with the blessing: “May the Almighty comfort you 308

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among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem. May the Almighty heal the breaches of His people Israel.” Then the visitors encourage the mourners to literally “stand up from mourning.” As the mourners “get up” from their shiva and walk outside, the visitors often offer a final blessing: “No more will your sun set, nor your moon be darkened, for God will be an eternal light for you, and your days of mourning shall end” (Isaiah 60:20). Memorial work that gives shape to the evolution of memory and allows for transformation and action helps us “get up,” offering some light and a form of healing.

Notes  1  Lady Bird Johnson recalled her conversation with Jaqueline Kennedy in Air Force One, hours after the assassination of JFK. In Johnson, C., (2007). A White House Diary—Lady Bird Johnson, Austin: University of Texas Press.  2  This memorial also exists in the virtual world, as one can type the coordinates of the crash (16°51’53”N, 11°57’13”E) into Google Maps and see a stunning aerial view of the memorial.  3  Discussing “transmission” raises issues of “reception,” or what viewers take from memorial experiences, separate from the intended emotion or meaning. Analysis of reception is beyond the scope of this chapter; however Irit Dekel’s Mediation at the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, addresses this side of the dynamic.  4  There is a small plaque inside the museum at the entrance to the piece with a brief artist’s statement.  5  “Garden of Stones,” Museum of Jewish Heritage website, http://www.mjhnyc.org/GosBackground.pdf.  6  In fact, the architecture of the museum itself uses the traditional number associated with the Holocaust in its design. It “occupies a spare six-sided building … with a six-tier roof alluding to the Star of David and the 6 million murdered in the Holocaust,” Brian Silverman, Frommer’s Portable New York City 2005, Frommer’s, 2004, p. 142.  7  Thanks to Osvaldo Oyola for suggesting the frame of “time-weaving practice.”

Bibliography Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined Communities, London: Verso Barsalou, J. and Baxter, V. (2007). “The Urge to Remember: The Role of Memorials in Social Reconstruction and Transitional Justice,” United States Institute of Peace, January Brett, S., Bickford, L., Ševenko, L. and Rios, M. (2007). “Memorialization and Democracy: State Policy and Civic Action,” FLASCO, International Center for Transitional Justice Brody, R. (2012). “The Inadequacy of Berlin’s ‘Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe,’” The New Yorker, July 12. Available HTTP: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2012/07/theinadequacy-of-berlins-memorial-to-the-murdered-jews-of-europe.html (accessed December 30, 2013) Danieli, Y. (1998). International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma, New York: Plenum Press Dekel, I. (2013). Mediation at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, London: Palgrave Macmillan Dickinson, G., Blair, C. and Ott, B. (2010). Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press Doss, E. (2010). Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press Dossick, W. (1995). Living Judaism, New York: Harper Collins Durkheim, E. (1995). The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, New York: The Free Press Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York: Continuum International Publishing Group Goldstein, R. (2002). “Keith Clark, Bugler for Kennedy, Dies at 74,” January 17. Available HTTP: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/17/us/keith-clark-bugler-for-kennedy-dies-at-74.html (accessed on December 30, 2013) Goldsworthy, A. (2004). Passage, New York: Harry N. Abrams Halbwachs, M. (1992). On Collective Memory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press Hawley, C. and Tenberg, N. (2005). “Spiegel Interview with Holocaust Monument Architect Peter Eisenman: ‘How Long Does One Feel Guilty?’,” Der Spiegel, May 9. Available HTTP: http://www.spiegel.de/ international/spiegel-interview-with-holocaust-monument-architect-peter-eisenman-how-long-doesone-feel-guilty-a-355252.html (accessed December 30, 2013) 309

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Herman, J. (1997). Trauma and Recovery, New York: Harper Collins Huyssen, A. (1994). “Monument and Memory in a Postmodern Age,” in Young, J. E. (ed.), The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History, Munich/New York: Prestel-Verlag, and New York: The Jewish Museum Johnson, C., (2007). A White House Diary–Lady Bird Johnson, Austin: University of Texas Press Matynia, E. (2009). Performative Democracy, Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers Nora, P. (1989). “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire,” Representation 26 (Spring), 8–9, University of California Press Ross, M. (2007). Cultural Contestation in Ethnic Conflict. New York: Cambridge University Press Schirch, L. (2005). Ritual and Symbol in Peacebuilding. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press Silverman, B. (2004). Frommer’s Portable New York City 2005, Hoboken, NJ: Frommer’s Smithey, L. (2011). Unionists, Loyalists, and Conflict Transformation in Northern Ireland, New York: Oxford University Press Torres, B. (2010). “9/11 Memorial Fountain in Journal Square Will Be Staying Dry Due to Cost of Replacing Broken Water Pump and Future Development Plans,” Jersey Journal, August 4. Avai­ lable HTTP: www.nj.com/news/jjournal/jerseycity/index.ssf ?/base/news-10/1280904008220630. xml&coll=3 (accessed December 30, 2013) Tota, A. (2011). “Memorials,” in Southerton, D. (ed.), Encyclopedia of Consumer Culture, pp. 947–50, Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Tota, A. (2012). “On the National 9/11 Memorial: An Italian Perspective,” Deliberately Considered, May 21. Available HTTP: http://www.deliberatelyconsidered.com/2012/05/on-the-national911-memorial-an-italian-perspective/ (Accessed December 30, 2013) Wagner-Pacifici, R. and Schwartz, B. (1991). “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial: Commemorating a Difficult Past,” American Journal of Sociology, 97(2) (September) Wheibi, T. (2013). “16 Year Old Mohammad Chaar Is Not a Martyr Nor a Hero,” dreamofchange. wordpress.com, December 28. Available HTTP: http://dreamofchange.wordpress.com/2013/12/29/16year-old-mohammad-chaar-is-not-a-martyr-nor-a-hero/ (accessed December 30, 2013) Young, J. (1993). The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press

Websites “Information on the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe,” July 2013, Available HTTP: http://www.stiftung-denkmal.de/fileadmin/user_upload/projekte/oeffentlichkeitsarbeit/pdf/ Presse/20130731_Pressemappe_2013_en_01.pdf (accessed December 30, 2013). Museum of Jewish Heritage, “Garden of Stones Background,” Available HTTP: http://www.mjhnyc.org/ GosBackground.pdf (accessed December 30, 2013) Yad Vashem, Originally available HTTP: http://www1.yadvashem.org/exhibitions/valley/valley_walls. html, and http://www1.yadvashem.org/visiting/temp_visiting/temp_index_valley.html (accessed 7/19/2008, no longer posted).

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25 Walking the autobiographical path The spatial dimension of remembering in a memoir by Italo Calvino Alessandra Fasulo

This chapter examines the relation between place and autobiography, with a particular focus on childhood memories. It introduces notions of emplacement and sensory apprehension of the environment and analyses them in a text by Italo Calvino, a short autobiographical piece in the shape of a walk.

Memory and place An immediate association of ‘emplaced memories’ would be with those techniques which assign contents to be memorised to a sequence of familiar spaces, so that they can be picked up one after the other when mentally traversing those spaces (Yates, 1966); however, the ‘container’ function can explain only a minimal part of the relation between place and memory. Firstly, a one-to-one correspondence between place and memory – a single episode linked to one site – is rare; more commonly, autobiographical places host repetitive and routinary events, so they cannot function as triggers for specific memories. Secondly, and more importantly, places are not separate from autobiographical events, but inevitably always part of the memories themselves, whether or not they feature explicitly in the recollection. Edward Casey, probably the most persuaded and assiduous proponent of emplaced memories (1985, 1987, 1993, 1996), claims that place lives in us because we are constantly aware of directionality, level, distance and depth as we stand or move; remembered experiences will thus always include such dimensions even when no specific place imagery is evoked (1985). Furthermore, he argues, places are differentiated for us within the landscape by their affordances for action, meaning that they are formed as ‘places’ – rather than undifferentiated spaces or settings – by the encounter of our intentionality with the textural features of a portion of the environment. In this sense, again, place partakes in memories as it is part of our actions’ trajectories from anticipation to completion. Finally, Casey states, places have the agentive capacity of ‘moving the mind’ (1996). Revisiting places and wandering through them – as will be evident in the autobiographical piece we will examine – allows for that basic function of memory that is re-membering, collecting together again what was once whole (Morton, 2007). This includes other people’s presence, objects, sensation patterns and habitual actions, as well as thoughts and feelings, supporting the recollection of what Renza 311

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(1977) calls the ‘gestalt of pastness’ – that special atmosphere of one’s own past that any autobiographer aims to render. Casey’s theory of emplaced memory is based on phenomenological notions about how the subject and the material world compenetrate each other: complaining that these have been lost, as the study of memory has become in the last decades encapsulated in a disembodied mind, Casey argues for a reopening into the world of our theory of memory. ‘Mind coadunates with world in memory of place’ (1985, p. 50, italics original) he states emphatically: by re-establishing the connections between place and memory the psychological concept of mind could also be redesigned in a more emplaced way.

The turn to senses Different strands of the social sciences have contributed to the present understanding of the sensorial constituents of place in relation to culture and language. The collected volume edited by linguistic anthropologists Steven Feld and Keith Basso (1996) represents a landmark in this field of studies: through detailed ethnographic inquiries, the contributors demonstrate that the way places are sensed contributes to form the interpretive and expressive resources of cultural communities. Characteristics of specific places – for example the constant water flow of New Guinea forests – offer material for analogies across experiential domains, structure the way natives conceive of many natural phenomena and are incorporated in verbal art (Feld, 1996). Language practices and place are shown in their constant interplay, with language absorbing and elaborating place’s qualities – for example through iconicity – but also foregrounding and enhancing some of these qualities, for example choosing particular names for accentuating the ‘quaintness’ of the English countryside (Frake, 1996). An important property in relation to place and symbolic production is mentioned, again, by Casey (1996) in the chapter that opens Feld and Basso’s volume. Casey observes that situated knowledge of a familiar location is the basis for the creation of universals, abstracted from a place’s ‘relationality’ (there is never a single place existing in utter isolation) and inherent regionality (whereby a plurality of places are grouped together) (Casey, 1996, p.45). The way places’ inner divisions and outer borders are continuously generative of meaning cannot be overestimated (Lotman, 1977), as it will also become evident in the analysis of Calvino’s autobiographical text. The richness and variety of the qualities of place that live in culture and language will probably never be fully investigated; however, new dimensions get added as research on the situated and embodied nature of psychological phenomena expands. Auditory aspects are growing in popularity, beside and sometimes against the visual domain.1 The history of the relation between sound and place – and the idea of soundscapes (see Marontate, this volume) – has revealed that sounds are a prominent element in the textural composition of place; they are inescapable, differently from visual stimuli, and to the hearer they convey with great specificity what is going on in the surrounding environment. The combination of sounds that characterise a place – varying with times of the day and of the year – is engrained in local knowledge and constitutive of emplaced experiences. If different senses can know places in different ways, all types of sensoriality are interlocked and ‘[bleed] into each other’s zone of expectations’ (Taussig, 1993, 57, cit. in Feld, 1996); sound, sight, smell and tactile perception are associated in sequential configurations typical for events and activities related to places; time, when conceived of in relation to place, evades the abstractness of chronology and is returned to the multiple distinct temporalities that characterise life-events (Bergson, 1988). 312

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Ecological psychology (Costall, Leudar 1996; Heft, 2001) and human geography (Thrift 1999) also postulate place as an already structured, culture-impregnated behavioural setting. Performing actions and taking part in activities means engaging with place directly, which enables individuals – and especially children, the cultural apprentices – to discover the cultural properties of the environment through embodied learning (Fuchs 2012). Children’s and adults’ activities, on the other hand, are culturally organised and orientated by language, and often carried out collectively, so that a place is always also approached from within a cultural framework. In short, place only exists within culture because the environments of human life have always already been shaped by socio-cultural processes; at the same time, in a circular movement, socio-cultural processes reproduce and elaborate the qualities of places, and in this ever-changing movement there are margins for the individual to engage with the environment in partially novel ways, ending up with original and idiosyncratic experiential configurations, and thus establishing with place a personal and intimate relationship. Such intense exchanges between culture, place and individual experience explain the centrality of places in memory: interpretations of oneself and the world are mapped onto places throughout the entire life of an individual (Giorgi, Fasulo 2013). Given the complexity with which place becomes manifest to the subject and merges with the internal landscape, recollections at different times can pull different threads, foregrounding selected themes and finding different narrative articulations of the past. We turn now to a brief consideration of place and the material world in memories about the first stages of life.

Place in narratives of childhood memories The growth of place in autobiography is largely a product of modernity, starting in the late 18th century with the acceleration of social changes and destruction of the natural environment which made the world of one’s childhood the site of nostalgic idealisations (Martens, 2011; see also Morley, Robins, 2002; Kern, 2003). Romanticism later posed great emphasis on childhood as a source of poetic inspiration and on children as capable of an immediate appreciation of beauty; Wordsworth’s famous The Prelude (1988), which dealt profusely with the relation the poet as a child had with nature, reflected and gave further impetus to the idea that capturing children’s views on the world would allow access to the authentic source of artistic creativity. Certainly, describing the places of childhood has become a literary trope, as it is commonly done also in fictional childhood recollections; 2 however, autobiographers are not alone in claiming that place and objects are the most significant companions of the early years. Studies in human geography and childhood anthropology have repeatedly observed children’s interest for and engagement with the environment (Matthews, 1992; Philo, 2000; Christensen, O’Brien, 2003), and particularly with the outdoor space, where they can be fully ‘children’ away from the gaze of the adults (Sebba 1991). Lorna Martens, analysing the autobiographical works of Rilke, Benjamin and Proust, argues that, before Freudian theories took away the trust in one’s conscious remembering, intellectuals in the West relied on places and objects to get as close as possible to their childhood experiences. None of the writers she examines, Martens explains, believed they could access their past intact in memory, but they saw a redemptive opportunity in the joint effort of remembrance, art and imagination that revisiting their past implied (the ‘promise of memory’ which is the title of her book). Martens’s historical interpretation and views on memory may be disputable (Wilson 2013), but her analysis offers a rich inventory of the ways in which 313

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places and objects are instrumental to autobiographical narratives and keep being modified and weaved into different projects throughout the whole life.

The Road to San Giovanni The autobiographical piece by Italo Calvino The Road to San Giovanni (1962/1993) is particularly apt to investigate the relation between place and memory. Place appears to play a variety of functions in it, from organising the narrative sequence, to informing textual form and style to drawing emplaced portrayals of himself and others. The memoirs bear the traces of the dilemmas that writing about places brings up, because of the tension between the past and the present perspective from which the place can be described. As a post-modern and meta-literary author, Calvino despised autobiography and rarely conceded to it. Always wary of the appearance of the author in the text, he frowned upon the self-indulgence that he saw associated with personal narratives and criticised writers who gave it prominence in their work (Carini, 2013; Lombardo, 2008; Wood, 2013). Nonetheless, he wrote several short autobiographical texts, with long intervals between one and the other. Calvino had planned to make a collection of these texts, for which he had chosen the name Passaggi obbligati (Obligatory Passages), and which would have included The Road to San Giovanni. Calvino died in 1985 and the unfinished collection was published posthumously under a different name (Calvino, 1990). The title originally chosen hints to an urgency, both psychological and literary, about the biographical themes of these pieces, which made him overcome the reluctance to engage in autobiographical writing (Carini, 2013). The themes of the text we are going to examine are the writer’s father and the place where he grew up. The text was written around the tenth anniversary of the father’s death. Italo Calvino’s father, Mario Calvino, was a cosmopolitan intellectual and a renowned agronomist who had implemented innovative agricultural techniques throughout the world, and had long worked in Mexico and Cuba. Italo himself was born in Cuba, although the family had left soon after his birth. They eventually settled in the city of San Remo, on the Ligurian Riviera, which was Mario Calvino’s native place. Here he started innovating the local agricultural systems and introducing foreign cultivations, beside working as a lecturer on tropical agriculture at the University of Turin. As a child and throughout his youth, Italo had a difficult relation with his father. The man’s extraordinary knowledge, which included botany, zoology and several languages he spoke f luently and interchangeably, was a burden for the boy, who also found the natural world completely unappealing (McLaughlin, 2011). However, in the ten years that separate the writing from the father’s death, Calvino experienced an acute nostalgia for his father and a deep regret for the innumerable opportunities of learning from him that he had missed (Calvino, 1994). Furthermore, as we will learn in retrospect, the lexicon and imagery of science that the father made so present in Calvino’s early years were also pressing at the doors of his creativity as a fiction writer; for those doors to be opened, it has been speculated, he needed to encounter the father again and salvage what could be salvaged of his world and presence, while at the same time giving a new significance to their relationship (Francese, 2008). The psychological distance the young Calvino felt toward the father implied a systematic inattention, an active non-listening to him, as well as the attempt to limit as much as possible the amount of time spent together. This active distraction made the memoir a difficult endeavour. In the following we will try to show how emplacing the autobiographical

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narrative allowed Calvino to draw together the portions of the past that he shared with his father, escaping the constraints of chronology and episodic recollection to paint a larger landscape in which the father and himself could be caught together. The Road to San Giovanni, to conclude, is relevant for the study of memory as it embeds a theory of place as a powerful symbolic organiser of self-world-other relations, and demonstrates the capacity of place to serve as the central allegory in narrative representations of the self.

The coordinates of Calvino’s autobiographical space Villa Meridiana, the Calvinos’ house, stood mid-hill with panoramic views of San Remo and the gulf in front and of the hills rising up behind it. The family also owned a few hectares of land higher up on the hills, in an area called San Giovanni Battista, where the father tended with great dedication a large orchard and vegetable garden. Every morning, Mario Calvino went up to San Giovanni before attending all his other commitments; during the summer school holidays Italo and his brother had to go with him to help carry the abundant produce of the land back down to the house. The title of the autobiographical piece refers to this ascension, and the text is organised according to its stages. Italo’s memoir pays homage not only to the father but also to the way of life that characterised the area where they lived. Elsewhere, Calvino describes his father as ‘the last Ligurian of a Liguria that no longer exists’ (Album Calvino, 1995, p. 33, our translation). This region of Italy, a narrow strip of hilly land raising above the sea, saw dramatic transformations in the decades after World War II, as a consequence of changes in the local economy and the use of the land, but both the charms of that environment and its precariousness eluded the young Calvino; similarly, he did not realise the extraordinary character of his father’s knowledge: he took them all for granted, his interests directed instead to the town and to all the attractions that a young person could find there. The family house, positioned mid-way between the town and the hills stood thus exactly at the geographical centre-point of this tension. The piece opens by referring to the position of the house as crucial to understanding the rest of the narrative: A general explanation of the world and of history must first of all take into account the way our house was situated, in an area once known as ‘French Point’, on the last slopes at the foot of San Pietro hill, as though at the border between two continents (Calvino 1962/1993, p. 3). The position of the house can explain ‘the world and history’ because it sits on a crucial geographical and psychological border3 ; on the one hand it defines the young Calvino’s identity in contraposition to the father’s, and on the other the sensorial experiences afforded by the dwelling will become central in Calvino’s default stance vis-à-vis the world,4 as we shall see more clearly in the following. Calvino’s note about his age in relation to the memories is revelatory of the relation between place and autobiographical time: I am not really sure if I’m talking about an age when I never left the garden or of an age when I would always be running off out and about, because now the two ages have fused together, and this age is one and the same thing as those places, which are no longer places nor anything else (Calvino 1962/1993, p. 5).

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The house with its double horizon is integral to the memory of his entire life up until the war, without internal distinctions of age; the status of those places in memory did not change, the desiring and expectant gaze he directed to town the same whether or not he was actually free to leave the house.

Topological identities Calvino liked very much the idea of writing imitating its subject (Antonello, 1998), the materiality of the words on page capturing some features of the content; in this piece, after introducing the house as seen above, the recollection begins to compare preferences and worldviews of the father and himself, zigzagging between the two several times and reminding the reader of the experience of a winding walk uphill. This is just one of the many levels in which the theme of the road informs the writing; in what follows, we will focus on such alternate descriptions of father and son to illustrate how the two of them are interdefined by the relation they entertain with opposite places. The first description of the father begins at the house door: Below, just beyond our gate and the private drive, lay the town … then the seafront; above, you only had to go out of the kitchen door … and immediately you were in the country, striking up cobbled mule tracks. That was the way my father always left the house, in his huntsman’s clothes, with his leggings, and you could hear his step of his hobnail boots on the f lags by the ditch, and the brass tinkle of the dog, and the squeak of the little gate that opened into the road that led to San Pietro. The way my father saw things, it was from here up that the world began… (Calvino 1962/1993, p. 4). The father is rapidly sketched here in the clothes he habitually wore when going to San Giovanni, and in the distinct series of noises he made when getting out. Having evoked the father in sight and sound at the onset of the ascension, Calvino continues to reveal his general attitudes by use of place-related images, and to begin unfolding the meaning of the ‘two continents’ they lived in: The way my father saw things, it was from here up that the world began, while the other part of the world below the house were a mere appendix, necessary sometimes when there were things to be done, but alien and insignificant, to be crossed in great strides, as though in f light, without looking to right or left. But I didn’t agree, in fact quite the opposite: as I saw it, the world, the map of the planet, began on the other side of our house and went downwards, everything else being a blank space, with no mark and no meaning; it was down in the town that the signs of the future were to be read, … and as I leaned out from the balustrades around our garden everything that bewildered and attracted me was within reach – yet immensely far away (Calvino 1962/1993, pp. 4–5). In the comparison laid out in the second quote, the views and passions of father and son are embodied in the way they apprehend the environment and move across different places. The father goes through the town rapidly and without looking, not finding anything to ‘read’ in the streets, contrary to the woods where he is able to interpret every leaf and tweet. For the son, it’s the opposite, and in spectacular fashion: he does not get any details of the natural

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environment (it is ‘blank’ for him), but his imagination is spun by the view of the town as synecdoche for all the cities of the world and the mysteries that lie in the future. The peculiarity of Calvino’s prose, expressed in this text to great effect, is the constant juxtaposition of concrete details with wide interpretive frames and the language of myth. Passing from one level to the other so abruptly (‘the world, the map of the planet, began on the other side of our house … down in the town the signs of the future were to be read’) is a powerful stylistic device to assert the interrelation of the two levels, and anchor the great schemes of things in the particulars of the material world. The narrative moves then to the young Calvino, and describes the town with its roofs and church towers as seen from the perspective of someone glancing down from the house, his gaze stretching as far as possible into the horizon, whilst daydreaming and imagining the future; then we move back again to the father and his ‘road’ (‘My father’s road likewise led far away’ [Calvino 1962/1993, p.7]). What is described in this part is not so much a place but the attitude of the father toward knowledge and nature. The road here is the central metaphor and textual strategy to represent distinctive qualities of the father’s force of will and intensity of desire: and into the naming of plants he would put all his passion for exploring a universe without end, for venturing time and again to the furthest frontiers of a vegetable genealogy, opening up from every branch of leaf or nervation as it were a waterway for himself … he would be forever anxious, but as though it wasn’t so much his getting a good yield out of those few hectares that he cared about, but to grow everything that could be grown, to offer oneself as a link in a story that goes on and on, from the seed and the cutting for planting out or for grafting to the f lower to the fruit to the plant and then over and over again without beginning or end in the narrow confines of the earth (the plot or the planet) (Calvino 1962/1993, p.8). This passage, part of a longer section written in the same cascading, forward-pushing style, illustrates some of the narrative resources used to re-member, re-assemble the father in memory. Calvino renders in textual form the quality of the father’s anxious energy, from the way he pushed into the woods to the analogous modality with which he pursued his scientific projects. The description is never meant to be a faithful portrayal: the narrative is firmly situated in the perspective of the son and never stops bearing the trace of him as the perceiver, oppressed by the tenacity of the father’s efforts, but at the same time feeling a certain pointlessness, a waste of effort toward unattainable aims in the father’s relentless activity. Inscribing the father’s energy and drive in the cadence of the text, on the other hand, allows us to find some degree of similarity beyond the irreconcilable differences: For what was the road I sought if not a repeat of my father’s, but dug out of the depth of another otherness,… the page to turn that leads into a world where all words and shapes become real, present, my own experience, no longer an echo of an echo of an echo (Calvino 1962/1993, p.10). The father’s voluptuous relation with knowledge is similar to that of the son, not in content insofar as Calvino’s woods are those of literature, but as they share the quest to achieve completeness and full control over the materials of their respective domains, to get at the essence of things as if the essence could be made to yield under the pressure of their will. 317

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Emplacing people After the topological identity of father and son has been introduced, the road as such begins to be described. Calvino walks the father’s walk again, not out of obligation this time but as homage to both father and land, a journey of recognition and rediscovery. The narrative, after the digressions discussed above, goes back to the sounds of the morning: Summer and winter, he would get up at five, noisily pull on his farming clothes, lace up his leggings … come into our room to wake us up, with gruff shouts and shouldershaking, then go downstairs with his hobnail shoes on the marble steps, wander round the empty house …, open the kitchen windows, heat up some coffee for himself, slops for the dog, talk to the dog, get together the baskets to be taken to San Giovanni, empty or with bags of seeds or insecticide or fertilizer in them (the noises sounded muff led up to us in our semiconscious state, since no sooner had Father woken us up than we had fallen right back to sleep again) and already he would be opening the back door to the beudo [dialect name for footpath], was out in the street, coughing and clearing his catarrh, summer and winter (Calvino 1962/1993, 13–14). The man is here again father-as-sound, a familiar sequence of noises corresponding to actions rarely beheld (as Italo was still in bed when they happened), but perfectly recognised and located in space. The father’s movements created sounds against the silent house of the morning, stepping down the marble stairs, opening windows and so on. The quoted text breaks down the sequence of resounding actions in a series of short phrases, one following the other very quickly until the resolution – the exit – makes the text slow down and pause. Calvino makes us perceive the contrast between an agitated, fast paced presence in the house and the calm that both the son and the house regain after he has gone out. Father, house and time of the day are merged in this recollection, and we can imagine how all this together represented for Calvino one of his versions of ‘home’. The paragraph both begins and ends with the words ‘summer and winter’: the constancy of the father’s actions is emphasised here, their indifference to seasonal changes but at the same time their nature-like predictability. Again, Calvino is describing the most regular behaviours of his father, and in so doing manages also to convey his own perplexed gaze, the distance he felt toward the father’s inf lexible determination. The narrative continues following the father on the road, evidently from times in which they went up together. The turns, brooks and bends of the walk to the land scaffold the text from now on, embedding digressions about the Ligurian way of life and capturing the father in his typical conduct along the way. As the human and physical scenery changes in going upwards, so does the father: After Baragallo everybody greeted everybody else as they passed by, even people they didn’t know, with a loud ‘Mornin’, or some other generic expression indicating recognition of the existence of their fellow man.… My father too would change after Baragallo; that nervous impatience that had marked his step so far would disappear, likewise his irritation when he shouted at the dog or tugged on the leash: now he would look around more calmly, the dog would usually be let loose and the shouts and whistles and fingersnapping directed its way were more good-natured, even affectionate (Calvino 1962/1993, p. 20–1). 318

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Again we are presented with a vivid and dynamic picture realised by uniting father and place. Different behavioural moods become apparent at different stages of the walk, like the ‘nervous impatience’ of his step or the ‘irritation’ in handling the dog that last until the Baragallo bridge, to give way to a gentler mode after it is passed. Compared with other passages, Calvino reaches here more explicit comic effects, depicting the father’s agitation as never really pausing, but only slightly toning down when he is at his happiest. In the words used, however, we also feel that the negative emotional overtones exuding from the father’s behaviour may include the son himself and the ever-present conflict over their different interests.5 Portraying a person through place may be a solution when the relation with that person did not include intimacy and dialogue, but offers interesting narrative opportunities beyond that. The description can be made more dynamic than when describing general, abstract traits independent from context; the portrayal can incorporate the many details that made the lifeworld of that person, thus creating a rendition of person and context at once. Furthermore, in emplacing people the observer-perceiver is always involved, so we have always to some extent a double description. In the case of the text we are examining, the cumulative effect of the descriptions of the father, talking and moving about loudly and vigorously, is to build in the reader the picture of the son as the receiver of those impressions without directly mentioning any psychological responses or subjective evaluations on his side.

Place and time An aspect of emplaced memories coming to the fore in the last passage concerns the rendering of autobiographical time: gathering memories around places rather than along a chronological line does not eliminate time but incorporates it within place-bound activities and events (Casey 1996). The ‘after’ and ‘now’ in the previous quote – ‘after Baragallo’, ‘now he would look’ – index both time and space at once, because the ‘road’ is both a geographical extension and an embodied activity with its own temporal duration. In the same excerpt, we have also seen the micro times of individual rhythms as manifested in pace and voice; finally, we are brought to consider the more macro dimension of the historical time evoked through the description of the landscape and its inhabitants. In the next quote, we can inspect an even more complex weaving of time into the emplaced narrative: Our property ended at the piazza with the church of San Giovanni…, then began again on the other side after a stretch of mule track, taking in a whole small valley which had a plantation of palms … and a spring hidden amongst rocks green with maidenhair fern, and a limestone cavern, and a rock cave, and a fish pond, and other wonders, which were no longer wonders for me but have once again become so, now that in place of all this, stretching away in squalid and ferocious geometry,… stands a carnation plantation – grey expanse of stalks in a grid of poles and wires, opaque glass of greenhouses, cylindrical cement tanks – and everything that once was is gone, everything that seemed to be there but was already an illusion (Calvino 1962/1993, p. 31). Calvino starts here with a list of pleasant environmental features (‘wonders’), but with what feels like a textual U-turn he lets us know that he did not see these things as wonders at the time; shifting to the present, he explains that those features only became precious to him after they had disappeared, replaced by an industrial flower plantation, and the initial list is overlaid by the far grimmer one of what stands now in that area. The old things were doomed, 319

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Calvino seems to say, calling them ‘an illusion’, the last residues of a time and civilisation that was already on the verge of disappearing at the time of his youth. This passage shows how emplacing memory can illustrate the subjective co-experiencing of historical and personal time, in which changes on a macro scale become intertwined with periods of one’s life when the aspect of places at different points in time is juxtaposed, and this process can change the relation one entertains with the places of the past (Brockmeier, 2009). The passage also implies a meta-narrative critique of the clichés of autobiographical writing and the golden aura conventionally bestowed on childhood memories. Calvino plays with the genre first invoking the themes of the child living in a magical world and of the adult longing for this lost realm, but to erase them in the next moment, before the end of the sentence where they are introduced. There never had been an idyll, he makes clear, of the young Calvino with the Ligurian landscape; there is only the sober realisation in the present that his past gaze on things was what it was, and there is no going back and finding precursors of the affection of today in the experience of the time. The sensation that can be recovered is that of taking such things for granted, perhaps also something to be nostalgic of, but the autobiography cannot go beyond that. This autobiography does not attempt to re-establish continuity across past and present, but painstakingly trace the shape of temporal fractures, giving recognition to the different versions of self that inhabited different periods of his life.

Writing of places and objects Emplacing memories involves adopting narrative resources that render repetitive actions eventful and give agency to material entities; it can be a resource deployed in limited portions of an autobiographical work or it can be the central discursive mode (Brockmeier, Fasulo, 2004). Different types of autobiographical projects can employ very different stylistic choices and narrative treatments of objects and places. In the text we are examining, as in most autobiographical pieces by Calvino, objects and places are typically of ambiguous and uncertain status, the writing oscillating between concrete and detailed illustration and allegoric exploitation. This is apparent in the text below, in which Calvino describes the contents of the baskets, the transport of which was the main reason for him to go up to San Giovanni. Our gloom was at odds with the generous content of our baskets. These were concealed (with the typical peasant diffidence toward prying eyes) under a layer of broad vine or fig leaves, yet with our swaying steps the loose covering would get lost along the way and the green trunks of zucchini would emerge, the ‘nun’s thigh’ pears and the bunches of Saint Jeannet grapes, the first figs, the tough down of the chayote … with everything being carefully arranged so that the hard things wouldn’t bruise the soft and there was still enough space left for a bunch of oregano, or sweet marjoram or basil. (To my distracted eyes those baskets seemed insignificant then, as the basic materials of life always seem banal to the young, yet now that I have but a smooth sheet of white paper in their place, I struggle to fill them with name upon name, to cram them with words, and in remembering and arranging these names I spent gathering and arranging the things themselves, more passion… – no, not true: I imagined as I set out to describe the baskets that I would reach the crowning moment of my regret, and instead nothing, what came out is a cold, predictable list: … all remains as it was then, those basket were already dead and I knew it … a citizen of cities and of history … yet what was this morning fury of my childhood, the fury that still persists in these not entirely sincere pages? 320

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Could everything perhaps have been different … if those baskets hadn’t even then been so alien to me, if the rift between myself and my father hadn’t been so deep? Might everything that is happening now perhaps have taken a different slant, in the world in the history of civilization – the losses not have been so absolute, the gains so uncertain?) (Calvino 1962/1993, pp. 28–30). The excerpt starts with the by now familiar contrast between the marvels Calvino and his brother were living amongst and their disinterest in them (‘our gloom’). Similarly to the list of ‘wonders’ before, he also produces a list here, presenting the various contents of the baskets and their careful arrangement. Lists are a common device in memory writing, used to summon and repossess lost items of different kinds (Brockmeier, Fasulo, 2004; Martens, 2011); hence, the presence of a list makes one expect at least some level of appreciation for its contents. The comments which follow begin in this vein, but the declaration of affection and nostalgia cannot be written to the end; with a textual procedure similar to the one analysed above, the emotional crescendo is stopped in mid-air, and any nostalgic tone is dissipated. In its stead, Calvino admits to an indifference that is still present today (‘all remains as it was then, those baskets were already dead and I knew it’), despite having expected to feel some retrospective warmth (‘the crowning moment of my regret’) for the contents of the basket. The text shows that retracing the road to San Giovanni means for Calvino encountering again the conf licting feelings he had toward the father, made to emerge in the labour of entextualising objects of memory belonging to the father’s world. When it happens, as we just saw, the tension between the past and the present is exposed, and the narrative progression dissolves into a multi-layered ref lection. Using parentheses and dashes, this part of the text mimics the live process of writing, with pauses and changes of mind and concerns about not being faithful to one’s experience. This stylistic device is not only meta-narrative but also meta-mnemonic, indicating that there is nothing like an ‘objective’ depiction from memory even when recollecting objects, any ‘reconstruction’ being in reality the product of a number of decisions. Here, the contents of the baskets become a new instantiation of the double loss Calvino is dealing with throughout the whole text, namely that of the objects and places themselves and of his entitlement to nostalgia for them. This is of course the core issue in the memory of the father as well, the affection felt for him in the present missing an anchorage in their relation they had in the past. As it goes on, the narrative becomes more evaluative of the relationship with the father; the quote above is close to the end of the piece and begins to incorporate alternative scenarios of the past and virtual futures that could have unfolded from them. Even at the point in which the inexorable pastness of past is faced in all its crudity, the exercise of memory seems to loosen it up a little and harbor the possibility of a different story joining the dots between past and present.

Memory as journey Comparing remembering to a journey has been an autobiographical theme since Augustine’s Confession; Goethe’s Italian Journey was meant to be a work of self-exploration, and Wordsworth saw his autobiographical reflections as a pilgrimage. Conversely, journeys can be envisioned as means of personal transformation, especially when they involve travelling to a relevant site of the past (Murakami, 2014). Calvino gives the trope of the memory as a journey a new nuance by using a specific and delimited spatial trajectory as form and metaphor of his autobiographical project. But how does an autobiographical journey end? How can the changes 321

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that the autobiographical process generates – if any – be narrativised? Calvino’s choice is to stay with place, but again lending the description a broader significance, exploiting position and perspective as temporal and psychological indexes: Now we’re walking home. I am bowed down under my pannier. The sun is high. From the nearest paved road, on San Giacomo Hill, comes the drone of a truck; here in the valley the grey of the olives and the chuckle of the stream deaden colour and sound. On the opposite slope smoke rises for the earth: someone has lit a stubble fire. My father is talking about the way olive trees blossom. I am not listening. I look at the sea and think I’ll be down in the beach in an hour. On the beach the girls toss balls with their smooth arms, they dive into the sparkle, shouts, splash, on scores of canoes and pedal boats (Calvino 1962/1993, p. 34). About a page before this quote the text had shifted to present tense, in summoning vague recollections of the movements within San Giovanni, watering the vines and collecting fruits. The shift had been preceded by some more considerations about the father in which, in a new compassionate tone, Calvino describes the father’s secret pain in having favoured the cultivation techniques that were altering the landscape, destroying the harmony and variety he so much loved in his homeland. In a further last comparison between them, Calvino defines his own work with literature as perhaps ‘more fortunate’ than that of his father (Calvino 1962/1993, p. 33). After this pacified note, the shift in tense signals a psychological turning point. The last scene depicted in the quote finds the young Calvino with his back turned to the hills, finally looking down and out to the sea again. The description renders magisterially both the haze of a hot summer midmorning on the Ligurian hills, and the way the sounds and colours arrived to him muff led because his mind was somewhere else; he is going down toward the beach, metonymy, as we now know, of the future and the realm of imagination. In this last representation of the two worlds – above and below the house – we can sense a new lightness: the perennial ‘fury’ of both characters is gone and the father is now walking down together with the son, still not listened to, but more reassuring as the background voice talking about blossoming olive trees. The conclusion in the present tense thus tells us where Calvino finds himself at the end of the autobiographical journey, and hints to a renewed relationship with both his past and future as a writer. Soon after the completion of this manuscript, the publication of a fictional piece puts an end to four years of writer’s block and inaugurated the series of his sciencethemed fantasy stories, The Cosmicomics (Francese, 2008). Writing the memoir seems to have allowed Calvino to recuperate, in a filtered and imaginative way, the objects and the words of science in which he had been so deeply immersed during the first part of his life, and to use it as material for the irreverent and fantastic fiction he was brooding.

Conclusions We have used The Road to San Giovanni to analyse the effects of place as organiser of an autobiographical recollection and support in the remembrance of a significant person. As maintained by phenomenologists, the knowledge of others is always situated and emplaced, even though the vocabulary of personality hides within the person’s skin all the relational properties of knowing others. Drawing on Heidegger, Gallagher (2008, p. 40) argues that ‘others appear within the pragmatic contexts that characterize our life’. Calvino’s 322

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choice of emplacing the memory of his father exploits precisely the fact that we know other people through the way they tend to their own business in their usual environment. In writing about how his father acted in places, the author achieves the effects of letting us see the man in the details of his bearing and also his own point of view; we get the portrait of the father as heard and seen by the son, and we learn about the limits with which the son could access his father’s world. Calvino also uses the different geographical collocation of his father’s and his own interests to describe each of them and explain their relationship, ascribing them what we have called a topological identity. Each character is defined in contrast to the other and understood in relation to his preferential space, while space itself takes on an allegoric value and is made to represent the ‘two continents’ of science and literature. The relationship with the father may be for Calvino what Brown and Reavey (2014) call ‘vital memories’, those parts of the past typically associated with ambivalent emotions that constitute the backdrop of the rest of the person’s life. Brown and Reavey argue that a way to change the impact of those memories is to go back to the ‘atmosphere’ of the past, and ‘explore ways of feeling a path through the atmosphere differently – to discover new possibilities in what the atmosphere can offer’ (p. 333). Space is where the atmosphere resides: the memories of places and people are bound together and the relation to a person can change when revisiting places. An emplaced autobiography means, as we have seen, an immersion into complexes of sensory and psychological perceptions – ‘every sound, every shape, led one back to the others, more sensed than heard or seen’ (Calvino 1962/1993, p. 7) – and their narrativisation allows for novel ways of making sense of one’s position in the world. The Road to San Giovanni shows the role of language in the process, and how inscribing places in writing induces us to interrogate the past and challenge unexamined assumptions about it.

Acknowledgements The author wishes to thank Jens Brockmeier for his substantial help with an earlier draft, and Sonia Rivetti for the suggestion of critical sources on Calvino. The Road to San Giovanni had been previously analysed in an article with Tiziana Palmese about the contribution of literature to cultural psychology (Fasulo, Palmese, 2005).

Notes  1  As Hacking (1998) notes, among others, the idea of memory as made of visual images or similar to video recordings fails to take into account not only all the other senses, but also the fundamental bidirectionality of the relation between memory and place, namely how the body is implicated in the production of its surroundings. For a more articulate critique of visualism, see Feld, 1996; and Cosgrove, 1984 (cit. in Feld).  2  Compelling examples of this are Orwell’s Coming Up for Air and Roth’s American Pastoral.  3  Calvino writes elsewhere that cartography is the attempt to control the unfamiliar through the familiar, and that cartographic spatialisation gives shape to psychological landscapes (Calvino, 1984/2013).  4  See for example how he describes his default inner position in relation to the environment: ‘and likewise if they ask me now what shape the world is, if they ask that self that dwells within me and preserves the first impression of things, I shall have to answer that the world is arranged on so many balconies irregularly deployed so as to look out over one great balcony that opens on the void of the air … and the real self within me is still looking out from that parapet, the real self within the presumed inhabitants of worldly shapes’ (Calvino, 1971, p.130, English transl.).  5  Later on in the text he writes: ‘but then he would immediately be oppressed again by reminders that all was precarious and beset by danger and once more the fury was upon him. And one of these reminders was myself, the fact that I belonged to that other, metropolitan and hostile part of the world, the painful 323

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awareness that he couldn’t count on his children to consolidate the ideal San Giovanni civilization of his, which thus had not future’ (Calvino 1962, p. 25).

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Part V

Terror, violence and disasters

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26 Southeast Asia and the politics of contested memories Kwok Kian-Woon and Roxana Waterson

Introduction: Southeast Asia and memory studies Southeast Asia’s tumultuous twentieth-century history provides key case studies for an analysis of the workings of social memory in postcolonial societies or developing countries facing the challenges of modernity. In highlighting some examples, we aim to demonstrate how deeply processes of remembering, misremembering or forgetting the past have been intertwined with modern political developments. Historically, the ethnically diverse populations of the region developed at the crossroads of the civilizations of East, South and West Asia, and most have experienced Western colonization and Japanese aggression during the Second World War, followed by the processes of decolonization and modernization. By the end of the twentieth century, the original members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), formed in 1967 – Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand – were joined by Brunei Darussalam (in 1984, following independence from the United Kingdom), Vietnam (in 1995), Laos and Myanmar (in 1997, by which time the national régime had dropped the term ‘Burma’), and Cambodia (in 1999). The ASEAN project can be seen as an effort to create a unity that would otherwise be lacking in the region. Its original impetus among the founder members in the late 1960s was linked to Cold War geopolitics, especially during the war in Vietnam. There are, however, many strong dyadic links – as well as dyadic tensions – joining neighbouring countries, all too often in memory-related disputes. The symbolic labour of creating identities in newly formed nation-states often involves some definition of the collective self against an Other; in sharing historical ties, cultural traditions and common borders, neighbouring nation-states quite naturally play such a role vis-à-vis each other, especially during times of domestic instability and regional competition. The border dispute between Cambodia and Thailand that focuses on claims to the ninth-century Preah Vihear Temple and has been a source of explosive tensions in recent years, provides a particularly vivid example of these processes (Pavin 2010). The closing decades of the twentieth century saw rapid economic development and technological advance, albeit unevenly, across the region. The city-state of Singapore, according to conventional indices, attained First World status, while there was an expansion of the urban middle class in countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines. 329

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A new phase of pro-market economic growth had begun robustly in post-socialist Vietnam and at a significantly slower pace in Laos. In post-conf lict Cambodia, massive foreign aid stimulated the development of a national economy. In 2002 Timor-Leste became the first new nation of the twenty-first century – and, as in predecessor Southeast Asian cases, not without experiencing widespread social unrest and political violence. This is also the case in contemporary Myanmar as it emerges from half a century of military dictatorship and national isolation – with promises of greater democratization and economic development amid increased capitalist exploitation and ethno-religious strife. Into the second decade of the twenty-first century, sustained political stability within Southeast Asian nation-states does not necessarily follow from economic growth. A poignant example is the radical polarization of Thai society that culminated in the violence, arson and loss of life in Bangkok in May 2010, which was followed by frequent mass protests with no signs of national reconciliation, building to a renewed crisis in late 2013. The deadlock deepened into 2014, leading to a military coup in May – the twelfth since 1932. Indeed, the contestation of memories in Southeast Asian nation-states has been bound up with mass political struggles, especially those for independence from the former colonial powers, involving at every stage tensions and conf licts in the establishment of new régimes and the formation of national identities. This might equally be said of developing countries in Africa, Latin America and other parts of Asia, but it is significant to note that Southeast Asia has had its share of traumatic events – and of the numerical scale and human tragedy of the Cambodian genocide, in which nearly two million people, a quarter of the population, were eliminated by the Khmer Rouge régime between April 1975 and January 1979. This must surely be regarded as a ‘limit-event’ (LaCapra 1998:183), which begs comparative analysis with other genocides of the twentieth century. Other repressions, less overwhelming in scale, have periodically been directed at those who have challenged authority and made demands for a more democratic society. These movements have often been spearheaded by university students, whether in Indonesia, where youth movements were deeply involved in the struggle for independence and more recently played a key role in mass actions leading to Suharto’s downfall (Strassler 2010:207–49); in Singapore, in the anti-colonial struggles of the 1950s (Tan et al. 2011); in Thailand (see Thongchai 2002 on the Thammasat University massacre of 1976 and subsequent memorialization of the victims); or in Burma, where the massacres of 1988 were recently able to be commemorated publicly for the first time (Lintner 1990). In all such histories of activism, the memory of past events provides a template for renewed action. But the lack of accounting for the acts of violence by which states have attempted to crush their student movements have, in all these countries, left painful memories that continue to be ‘contested, unsettled and disturbing’ (Thongchai 2002:277). While our discussion here is necessarily constrained in scope, we draw on some major themes in memory studies and weave a number of theoretical and comparative threads that are exemplified in selected Southeast Asian case studies, some of which were not treated, or only partially so, in our earlier work (Waterson and Kwok 2012). To begin with, we build on the idea of social memory as prospective or future-oriented. Individual memory brings evolutionary advantage, in any species, as an aid to planning; arguably, this must hold true also at the social level. In order to become social rather than merely personal, memories must also be transmitted. Exactly how such transmission occurs is therefore a central question for memory studies, but one that remains surprisingly resistant to theorization. Halbwachs (1992 [1925]), routinely revered for his foundational work on the sociology of memory, had relatively little to say about actual processes of transmission. Clearly, these processes are multiple, and a very close-textured ethnographic or historical study is necessary to grasp them 330

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in action. The plethora of memory studies since the early 1990s has failed to advance any comprehensive theories of transmission, pointing to the elusiveness, as well as the diversity, of these processes. Trouillot (1995:22) observes the difficulty of tracing how historical narratives are produced, because each has so much specificity. ‘The heavier the burden of the concrete’ he writes, ‘the more likely it is to be bypassed by theory’. We argue here that there are many ways in which narratives can fade or fail, or be maintained or sustained through generations, for transmission requires also an effort of imagination by the recipients to enter into an experience which is not their own. This is by no means guaranteed. Memory can be thought of in its several dimensions as trace (as a form of historical evidence, whether existing in a person’s head or inscribed in material form in the landscape, in objects, rituals or in media, such as film, which became such an important vehicle for testimony during the twentieth century), as event (the re-telling of the past being a distinct performative act in itself, one that demands a dialogical engagement with and by an audience and which is capable of generating its own meanings), and as trajectory (the potential for endurance through time of any particular memory). In the passage from trace to trajectory, events and acts of recall play a crucial role. Traces can be preserved, erased, effaced or excavated, and the trajectories of memory are variable and unpredictable. Each effort at transmission has the potential to extend the life of memories in collective awareness, just as enforced silence, the lack of an empathetic audience or the passage of time may cause traces to fade and trajectories to be cut short (Waterson 2007; Argenti and Schramm 2010). In Southeast Asia there are undoubtedly cases of past injustice that may never receive due redress. These are often related to political contestations from the mid–twentieth century onwards within transnational, national and sub-national contexts. Consider broadly the interrelationships between the geopolitics of the Cold War and the making of new or postcolonial states, which involved political parties vying for institutional power and ideological hegemony and gaining state control over other sub-national groupings that were competing for popular support and national legitimacy. Hence, for instance, the demonization and suppression of Communism in Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. The anti-Communist mass killings in Indonesia in the mid-1960s were perpetrated by the ‘New Order’ régime, enabled by tacit international support and bent on eliminating its enemies in the populace; the costs were particularly tragic both in terms of loss of life and the subsequent suppression of memory over the ensuing decades. Cambodia presents a grotesque mirror image, in which Communists featured as perpetrators rather than victims. The Khmer Rouge was responsible for the mass extermination of suspected class enemies and minority groups, while the rest of the population was subjected to a brutal indoctrination into a new ideology and social structure. Repressive régimes founded upon terror keep their grip on power partly by enforcing silence about their own acts of violence; terror itself is the most powerful tool to that end. The legitimating construction of a dominant narrative about the past, itself full of gaps and silences, further serves the attempt to ‘institutionalize forgetting’ (Sanford 2009:40) by excluding opponents and victims from the story. The fall of such a régime provides a wealth of opportunities for the study of social memory processes, as in the case of the transformations brought about in countries of the former Soviet Union after 1989. A space is then created for the resurgence of previously ‘dangerous’ oral memories, an interrogation of dominant narratives and a restoration of missing pieces of the past. Placing on record – or recovering the traces of – past atrocities is part of the process of coming out of terror, a means for ordinary people to reclaim ‘a sense of future’ (Castillejo-Cuéllar 2013:17). Here we consider new studies of the work of memory in Indonesia following Suharto’s fall in 1998, and in post-conf lict Cambodia, especially 331

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after the death of Pol Pot in the same year. These two cases alert us to the fact that silences may have many different qualities and implications. Contrary to the view emerging from trauma studies that testifying is an unmitigated good and essential to ‘healing’, both the Indonesian and the Cambodian cases indicate that efforts to revisit and expose the past may meet with strong resistances, even at times from survivors themselves. These examples may usefully be considered in relation to a body of recent writing in memory studies that seeks to present a more nuanced and critical inquiry into the varied nature of silences (Trouillot 1995; Castillejo-Cuéllar 2005:167; Zerubavel 2006; Dwyer 2009; Vinitzky-Seroussi and Teeger 2010; Kidron 2010).

‘Straightening history’: régime change and the struggle over memories in Indonesia The year 1998 was a turning point in Indonesian history, bringing the downfall of Suharto’s New Order government after 32 years in power. The change was precipitated by the Asian Monetary Crisis, which devastated the Indonesian economy and coincided with the 1997 elections to produce a watershed of popular protest, spearheaded by university students. Suharto’s fall opened the possibility of revisiting an unspeakable past, specifically the founding event that had brought him to power. This was the alleged coup of 30 September 1965, in which six generals and a lieutenant were murdered in a bungled plot blamed on the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), which provided the pretext for Suharto’s ensuing counter-coup with its mass slaughter of at least half a million, and perhaps as many as two million, Communist Party members and suspected sympathizers.1 Hundreds of thousands of political prisoners were held for years without trial, while their families were harassed, ostracised and excluded from employment under the policy of bersih lingkungan or ‘clean environment’, which stigmatized by association the relatives and children of leftist victims. The killings were orchestrated by the army’s Special Forces (RPKAD), but many were carried out by civilian militias, a factor that complicates present efforts to bring the past to light. Civilian perpetrators share a stake in the official narrative demonizing the Communists, making them strongly, even violently, resistant to any revision.2 Paramilitary youth groups played a key role in the massacres of 1965–66, notably Ansor, the youth wing of the Muslim association Nahdlatul Ulama, which was active in East Java and Bali, and Pemuda Pancasila, the youth group of the New Order’s dominant Golkar Party, which was active in Medan, North Sumatra (Collins 2002:599; McGregor 2009).3 For Ansor members, memory of Communist cruelties at the time of the abortive uprising at Madiun in 1948, as well as more recent provocations by the PKI, were used (and sometimes exaggerated) in order to cast themselves, and not the Communists, as victims (McGregor 2009:218). Pemuda Pancasila’s founding members were local gangsters (preman), who recently surfaced as the stars of a surreal and profoundly disturbing documentary by Joshua Oppenheimer, The Act of Killing (2012), in which they f launt their confidence in Indonesia’s continuing culture of impunity by openly re-enacting their methods of execution. Oppenheimer has defended his project, which raises uncomfortable questions about the ethics of the filmmaker’s own complicity in these grotesque scenes, by clarifying that he had originally been trying to make a film about a community of survivors. Military interference made this project impossible, but to his surprise, perpetrators proved more than willing to testify. Given the comparative rarity of perpetrator testimony, the film, notwithstanding the merging into fantasy of some of its most bizarre scenes, is a document that invites careful appraisal. Its maker intends it as an ‘interrogation of impunity’, exposing the true nature of the Indonesian régime (Kitamura 332

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2013). Since its release, the film has won 29 awards at international festivals and has been widely hailed as a masterpiece, but its ultimate historical value must rest on its potential to provoke debate among Indonesians themselves.4 For more than a decade, all Indonesian schoolchildren had to sit through obligatory annual screenings of the government-sponsored film, Penghkianatan G30S/PKI (The Treachery of the September 30th Movement/PKI (1984)), a four-hour melodrama presenting the official version of the attempted coup, which included deliberate falsehoods and distortions.5 As for the massacres, they were conspicuous by their absence from school history textbooks. The film thus served in a double sense as a ‘screen memory’, and its annual repetition provides a telling example of ‘narrative fetishism’ (Santner 1992:144) or ‘acting out’ (LaCapra 1998:185), occluding the forbidden story of the massacres. Given the emotive power of film as a mass medium, it is worth asking what it would take to undo such prolonged indoctrination; a survey taken in 2001 reports that over 80 per cent of respondents believed the film’s depiction of events to be true (Collins 2002:584). Perhaps only another film, and one as bizarre as Oppenheimer’s, could begin to open a challenge to it. Historians have also been emboldened to critique other aspects of Suharto’s version of national history, in particular his inf lated account of his own role in a key incident of the war for independence against the Dutch, the so-called General Attack of 1 March 1949 (AhimsaPutra 2012). Suharto’s glorified role in this event was the subject of extensive public commemoration through annual celebrations and speeches, a huge monument in Yogyakarta, and the regular screening for schoolchildren of several popular films. Suppressed controversy about this official depiction was quick to surface after 1998, becoming part of the wider movement by historians to ‘straighten out history’ (meluruskan sejarah). A new version of several contentious historical episodes was published as a National History Supplement in 2000; but a revised school textbook, querying the automatic blaming of the Communist Party for the September 30th Movement, met with such backlash upon publication that it has never been distributed. The rewriting of Indonesian history thus promises to be a slow process, just as for individuals the lingering fears induced by New Order repression may continue to impinge upon the work of memory (Stoler and Strassler 2000). Activists of a younger generation have demonstrated their concern with social memory by reaching out to survivors of 1965–66, the ex-political prisoners and families of victims of the massacres, to begin the work of reconciliation. In particular, younger members of Nahdlatul Ulama have bravely questioned their parents’ roles in the killings. In Yogyakarta they formed an NGO, Syarikat, which since 2000 has gathered testimony from survivors, made documentary films, published books and a journal, and organised seminars, theatre performances, art exhibitions and other events to help survivors find a sympathetic audience. They have arranged meetings between survivors and former perpetrators in order to talk about the past so as to encourage community healing, an exercise that during the Suharto era was strictly forbidden (Sulistiyanto and Setyadi 2009). Some former political prisoners themselves have also dared to organise, forming at least four associations since 1999 to press for rehabilitation of their civic rights, while others have published their memoirs (Budiawan 2012:271). But the continuing silence of some survivors is symptomatic of their lack of confidence that such events could never happen again in Indonesia. Where paramilitary groups continue to be embedded in local politics, and victims are obliged to live as neighbours with their former persecutors (as is the case in many Javanese and Balinese communities), the persistence of a culture of impunity and a continued sense of menace from perpetrators hinders the ability of survivors to overcome the trauma of the past, such that many of them still prefer to remain silent (Cribb 2002:563; Parker 2003:72; Dwyer 2009; Budiawan 2012:275). Parker, 333

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working in Bali, had to rely on supporters of the Indonesian Nationalist Party (PNI) for information on land actions and political polarization in the period immediately leading up to the massacres, because former PKI sympathizers had all been silenced or killed. ‘My few informants’, she writes, ‘were usually either murderers, people who were complicit in murder or fearful observers’ (Parker 2003:67). Budiawan, a younger-generation Indonesian scholar, interviewed former political prisoners for his doctoral research (2004) and talked with some of their wives, an acutely marginalized group that has lacked any audience for its sufferings. Not knowing if they would ever see their husbands again, they were left to bring up children on their own, isolated by official policies that forbade others to help them. Dwyer (2009:137), writing of a Balinese acquaintance who lost her husband and beloved brother in the massacres, and was herself molested, proposes as an ‘underexplored possibility’ the idea that ‘silence itself may offer certain forms of agency that are not simply the absence of speech, that it may be striated with a more complex politics than merely a cowed acquiescence to power.’ Silence is not necessarily the total silence of the defeated, but like speech, it takes place ‘with certain interlocutors – or eavesdroppers, or informants – in earshot or mind’ (2009:134) and with a view to avoiding a re-eruption of violence. Navigating the landscape of the said and the unsaid, while having to live with perpetrators as neighbours, is still politically fraught, and Dwyer expresses doubt that breaking the silence could necessarily put things right. That in any case looks increasingly unlikely to happen: although a law was passed in 2004 mandating the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to investigate the events of 1965–66, after opposition from a group of NGOs objecting to the idea of amnesty for perpetrators, this law was abruptly annulled in 2006 in a shock verdict by the Constitutional Court. Time is running out as survivors grow old and die, while even the evidence of mass graves, in a tropical climate, is by now decaying past the point of recovery. Although the Indonesian TRC was to have been modelled on the South African example, there are obvious structural differences in the relations between perpetrators and victims in these two countries that must raise questions about whether that format could in fact have succeeded here. How much does it matter for Indonesia if there is never to be a serious accounting for this monstrous event? While young activists hold it as a matter of moral urgency, many others would prefer never to confront it. Cribb (2002:562) points out that, although no one has a complete picture of what happened (and exact numbers of dead will never be known), people probably do know what happened in their own community through gossip and the passing on of stories. Yet, where accounts of the past cannot be openly rehearsed as a part of family or community life, they are likely to fade and may eventually be lost altogether from collective memory; thus the social trajectories of memory are cut short. Given the failure of state-sponsored reconciliation, it has been left to grassroots organisations to take the initiative. But where fear still powerfully inhibits the digging up of past hatreds, reconciliation remains an improbable goal. The civilian stakes in the maintenance of an anti-leftist narrative make it an open question whether impunity can ever be broken in Indonesia, which contrasts in this respect with several Latin American countries where the amnesties that authoritarian rulers like to grant themselves upon leaving office have not in fact stood the test of time.6

Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge genocide: the long road to accountability As the Suharto régime fell in Indonesia, gradually opening up the suppressed space for public remembering, the consolidation of Prime Minister Hun Sen’s authoritarian rule in Cambodia 334

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did not have the same effect. Instead, the Cambodian case represents, in David Chandler’s words (2008:356), ‘induced’ or ‘enforced’ amnesia. Without any irony, Hun Sen said in 1998 that Cambodians should ‘dig a hole and bury the past’ – this in spite of the demonization of the Pol Pot régime during the immediate post-conflict era, the ‘second civil war’ (the People’s Republic of Cambodia) from 1979 to 1991. Remnants of the Khmer Rouge continued to launch guerrilla attacks on civilians and UN peacekeepers up until the death of Pol Pot, after which they surrendered to the authorities (Form 2009). By this time, the Hun Sen government, buoyed by international recognition and foreign aid, placed its priority on the country’s post-conf lict development without acknowledging any collective need to deal with its recent traumatic history and the culpability of Khmer Rouge leaders. The continued participation of former Khmer Rouge cadres, not least Hun Sen himself, in national politics has been an obstacle in the long process of bringing to trial the régime’s surviving leaders. Indeed, there were incalculable costs in the delay in establishing formal procedures for truth-seeking and transitional justice. This came to fruition only 30 years later in the form of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, also known as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), after persistent efforts on the part of the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam) and the international community, and protracted negotiations with the Cambodian government. The delay was also caused by geopolitical issues in the shadow of the Cold War: ‘An angry Prime Minister Hun Sen reminded the UN and the US that both had recognized Pol Pot’s phantom state – Democratic Kampuchea – 12 years after its disappearance, simply to justify their castigation of socialist Vietnam as an aggressor, a country whose intervention in 1979 had ended the mass murders’ (Form 2009:900). But the delay of three decades presented a severe challenge to the veracity of witness memories (Caswell 2010:34). The trials were too late to include Pol Pot and other key Khmer Rouge leaders, such as Ta Mok, who died in 2006 while awaiting trial. In March 2013, Ieng Sary, Pol Pot’s brother-in-law, evaded a judgement by dying while his trial was still in process, while his wife, Ieng Thirit, was found unfit to stand trial because she was already in dementia. During the checkered process leading to the tribunal, the general fog of amnesia was only partially and inadequately broken through by the physical reminders of the genocide, especially the former Tuol Sleng detention centre (which became a ‘genocide museum’) and the Choeung Ek ‘killing fields’. But the two sites were predominantly visited by foreigners; offering no personal stories of victims, they risked being reduced to banality as tourist attractions. These officially sanctioned and overly emphasised sites contribute to a ‘selective memorialization of the past’ and, in tandem with the ongoing tribunal, ‘create an illusory justice that operates through the simultaneous selling and silencing of genocide’ (Tyner et al. 2012:867–68). However, it is fair to say that without the efforts to bring about the tribunal, there would have been no alternative legal mechanism to serve as a springboard for transitional justice. The work of outreach has been underfunded, such that part of the Cambodian population may still be unaware of the ECCC and its ‘performative’ role as a national event in engaging the wider population was limited. But the very fact that its work has officially recorded the atrocities committed by perpetrators, and recognized the status of victims, can facilitate the education of Cambodian youth about the recent traumatic past (Lavergne 2012). The importance of archives cannot be overstated. The massive database painstakingly and relentlesly developed by DC-Cam (led by its director Youk Chhang) contributed directly to the establishment of the tribunal, and together with the transcripts of the trials and other documents, there is now a repository of primary sources that can serve to establish truth and accountability (Caswell 2010). This material forms a memory bank which future generations 335

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of Cambodians – and not just researchers – can turn to in the effort to retrace and understand their past. At the same time, however, the transmission of memory remains a challenging task, especially when the majority of the young and the educated are now more concerned about economic improvement than with coming to terms with the crimes and sufferings of an earlier generation (Dicklitch and Malik 2010). Writers on the South African TRC have noted that the trauma was too huge for the commission on its own to affect ‘closure’, an idea that is always in danger of being too glibly evoked. But it does serve as a landmark and moral compass, while other media including art and theatre can still play a vital role in a more prolonged process of ‘working through’. The fact that these productions involve a degree of distancing may even help to make that work more bearable. Beyond the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, too, a range of projects undertaken by theatre practitioners, artists, writers and filmmakers stand as important contributions to the ongoing work of memory. The impressive body of work created by filmmaker Rithy Panh (1994, 2000, 2003, 2012a, 2012b) provides just one example.

Traumatic memory: in search of comparative perspectives Comparative examples from Southeast Asia raise important questions about the theorising of traumatic memory. Trauma studies have drawn overwhelmingly upon the universalist assumptions of Euro-American psychology. But we should be alert to the possibility of crosscultural differences in the ideas and beliefs of people dealing with trauma and in the resources available to them. From a practical perspective, one must also note that in countries like Cambodia, where an estimated 40 per cent of adults are living with post-traumatic stress disorder (Saliba 2009), mass trauma must be dealt with largely without the benefit of Westernstyle psychiatric services, which are not available. Indeed it is necessary to ask whether they would be useful even if they were available; individualistic approaches are hardly adequate to deal with cultural trauma (Alexander 2004) on this scale. A further issue is that 70 per cent of Cambodians are under the age of 25 and thus have no memory of the Khmer Rouge era. Their parents may find it too painful to talk about the past, but even when they do, many young people are reported as not believing what they hear. Peg LeVine (2010), a clinical psychologist who spent a decade researching forced marriages in Cambodia, argues that an overlooked aspect of Khmer Rouge terror is the destruction of familiar rituals and relationships with the unseen world of spirits and ancestors, still a very salient element of Cambodian culture. Enforced relocations cut people off from their own ancestors and brought the fear of not knowing how to placate unknown spirits in strange locations. The prevention of established marriage rites in the presence of one’s own family added to the stress of being forced to marry a stranger. LeVine concludes that these disruptions amounted to a ‘cosmic betrayal’ (2010:183), amplifying the physical and psychological sufferings caused by the régime’s brutality. Angkar (‘The Organisation’), as the leadership called itself, was strangely invisible because the rulers were so secretive and had no physical headquarters, but propaganda described it as being omnipresent and omnipotent. In the all-pervading atmosphere of paranoia created by the régime, Angkar was commonly imagined as an evil, possessing force that might be listening in the trees or that could be witnessed in the expression on the face of a soldier in the act of committing atrocities. Half of LeVine’s respondents spoke of Angkar in the present tense; some said it had emerged out of the ground and might do so again. The ‘anticipatory anxiety’ thus generated must itself impact the possibilities for reconciliation (2010:171). 336

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This line of cultural analysis is clearly more useful than less-nuanced arguments, some of which border on the essentialization of cultural differences, specifically Cambodian Buddhist culture or ‘Khmerness’, with reference to the putative virtues of silent and stoic suffering, self-pride and forgiveness. Kidron (2010) proposes that, as much as this form of silence can be regarded as resilience or empowerment, it has the effect of attenuating the intergenerational transmission of memory. Her data also point to the fact that as much as any religious values, it is the traditionally hierarchical relationship between parents and children that hinders transmission and inhibits children from asking questions. Moreover, the argument that Cambodian Buddhism is a resource that can help to promote forgiveness and reconciliation is complicated by the fact that it co-exists with cultural notions of revenge, and can promote its own anxieties, where so many souls have died a violent death and gone without funeral rites. Newborn babies are carefully examined for birth marks that might indicate that a victim, still bearing the scars of former violence, has been reborn. The annual communal ritual of Pchum Benh (Ly 2005), in which the hungry souls of the dead are fed with rice balls made by each household and later gathered into symbolic ‘mountains’, serves to draw communities together in a shared act but is particularly poignant where so many of the ancestors being commemorated actually died of starvation. Where bodies have been robbed of their identity by being made to disappear into mass graves, the work of mourning is especially difficult for those left behind. If funeral rites are considered essential for the peace or release of the soul, then the absence of a body is an added source of grief. In Balinese Hinduism, belief in rebirth and the uses of ritual to assuage the ghosts of those who have died violent deaths provide significant points of comparison with the Cambodian Buddhist context. Spirit mediums have been consulted in attempts to locate the bodies of the dead or to learn whether they have been reincarnated in the newborn; rites have sometimes been held in secret and in the absence of a body in order to help the dead find rest, or the deceased may continue to appear to the living in dreams, requesting further ritual attention (Cribb 2002:563; Dwyer 2009:123, 129). Ida Bagus (2012), who documents the continuing dire impoverishment of survivors she met in West Bali, also highlights how memories of the violence are manifested in relations with the spirit realm. Some perpetrators, haunted by a guilty conscience, show signs of mental disturbance that are blamed on karmic sanctions. Certain graves, believed to be those of PKI victims, are regarded as ‘hot’ or ritually dangerous sites that regularly receive offerings and thus have become a focus of continuing commemoration. One individual, infamous for his participation in the killings, became a Hindu priest in the very same cemetery where, under state auspices, he committed multiple murders in 1966. In spite of unresolved hostilities, in this community at least Ida Bagus notes that since 1998 there has been more open expression of sympathy with the victims, with its corresponding acknowledgement of collective complicity and guilt, and she sees hopeful signs that their stories may at last enter into public memory. Many Southeast Asian societies draw a conceptual contrast between ‘good death’ and ‘bad death’. Violent or inauspicious deaths generally require special ritual measures to help the soul find peace and to restore cosmic balance and community well-being. On the one hand, such rituals can be seen as a cultural resource that might be helpful to damaged communities in assuaging their sense of loss; on the other hand, if there is some hindrance to their performance, then this must add to survivors’ distress. Heonik Kwon (2006) has produced a most revealing study about the salience of death rituals and communication with the dead in Vietnamese culture and the problems posed to these processes by the overwhelming scale of mass death in the American War. In normal circumstances, ‘bad death’ is the rare counterpoint that helps to define ‘good death’, death at home, with the subsequent performance 337

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of rites to enshrine the soul as an ancestor whose regenerative powers will help the living. The soul of a person who dies a violent and unjust death away from home, leaving relatives with no body for whom rites can be performed, is condemned to roam in a perpetual state of liminality on the margins of both the seen and the unseen worlds. Where 300,000 people remained missing in action after the war, historical reality has simply overwhelmed the ideal of a ‘good death’, while civilian massacres, such as those at My Lai and Ha My during the Tet Offensive of 1968, paradoxically created ‘bad death’ at home, causing ‘a representational crisis in social memory’ (2006:21). The bipolarity between the two forms of death also paralleled the bipolar order of the Cold War, which persisted in the official privileging of the deaths of revolutionary martyrs over those of ordinary civilians in Vietnamese state commemorations after 1975. Ritual is the recourse through which, over the years, people have been slowly working at mending relations with the dead, often having to improvise in the face of the unprecedented disruption. Shamans, in spite of strong disapproval from state authorities, still play an important role in this process, as vehicles of possession by the spirits, enabling them to make their wishes known to their kin. The living, for their part, gently encourage the souls to accept the ritual procedures designed to help them achieve their own transformations out of liminality. At the site of the massacre in Ha My, huge annual celebrations have developed for the dead, binding the community of survivors and descendants together in a surge of commensality and shared activity. These celebrations encapsulate all at once the three dimensions of memory that we have earlier referred to: the unsettled souls are imaginatively transformed into a trace, performatively brought into communion with the living in a ritual event, which in turn serves to sustain a trajectory, bridging past, present and future generations. What all this points to, from a comparative perspective, is the anomalous nature of psychoanalytic ideas of mourning as solely the work of the individual psyche and the relative ritual impoverishment of presentday Western cultures, especially where death is concerned. In most cultures at most times and places, and paradigmatically in the Vietnamese case, mourning is a collective effort. Kwon goes further in teasing out the contradictions between state-sponsored memorialisation of soldiers’ ‘heroic death’, and the marginalisation of civilian fighters and victims of the war, showing how national commemoration processes may conf lict at times with the interests of kin and communities. Timor-Leste is another case in which, without in any way essentialising cultural differences, the role of cultural institutions and processes demands to be understood. Between Indonesia and Timor-Leste there is a legacy of traumatic memory resulting from Indonesia’s brutal colonisation from 1975 until its appallingly mismanaged sudden decolonisation in 1999. Internationally sponsored efforts to promote justice and reconciliation included both the Serious Crimes Unit (SCU) set up by the United Nations to try grave violations of human rights committed in 1999, as well as the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR), which operated from 2002 to 2005 with a remit to hear less serious cases relating to the period of 1974 to 1999. But since practically all high-level perpetrators of the 1999 violence f led to Indonesia, against whom no significant pressure was brought to secure their surrender, many have questioned the efficacy of the criminal process. The SCU completed 55 trials and achieved 84 convictions of relatively low-level Timorese perpetrators, at a cost of US$20 million, but its work was severely hampered by lack of resources. Nevertheless, the process did go some way to establishing a historical record of the events of 1999, preventing future denials (Reiger and Wierda 2006:41). In Indonesia, the Law on Human Rights Courts of 2000 also led to the establishment of an Ad Hoc Court to hear cases relating to Timor-Leste. Only 18 individuals were tried as a result of this process; 338

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16 were acquitted and 1 was acquitted on appeal, while militia leader Eurico Guterres, the sole Timorese individual on trial, was the only one to be convicted, receiving a 10-year sentence for crimes against humanity. Not surprisingly, the Indonesian trials have been the subject of strong international criticism. A comparative approach is necessary to understand the functioning of truth and reconciliation commissions, or any other form of reconciliation process (Waterson 2009). Processes of transitional justice generally depart in significant ways from already established legal procedures, and each socio-political context is unique. In order to work, they must have both legal and ritual aspects; each aims to achieve something that has never been tried before in that society, and their outcomes are necessarily uncertain. Hence they demand a great deal of innovation. When people innovate, however, they also find it useful to seek for legitimacy in precedents that already exist within their own cultural repertoire. The South African TRC was saturated with Christian symbolism, which had powerful resonances for many (though not all) South Africans and helped to lend moral force and sacredness to the proceedings. In Timor-Leste, by contrast, the Community Reconciliation Procedures carried out by the CAVR between 2002 and 2006 were imaginatively modelled upon a customary ceremony for dispute settlement called biti bot or ‘unrolling the mat’. Flanked by village elders in sacred ritual attire and the representatives of the CAVR, victims had the opportunity to confront their perpetrators, question them as to why they committed the acts they did, and demand compensation (which in practice, to the surprise of the moderators, was often very modest). However, as dramatically detailed in the documentary film Passabe (Leong and Lee 2004), some notorious cases were left unsettled. At the village of Bobometo in Oecussi, around 80 young men were massacred by perpetrators from the neighbouring village of Passabe. The victims’ families, who have long-standing kinship ties to the Passabe villagers (and whose grief was thus exacerbated since they saw the perpetrators as ‘brothers’), requested a buffalo for each of the young men who was killed, to be sacrificed in order to complete their funeral rites. But the perpetrators long ago f led into Indonesia, and the remaining Passabe villagers are too impoverished to pay these fines. This unresolved conf lict is a source of continuing misery to the survivors, who phrase their symptoms in a local idiom, as ‘thinking too much’ (hanoin barak) (Sakti 2013). A Western-trained psychiatrist would certainly diagnose this condition as ‘depression’; but to assume that they are simply in a psychological state of arrested mourning would be to fail to take account of the collective character of mortuary ritual, as well as locally salient ideas about the traditional ritual recourse for dealing with ‘bad death’. In the Atoni Meto kinship system, marriage alliances are formed along particular pathways linking houses, creating clearly defined groups of wife-givers and wife-takers. The former are in a relationship of ritual superiority to their wife-takers. When someone dies a violent death, his kin are required to make a ritual payment to their wife-givers, who will then perform a rite to deliver the soul of the bad dead safely to the ‘ruler of the sky’ (Uis Neno). As one man explained to Sakti (2013:447), what made him ‘think too much’ was not dwelling on his son’s death – for he accepted that nothing can bring back the dead – but a ritual impasse. His wife-givers would regularly turn up at his house and shout at him, reproaching him because he was still unable to make the payment that would enable them to perform their ritual duties; this situation had simply endured for too long. Most recently, the villagers have appealed to the government for funds to help them remove this blockage in the ‘f low of life’ resulting from disrupted mortuary rituals. Outsiders failing to understand these structural factors prolonging distress are likely to offer inappropriate comments or support; from the government’s perspective, the money would be well spent, as the surest way to make progress toward healing the bitter rift between these communities. 339

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Conclusion: social transformations, memory trajectories and the right to memory In conclusion, we raise one question that applies potentially to several of our case studies; it concerns the implications of a failure to address past injustices. What happens when efforts at remembrance or redress fall through in the face of persistent official suppression or popular indifference to the point in which the protagonists simply become weary of their struggle, or those who actually experienced key events have already passed away? Sometimes a wellentrenched official narrative is capable of maintaining an iron grip even in the face of considerable political change, as we have shown in the case of Indonesia. Or, as in Singapore, a past generation of political activists, excluded from the victors’ dominant narrative, may in old age make a last-ditch attempt to recount their sufferings and enter their own perspectives into the collective consciousness, only to find a self-selected audience curious but the general public uncomprehending. For those who carry the burden of the past, whether they be victims of Suharto’s repression or the families of Thai students killed in the demonstrations of 1976, many of whom were too terrified to claim their children’s bodies from the police stations (Thongchai 2002), or Singapore’s Chinese-educated older generation who were marginalized during the post-independence decades (Kwok and Chia 2012), might such fatigue eventually induce, if not exactly forgetting, a sort of enervated resignation? What then is at stake in the work of memory in the contemporary world, characterised as it is by accelerated social change, intensified urbanization, technological advancement (especially in new media), and more general capitalist transformation? In Singapore, where the inhabitants find the whole fabric of the city continually being demolished and recreated all around them, the past is constantly being erased. This effect is only amplified by a national discourse whose future-oriented trajectory has no place for a more complex and diverse past. Moreover, the dominance of a globalized consumer ethos in Singapore exemplifies Connerton’s (2009) portrayal of the powerful amnesias created by capitalism’s commitment to obsolescence. The virtual present of new media absorbs a great deal of young people’s attention every day, and the pressures of the educational system leave little time free for daydreaming and imagination anyway. In this environment, it is increasingly difficult for young people to conjure the atmosphere of earlier decades in which their parents or grandparents had to act. Is it surprising, then, if many of them cannot see the point of revisiting the past, fail to make sense of what their elders are trying to communicate to them, or simply meet their stories with disbelief? Yet even here, a younger generation of historians, civil society activists and ordinary citizens is going against the grain by asserting their right to memory, being prepared to protest the continuing destruction of heritage and to ask searching questions about obfuscations and silences in the official narration of their history (Hong and Huang 2008; Barr and Trocki 2008; Loh and Liew 2010; Tan et al. 2011). One must ask whether and why this should matter; what is lost, if the losers are left out of the story? Our answer is that the stakes in the work of memory are ultimately moral. And here we recall Pierre Nora’s definition of a ‘site of memory’ (lieu de mémoire) as ‘any significant entity, whether material or non-material in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community’ (1996:xvii). In effect, every instance of the human will to remember in the contestation of memory is an appeal to recognize the legitimacy of alternative visions of social betterment. It constitutes an example of the prospective thrust of social memory, for what is suppressed or sustained in memory both informs and shapes the aspirations and character of a person or community, in the present and the future. 340

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Notes  1  Roosa (2006) provides the most searching examination to date of the September 30th Movement and how it went tragically wrong. Studies of the massacres of 1965–66 include Cribb (1990, 2002), Sudjatmiko (1992), Robinson (1995), Vickers (1998), Sulistyo (2000), Sanit (2000), and Kammen and McGregor (2012). Goodfellow (2002), Ida Bagus (2012), Parker (2003), Zurbuchen (2005), and Dwyer (2009, 2010) sensitively explore the process of contestation and recovery of social memory since the end of the Suharto era, as well as the continuing difficulties preventing survivors from speaking out or finding a suitable audience for their memories.  2  These violent reactions are vividly displayed in the film Shadow Play: Indonesia’s Years of Living Dangerously (2002) in a scene in which villagers disrupt an attempt to give decent burial to the remains of victims exhumed from a mass grave at Wonosobo in the mountains of Central Java. A groundbreaking international conference held on the topic of the 1965–66 killings at the National University of Singapore in June 2009, which included a number of Indonesian scholars, activists and survivors, could still not have been safely held in Jakarta (selected conference papers were subsequently published in Kammen and McGregor 2012).  3  The continuing presence of Pemuda Pancasila in local politics in North Sumatra is chillingly displayed in the film The Act of Killing (2012), while the re-emergence of militias as a factor in current Indonesian politics is discussed more generally by Cribb (2002) and Collins (2002). Lemelson’s film about Balinese survivors, 40 Years of Silence: An Indonesian Tragedy (2010), illustrates the tensions involved for survivors living as neighbours with perpetrators.  4  By April 2013, the film had had 500 screenings within Indonesia, but it has not been submitted to the censorship board for fear of incurring a ban that would make it illegal for Indonesians to screen it. That might invite possible attack on screenings by the army or paramilitary groups (Kitamura 2013). It has now been made available in Indonesia online. Errol Morris, who together with Werner Herzog became an executive producer of the film at a late stage of production, also provides an appraisal (Morris 2013).  5  This includes, for instance, a depiction of members of the leftist women’s movement, Gerwani, engaging in orgiastic sex with the coup leaders and dancing naked around the abducted generals, mutilating their bodies by gouging out eyes and severing their penises. This was entirely false because the autopsy, which Suharto himself signed, confirms that there was no such mutilation; but the lurid image of ‘Communist’ women in frenzy was used to suppress the formation of any independent feminist organisation throughout the New Order period. Wieringa learned from interviews with one woman who had been present as a volunteer at a training field near the site of the murders that after she was tortured and raped in prison, her captors forced her to take off her clothes and dance naked while they took pictures of her. These pictures, shot weeks after the September 30th incident, were later used as ‘proof’ of the accusations against Gerwani members (Wieringa 2009:10). The bizarre projections involved in the demonization of the PKI and Gerwani women, and the subsequent acts of violence against them, is strongly reminiscent of Michael Taussig’s (1987) thesis regarding the politics of terror.  6  One thinks here notably of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and most recently Guatemala, where in May 2013, former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, now age 86, was convicted of genocide against the Ixil Maya in the 1980s and sentenced to 80 years in prison.

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Filmography The Act of Killing. Dir.: Joshua Oppenheimer (2012). 159 min. Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell (Duch, le maître des forges de l’enfer). Dir.: Rithy Panh (2012b). 110 min. 40 Years of Silence: An Indonesian Tragedy. Dir.: Robert Lemelson (2010). 86 min. The Land of the Wandering Souls. Dir.: Rithy Panh (2000). 100 min. Passabe. Dir.: James Leong and Lynn Lee (2004). 111 min. Penghkianatan G30S/PKI. Dir.: Arifin C. Noer (1984). 271 min. Rice People. Dir.: Rithy Panh (1994). 125 min. Shadow Play: Indonesia’s Years of Living Dangerously. Dir.: Chris Hilton (2002). 55 min. S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine. Dir.: Rithy Panh (2003). 101 min.

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27 Japanese war memories and commemoration after the Great East Japan Earthquake Philip Seaton

Introduction Some experiences are engraved on the memory. I will never forget the Great East Japan Earthquake triple disaster – earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Station accident – of 11 March 2011 (referred to hereafter as simply ‘3/11’). At 2:46 that afternoon I was in Tokyo Station in the underground concourse near the bullet train ticket barriers. When the shaking started, I thought it was the long overdue ‘big one’ that is expected to hit the Kanto area. After the shaking abated, other stranded passengers and I gathered in front of the station’s big screens. They carried live pictures of the horrors unfolding a few hundred kilometers north in the coastal areas of the Tohoku region. An image of a car speeding along a coastal road as the tsunami swept in remains particularly vivid. The earthquake and tsunami claimed 15,883 lives with a further 2,676 missing. The clarity of my memories of that day is not simply a result of my personal experience. The effects on me (five hours stranded on a station platform) were insignificant compared to others. Memories of 3/11 are etched on my mind because of the collective meanings of that day and my awareness at the time that I was witnessing ‘history in the making’. Like the other ‘eleven’ – the 9/11 terror attacks on the US in 2001 – 3/11 was a psychological turning point after which ‘things would never be the same again’. In this chapter I explore how the psychological turning point of 3/11 created a paradigm shift in Japanese memories of the Asia-Pacific War, 1937–45. However, the seed for this paper was planted in my mind years before 3/11. While researching the air raid on Nagaoka (Niigata Prefecture) of 1 August 1945, I encountered explicit links between narratives of the Boshin War (1868–9), World War II and the 23 October 2004 Chuetsu Earthquake on the city’s website.1 I had lived in Nagaoka from 1998 to 2001 and knew that in local commemorations the two war narratives were linked as the times when Nagaoka was destroyed in war. But after 2004, the earthquake was superimposed onto the war narratives, generating a municipal narrative of local resilience and recovery from disaster. From this starting point, I initially explored the links between war memories and natural disasters on a metaphorical level. In Japan’s Contested War Memories (2007) I evoke a ‘war memories as seismic phenomenon’ metaphor to highlight how ideological rifts in Japanese 345

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historical memory cause the periodic eruption of controversies and political upheavals characteristic of Japanese war memories. In the wake of 3/11, however, the links seemed to go beyond the metaphorical. On a theoretical and empirical level, analysis of memories of war and 3/11 in Japan is an ideal opportunity to discuss the ‘past-present relation’ (Popular Memory Group 1998: 78) in a bidirectional manner: how memories of the more distant past (the war) infuse and inf luence the meanings/memories of the more immediate present (3/11) and how a major event in the immediate present may trigger a paradigm shift in memories of the more distant past. Throughout this chapter I focus on the latter and argue that it is a more conspicuous phenomenon than the former since 3/11, although I explore the former (references to the war infusing 3/11 narratives) in some detail. I start by presenting some lexical and metaphorical links between war and natural disaster. Then, I discuss the politics of government-sponsored war and/or disaster commemorations. Finally, I examine how natural disasters have affected war memories through a survey of local newspaper reportage following three disasters: 3/11, the Chuetsu Earthquake (2004) and the Hanshin (Kobe) Earthquake (1995). I conclude that while the 2004 and 1995 disasters had a clear impact on local memories and commemoration of war, 3/11 marks a paradigm shift in national war memories.

Lexical and metaphorical links between war and natural disaster The Chinese character 災 (sai) means disaster or calamity. It comprises two parts. The top half means river, and the bottom half means fire: water and fire – both bringers of life and destruction. The character exists in a number of compounds relating to natural disasters, such as 震災 (shinsai, earthquake), 被災地 (hisaichi, disaster zone) and 火災 (kasai, fire). It is an important character in a country that has experienced catastrophic disaster (defined as causing over 1,000 deaths) about once every 15 years over the last 1,400 years (Duus 2012: 175). It also exists in the compound 戦災 (sensai), meaning war damage. This lexical connection indicates a long-standing association between war and disaster in Japan. The connection is intuitive – both wars and natural disasters cause destruction, suffering and loss of life – but is particularly striking in the metaphorical associations between air raids and the tsunami. On a day like any other, a siren sounds, warning civilians of the approaching waves (of bombers). People f lee to evacuation points or shelters, but those who cannot make it to safety in time are engulfed by the f lames/waves. Even those who make it to the shelters sometimes find the shelters offer no protection. When the f lames/waves have receded, the destruction is complete. Only a few isolated shells of buildings remain. There is a crucial difference, however, between an air raid and a tsunami in that one is man-made and the other is, metaphorically speaking, an ‘act of God’. In Japanese, there is a lexical link here, too: 人災 jinsai (literally ‘person disaster’) means ‘man-made disaster’, while 天災 tensai (literally ‘heaven disaster’) means ‘natural disaster’. Using a natural disaster metaphor for a war, however, makes the man-made disaster of war seem to be something that ‘just happens’ and obscures the agency of both the Japanese people and the enemy. This is congruent with observations by the oral historians Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore Cook, who note that ‘war responsibility is not clearly established in the minds of many Japanese today, no matter how certain the rest of the world may be about it’ and ‘how rare are Japanese invocations of the enemy, or of hatred for the enemy, and how nearly the war becomes an enemy-less conf lict’ (1992: 15, 17). One might even hypothesize that these characteristics of Japanese war memories have their roots in the worldviews of a population used to being at the mercy of nature – whether earthquakes, typhoons or f looding. When 346

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the language of natural disaster infuses war discourses at the level of lexicon and metaphor, war memories easily gravitate toward a narrative of suffering at the hands of forces beyond one’s control. However, I have argued that while victim consciousness and/or the avoidance of responsibility allow a superficial appearance of national unity in war memories in Japan, ultimately responsibility discourses are the real forces that shape the contours of war memories from deep beneath the surface (Seaton 2007). These ‘ideological rifts’ are revealed whenever Japanese actions and agency are the objects of scrutiny. Vigorous debate exists in Japan on who was to blame for the war and in what form responsibility should be shouldered. We have already begun to see similar responsibility discourses emerging with regard to 3/11, despite the superficial national unity and ‘bonds among people’ (kizuna 絆) forged in communal victimhood (epitomized by the Ganbarō Nippon, Ganbarō Tōhoku slogan, ‘Do your best Japan, do your best Tohoku’). In particular, the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster precipitated a national debate about energy policy, which, as will be seen in the newspaper survey later, is analogous to the postwar debates about the actions of Japan’s military in denunciations of the ‘security myths’ of military/nuclear power. As in war debates, the responsibility discourses relating to 3/11 revolve around some key questions. Who owes an apology to whom for the widespread suffering and at what point will apologies be considered sufficient by victims? How much compensation should be paid by whom and to whom and can money ever really compensate people for their losses? Should people be brought to trial for their roles in the disaster? These immensely complex issues are still unfolding as this chapter goes to press and are not my primary concern here. Nevertheless, just as responsibility discourses have a pivotal role in Japan’s contested war memories, natural disasters have often produced a culture of blame (see Duus 2012: 176–9), and 3/11 is no exception. Memories of war and disaster, therefore, share many characteristics, but one of the key findings of the media survey below is that in the immediate aftermath of 3/11, references to the natural disaster permeated war discourses more than the other way round. To some extent this is a matter of chronology. As the more recent event, 3/11 is the contemporary context within which the wartime past is thought through. Nevertheless, there is also clear evidence of the wartime past infusing narratives of the natural disaster in the present. Following the Fukushima nuclear plant accident, many associations were made between those affected by nuclear contamination in Tohoku and the A-bomb victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Again there are close lexical links. The Japanese word for ‘people exposed to radiation’ is hibakusha (被曝者), and it is pronounced the same as the word for ‘A-bomb victims’ (被爆者), although the characters for the letters ‘baku’ are different (曝 means ‘exposure’ and 爆 means ‘explosion’). It is also a characteristic of the war memories literature that the words ‘Hiroshima’ and ‘Nagasaki’ may be written in the angular phonetic script katakana (which is usually used for foreign loan words) rather than Chinese characters: so, ヒロシマ rather than 広島 (Hiroshima). After 3/11, Fukushima (フクシマ) also came to be written in katakana as code for ‘nuclear victimhood’. Other metaphorical links include the way in which the so-called Fukushima fifty, the workers who stayed at their posts to bring the stricken nuclear power plant under control, described themselves and/or were described by the media as ‘kamikaze’, the workers on a suicidal mission to save the nation from greater disaster (Birmingham and McNeill 2012); and Ames and Koguchi-Ames (2012: 208–9) note how the American involvement in disaster relief during Operation Tomodachi following 3/11 created resonances with the occupation period. In sum, there are multiple ways in which discourses of war and natural disaster have become intermingled in Japan on lexical and metaphorical levels. We will see how these links 347

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manifest themselves in the war narratives of ordinary Japanese people in the final section of this chapter, but first let us turn to how 3/11 has infused official war memories and commemorations since 2011.

The politics of commemoration On 11 March 2012 a government-sponsored ceremony was held to mark the first anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake. It bore a striking resemblance to the Ceremony to Commemorate the War Dead held on 15 August each year. The emperor and empress, prime minister, senior politicians and representatives of the bereaved families paid their respects to the dead and missing. At 2:46 pm there was a minute’s silence preceded by the distinctive pip-pip-pip-pii and call for mokut ō (silent prayer) that precedes the minute’s silence at noon on 15 August. The similarities did not end there. The stages on which the ceremonies were performed bore a strong resemblance, as did the order of speeches and to some extent their content. The format of the ceremonies may be similar, but while the war-end anniversary ceremony commemorates fallen soldiers, the earthquake ceremony remembered civilian victims of a natural disaster. Ultimately, both ceremonies commemorate collective loss, and the government-sponsored commemorations constitute an official attempt to assign a particular meaning to that collective experience and thereby shape collective memories. By being deemed worthy of the highest form of state commemoration with the mourning led by the emperor and prime minister, the narratives are written into national memory, history and identity, and the experiences of the dead form a lesson for the living. Noteworthy here is the significant difference in the statuses afforded to the official commemorations of 3/11 and the Hanshin Earthquake of 1995. On 17 January 1996 a similar ceremony was held to mark that anniversary. But, the ceremony was held in Kobe rather than Tokyo and attended by the crown prince rather than the emperor (Yomiuri Shimbun 1996). This was a localized official commemoration in contrast to the nationalized commemorations for 3/11. This differing status is also evident in the newspaper surveys: the Hanshin Earthquake affected primarily local war memories, but 3/11 reshaped war memories across the nation. The national impact of 3/11 on war memories is also evident in the statements2 made by three successive prime ministers (Naoto Kan in 2011, Yoshihiko Noda in 2012, and Shinzō Abe in 2013) on the Hiroshima (6 August) and war-end (15 August) anniversaries. Links between the war and 3/11 first appeared two days after the earthquake, when Prime Minister Kan referred to 3/11 as ‘in some regards the most severe crisis in the 65 years since the end of the Second World War’. Then on 6 August, Kan used his speech at the Hiroshima anniversary ceremony to present a damning critique of pre-3/11 energy policy and offer a radical (and divisive) alternative vision. Japan is also working to revise its energy policy from scratch. I deeply regret believing in the ‘security myth’ of nuclear power and will carry out a thorough verification on the cause of this incident and implement fundamental countermeasures to ensure safety. At the same time, Japan will reduce its level of reliance on nuclear power generation with the aim of becoming a society that is not dependent on nuclear power. For his address at the Ceremony to Commemorate the War Dead on 15 August, Kan invoked the common theme of recovery. 348

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The disaster-stricken areas are now exerting every effort for recovery and reconstruction. Japan is a country that was able to recover from the ravages of World War II and overcome countless hardships thanks to the hard work of each and every Japanese citizen. With such an experience behind us, I am confident that we will absolutely be able to revitalize the affected regions and the entirety of Japan. This, I believe, is what those who sacrificed and worked so hard for this country in the past, would have wanted. However, in September 2011, Kan was replaced as prime minister by Yoshihiko Noda, who presided over the war anniversaries in 2012. Noda made significantly fewer cross-references between the war and 3/11 and at the Hiroshima ceremony backtracked on Kan’s energy policy by referring to a ‘reduced’ dependence on nuclear energy rather than the aim of becoming ‘not dependent’. His comments on 15 August relating to 3/11 were also much shorter than Kan’s: ‘For the sake also of the war dead who continued to hope for the stability and development of Japan, we must fulfill our mission to achieve the Rebirth of Japan through the reconstruction from the Great East Japan Earthquake.’ Following the return to power of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in December 2012, Prime Minister Shinzō Abe avoided any references to the Fukushima crisis in his speech at the Hiroshima ceremony in both 2013 and 2014 and limited his references to 3/11 at the war-end anniversary in 2013 to the following nondescript comments: ‘Domestically, we have arrived at the present day by helping each other out and overcoming socioeconomic changes and crises wrought by natural catastrophes any number of times’. References to 3/11 disappeared from the address in 2014. These are substantially different official ways of incorporating 3/11 into war commemorations. There are three possible readings. First, there was a knee-jerk reaction through a sense of crisis to link the war and disaster immediately after 3/11, but by 2013 things were calmer and by 2014 war-related prime ministerial addresses had reverted to their pre-3/11 format. The second is that politicians of different ideological hues play to their electoral power bases and articulate their agendas in different ways. Kan’s political background is in human rights activism. On history issues, he displayed progressive credentials by pushing through an apology to South Korea on the centenary of the Japanese annexation of the peninsula in August 2010, despite considerable opposition from the political right wing. Noda, meanwhile, was the son of a Self-Defense Forces soldier and was considerably more conservative than Kan on history issues (he vocally disagreed with Kan’s apology to South Korea, for example). Abe, by contrast, is a well-known nationalist. In 2013, in a highly significant move, he reversed two decades of Japanese government protocol by removing the references to suffering across Asia as a result of Japanese militarism from his address at the government-sponsored ceremony on 15 August.3 Instead, Abe limited his comments to thanking the Japanese war dead, saying, ‘The peace and prosperity that we now enjoy have been built upon the sacrifices of you who gave up your precious lives’. Furthermore, he backed up this sentiment by paying his respects to the war dead at the controversial Yasukuni Shrine4 on 26 December 2013. And rather than regretting the ‘security myth’ regarding nuclear energy, Abe was instrumental in securing Japan’s first nuclear exports since 3/11, when a trip to Istanbul coincided with a deal between Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and the Turkish government to build four reactors (Ono 2013). The third potential reading is that Kan knew that he was on the way out as prime minister in August 2011. His comments exhibit the freedom of a prime minister who no longer needed to worry about his political future and could just say what he wanted. His successors, by contrast, were either a few months away from an election (Noda in 2012) or at the beginning of a period of majority government (Abe in 2013) and could not afford, therefore, to disregard the implicitly obvious position of the conservative elite and bureaucracy: despite 349

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considerable public discourse linking the war and 3/11, the official narrative should not overstate the connections. Put simply, these politicians with different backgrounds, interpretations of history and political prospects came to different views about the political capital to be gained by linking the war and 3/11, with Kan promoting the link and Noda and Abe eschewing it. In addition to the politics of commemoration, there is a significant religious angle to commemorations of both war and 3/11. Given the constitutional separation of religion and the state in Japan (article 20 of the constitution), official commemorations must be secular. When politicians have been involved in religious rituals – such as worshipping (sanpai) at Yasukuni Shrine – they have faced lawsuits accusing them of violating the constitution. However, individuals have their freedom of religion protected by the constitution and are free to memorialize in a religious manner, typically with hands clasped (often holding Buddhist prayer beads, juzu) and head bowed in silent prayer. The constitutional separation of religion and the state is a considerable barrier in official commemorations. As Christopher Hood argues, in Japan religion is usually an issue of practice more than doctrine, and the dividing line between religion and culture is difficult to identify. Generally speaking, people engage in Shintō rituals earlier in life and in Buddhist rituals toward the end of life, although the delineation between religions is not significant in the realm of ancestor worship (2013: 203–4). In the case of war and disaster, however, there is also the issue of ‘untimely death’ (ibid.) and the risk of becoming muenbotoke, ‘unrelated spirits’ that are not related to and do not receive ritual care from the living members of their household. These souls are considered to be in an eternal state of suffering and are potentially dangerous for the local community, who would carry out rituals for the spirits of muenbotoke [(Boret 2014: 63–4)]. Yet the state cannot become involved in any of these religious rituals, even if (as many argue) such rituals for memorializing the dead can be categorized as ‘Japanese culture’ more than ‘religion’. Nevertheless, religion inevitably encroaches on official commemorations. Prime ministerial worship at Yasukuni Shrine is the most obvious example. Another is the use of the term ‘sacrifice’. Sacrifice comes from the French words ‘sacre’ and ‘faire’, ‘to make sacred’. Sacrifice, therefore, means to die for some higher meaning or purpose. The Japanese term, gisei (犠牲) has virtually the same meaning as ‘sacrifice’ in English as its etymology is in Chinese religious rituals in which living things are offered to gods or sacred things (Takahashi 2005: 20). The war dead are often praised for their ‘precious sacrifice’ (see the comments made by Prime Minister Abe on 15 August 2013 cited above) and the word giseisha (‘sacrificed person’) is ubiquitous in media references to 3/11 or during commemorative ceremonies to mean ‘victims’ or ‘the dead’. For Tetsuya Takahashi, a well-known critic of Yasukuni Shrine worship, religious rhetoric and politics are inextricably linked via the ‘sacrifice system’, which is created and perpetuated when the benefit of some is achieved through the sacrifice of the lives (life itself, health, daily existence, possessions, dignity, hope etc.) of others. This sacrifice is usually concealed, but it is justified and eulogized as ‘precious sacrifice’ by the community (state, people, society, corporations etc.) [(2012: 42)]. The rhetoric of sacrifice and the offering of reverence to victims via state commemorations, therefore, are essentially a means for the powerful to cast the sufferings of the weak as 350

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noble, while retaining all the benefits accrued because the weak have suffered on their behalf. Takahashi, himself from Fukushima, casts the location of nuclear power stations in the provinces as one example of the sacrifice system in practice, and the people of Fukushima driven from their homes are classic giseisha, sacrificed people, in the sense of the exploited weak. Takahashi (2005) makes similar arguments regarding Yasukuni Shrine and the wartime sacrifice system – ordinary soldiers are drafted via conscription, make the ultimate sacrifice, and are then revered at Yasukuni Shrine by politicians and/or the state – and also the sacrifice of the Fukushima fifty who fought to bring the Fukushima nuclear reactor under control (Takahashi 2012: 36). Where the wartime and 3/11 commemorative systems really converge, however, is in another, much less publicized form of official commemorations for victims of 3/11. Immediately following the earthquake, Japan’s Self-Defense Forces (SDF) were mobilized to help with searching for victims, distributing aid and clearing debris. A small number of SDF personnel died while serving in the disaster zones (the first reported case was an officer in his fifties who collapsed while on disaster relief duty in April 2011). These victims of 3/11 were commemorated at the annual ceremony for those who ‘died in the line of duty’ (殉職 junshoku) at the SDF’s headquarters in Ichigaya, Tokyo.5 In this way, official commemorations of 3/11 even became militarized, as they were too when SDF personnel engaged in military-style tributes to victims, such as saluting the coffins of tsunami victims (for a photo, see Sankei Shinbunsha 2012: 52). These instances of militarized commemoration bring us full circle back to where this section began: discussions of how war commemorations provided the template for 3/11 commemorations at government-sponsored ceremonies to remember the dead. In summary, we have seen that both war and 3/11 memories and commemorations have become highly politicized. Talking about war commemoration, Ashplant, Dawson and Roper state: The politics of war [disaster] memory and commemoration always has to engage with mourning and with attempts to make good the psychological and physical damage of war [disaster]; and wherever people undertake the tasks of mourning and reparation, a politics is always at work [(2004: 9)]. Replacing ‘war’ with ‘disaster’ in this quote neatly captures the dynamics of 3/11 commemorations. In many ways, Japan was drawn together by the tragedy. Each year a character is selected to represent the mood of the year. In 2011 it was 絆 kizuna, ‘bonds’, which reveals the togetherness people felt after the disaster. Yet the superficial image of togetherness post-3/11 conceals deeper divisions. In this macro sense, collective memories of 3/11 bear considerable resemblance to war memories. On the surface there is a common narrative of suffering, recovery and togetherness, but at the heart of memories of both war and disaster one must engage the discourses of responsibility and a politicized commemoration process, which are where the considerable ‘fault lines’ in collective memories lie.

Popular memories in local newspapers The last part of this chapter presents content analysis of prefectural newspaper reportage in Fukushima, Niigata and Hyogo to establish the linkages made between memories of war and earthquakes in the media. All three surveys centre on the period of ‘August commemorations’ 351

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(Seaton 2007: 107–30), when war reporting is clustered. The objects of the three surveys varied: letters to the editor in the Fukushima Minpō, 2010–12; editorials in the Niigata Nippō, 2004–12; and general war reporting in the Kōbe Shinbun in August 1995 and 2011. This is largely due to the differing formats of the newspaper archives and differing time spans (three years, nine years and sixteen years respectively).6

Letters to the editor in Fukushima Minpō For the survey of the letters-to-the-editor page Minna no hiroba (‘People’s Plaza’) in the Fukushima Minp ō, I categorized all readers’ letters published 1–31 August 2010–12 into ‘warrelated’, ‘both war- and disaster-related’, and ‘unrelated’. The results are in Table 27.1. In total, 615 letters were published (typically 7 per day). Letters that addressed war numbered 137 (22.3 per cent), and there were clearly more war letters in 2012 than the previous two years. Of these 137 letters, 46 explicitly linked war to natural disaster. No letters linked war and natural disaster in 2010. In 2011, over half the letters linked war and 3/11, although in 2012 this dropped to just over 40 per cent. Overall, the letters exhibited some clear characteristics. First, war-related letters were overwhelmingly from older people (around 60 per cent were from people over 70). Second, virtually all letters wished for peace, and many employed what might be called ‘classic Japanese victim consciousness’: this is how we suffered, which is why war is bad and we wish for peace. Third, there seemed to be a strong editorial hand in selecting letters with a distinctively conservative hue. While there was virtually no acknowledgement of or reference to Japanese aggression, there were critiques of Japanese apologies or calls for politicians to worship at Yasukuni Shrine. The sample of letters, therefore, is skewed demographically and ideologically, but nevertheless it indicates widespread infusion of the 3/11 narrative into war memories in 2011–12 in a number of distinctive patterns. First is the ‘double victimhood narrative’: during the war we suffered, and now we suffer as a result of 3/11. Sometimes the argument was made in abstract terms, but others had stories to tell of personal double victimhood. On 13 August 2011 an 80-year-old man described losing his house twice, first during an air raid and then in the tsunami; and an 85-year-old man recounted his double exposure to radiation as a young soldier in Nagasaki and then in Fukushima. Second were ‘twist of fate’ tales linking the war and 3/11. A 78-year-old man (12 August 2011) described how an uncle had died in a Kaiten (kamikaze submarine) during the war. The uncle’s younger brother followed his brother into the Kaiten corps but the war ended a week before his mission. Wanting to live near the sea to ‘be near his brother’, the surviving uncle moved to Iwaki city, where he was swept away by the tsunami on 3/11. Third, some people spoke of how 3/11 reminded them of the ‘importance of remembering’ the war. A 44-year-old woman described how 3/11 made her realize she had always Table 27.1  War-related letters in the Fukushima Minpō newspaper Year

Total letters

About war (% of total)

About war and 3/11 (% of war letters)

2010 2011 2012 Total

211 198 206 615

35 (16.6%) 37 (18.7%) 65 (31.6%) 137 (22.3%)

– (– %) 19 (51.4%) 27 (41.5%) 46 (33.6%)

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taken peace for granted (17 August 2012). Meanwhile, on 25 August 2011, a 45-year-old woman felt 2011 was a year to make one think of the importance of life. Such sentiments revealed that 3/11 generated empathy among members of the postwar generation for the feelings of fear, loss and grief of the war generation. Fourth, some expressed a ‘sense of betrayal’ after both the war and 3/11. A 58-year-old man (on 17 August 2011) called 3/11 a ‘second defeat in war’, saying that the myth that the kamikaze would save Japan was revealed to be false just like the myth of nuclear safety. An 84-year-old man mentioned the myth of the unsinkable Battleship Yamato in a similar context on 30 August 2011. Finally, many letter writers used the letters page to make simple appeals. ‘No more war’ and ‘No more nuclear energy’ were ubiquitous, while an 82-year-old man (22 August 2011) exhorted his compatriots to join together after 3/11 as people had done after the war to work for the recovery of Japan.

Editorials in the Niigata Nippō The next survey places linkages between war and disaster in a broader historical context. On 23 October 2004, the Chuetsu Earthquake badly damaged rural areas near the city of Nagaoka, Niigata Prefecture. Unlike 3/11, however, the death toll was relatively low (68 fatalities), and there was no ‘warlike’ destruction of neighbourhoods by either waves or fire. This helps explain why the Chuetsu Earthquake precipitated few comparisons with war in the local broadsheet, the Niigata Nippō. A survey of editorials during the month of August for the period 2004–12 revealed that 43 editorials tackled the war and/or natural disasters. However, the two were not explicitly linked until an editorial on 6 August 2011 that declared that post3/11 the Hiroshima anniversary had been given ‘new meaning’ and that it was the duty of Japan to learn the lessons of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Fukushima (all written in katakana as code for nuclear victimhood) (Niigata Nippō 2011a). Then on the eve of the war-end anniversary, the war and 3/11 were linked to the proposed relocation of the US Marine Corps Air Station Futenma in Okinawa and territorial disputes with South Korea, Russia and China in a broad discussion of war and peace issues post-3/11 (Niigata Nippō 2011b). The paper’s editorial stance on war was also an issue. The Niigata Nipp ō has a ‘progressiveleaning stance’ (see Seaton 2007: 23) on war history. In contrast to the various voices in Fukushima Minp ō calling for prime ministers to worship at Yasukuni Shrine, the Niigata Nipp ō (2006) told Prime Minister Junichirō Koizumi not to go in its war-end anniversary editorial (ultimately, Koizumi did worship on that day). Even in its editorial on the sixtieth anniversary of the Nagaoka air raid in 2005 (the first anniversary since the Chuetsu Earthquake), the paper did not link the air raid and earthquake but stated: ‘Japan was the victim of American air raids. But, for neighbouring Asian countries Japan was an aggressor and perpetrator. It is required of us to pass on memories of the air raid and war correctly, including the burdensome parts’ (Niigata Nipp ō 2005). This progressive-leaning ‘Japan was both victim and perpetrator’ framework in war coverage is not transferable to coverage of natural disasters: Japan can suffer at the hands of an earthquake, but it cannot aggress against one. Overall, the inability of the Chuetsu Earthquake to instigate a paradigm shift in even local memories of the war within Niigata reveals the lack of any significant inf luence on national memories compared to 3/11. Ultimately, the Nagaoka case study highlights that not all war and disaster narratives form a natural comparison. The linkage of war and disaster narratives in Nagaoka that had originally drawn my attention to this issue, therefore, is actually a narrative of recovery rather than war/disaster. 353

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Reportage in the Kōbe Shinbun The final newspaper survey looks more generally at the K ōbe Shinbun’s reportage in August 1995 and August 2011. This survey indicates how the Hanshin Earthquake of 1995 lies between the Chuetsu Earthquake of 2004 and 3/11 not only in the death toll (6,434 fatalities) but also in its impact on war memories. First, a survey of the letters-to-the-editor page revealed quite different patterns to the letters in the Fukushima Minpō. In both 1995 and 2011, the paper dedicated five days of its letters page to war-related letters (10–13, 15 August 1995 and 9–13 August 2011). In 1995, there were 6 out of 39 letters (15.4 per cent) that linked the war and the Hanshin Earthquake, which is considerably lower than the percentage of letters linking war and disaster in Fukushima Minp ō (see Table 27.1). In 2011, only 1 letter out of 35 linked war and disaster. The explanation for this is probably best given by one of the letter writers in 1995, a 70-year-old woman who on 12 August 1995 said that while walking along the streets in 1945 and 1995 might have been similar in terms of appearance, the psychological damage in 1945 was much greater. ‘I survived that war. There’s nothing that can be more frightening than that.’ In other words, there was no real comparison between the experience of war and disaster, or it was just a superficial one while the Hanshin Earthquake and war were inherently different experiences. This did not mean there were no connections in general reportage: for example, in one front-page article there was a photo and a report about an event to commemorate A-bomb victims by f loating lanterns down a river in Nishinomiya (in Kobe), which doubled as a commemoration for the victims of the earthquake (K ōbe Shinbun 1995a). But, the experience of natural disaster has to be particularly ‘warlike’ for the comparison to be convincing. The Hanshin Earthquake was relatively warlike and the Chuetsu Earthquake hardly so, but 3/11 was highly warlike in terms of the indiscriminate destruction caused, the numbers of deaths and evacuees, the associations to Hiroshima created by the Fukushima accident, and by being the greatest national emergency since World War II. Editorials in the Kōbe Shinbun echo this conclusion. On the war-end anniversary in 1995, an editorial stated simply: ‘War damage (sensai) and earthquakes (shinsai) are completely different. But for people who experienced the war, the terrible spectacle of the Hanshin Earthquake looks familiar to the burnt out areas following an air raid’ (Kōbe Shinbun 1995b). Nevertheless, the fact that the newspaper’s editorial for the war-end anniversary in 1995 (the fiftieth anniversary, which had precipitated a deluge of retrospectives about the war in Japan and around the world) was framed in terms of the Hanshin Earthquake in itself reveals just what a huge contemporary context the earthquake was in which the wartime past was being thought through. In 2011 the newspaper’s editorial on 15 August linked the war and 3/11 by telling the story of the Kamaishi War Museum. During the war, Kamaishi was a steelmaking town that lost 750 lives when it was shelled by the US Navy. The museum opened in the summer of 2010 only to be washed away on 3/11 (Kōbe Shinbun 2011). Just as the various natural disasters that have struck Japan in the postwar period have added new layers of memories over the war memories, so too on occasion have natural disasters wiped away memories of war, not only in the destruction of sites, such as the Kamaishi Museum, but also by taking the lives of many who survived the war only to perish at the hand of mother nature in the rural coastal villages of Tohoku, the mountain villages of Niigata, or the older and more f lammable districts of Kobe.

Conclusions This chapter examines how memories of war and disaster have become intertwined in Japan. Memories of disaster are diverse, not only in the nature of experience but also in the 354

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competing discourses of blame that they generate. When mixed with Japan’s contested war memories an extremely complex set of interactions occurs. The level of integration between war and disaster memories depends on how ‘warlike’ the experiences of disaster, and how ‘disastrous’ (or beyond one’s own control) the war experiences were. The integration happened most clearly post-3/11, although it was much in evidence back in 1995, too. Ideological discourses also significantly affect the type of comparisons that can be made and the lessons that can be drawn; and whether individuals have experienced one, both or neither also shapes the contours of personal narratives. Ultimately, memories are the way in which the past is thought through in the present. Any major event in the life of a nation, such as a major natural disaster, will have the power to affect interpretations of the past. In Japan, post-3/11 memories of war and disaster have clearly become intertwined to the point where any in-depth discussion of one must engage, even if only to a brief extent, discussion of the other. In this sense, 3/11 generated a paradigm shift in the study of war memories in Japan. The numerous attempts by politicians and pundits to declare the ‘end of the postwar’ have never really taken root and the war commemorations in 2015 were still described in the media using the phrase ‘postwar 70’. Without leaving its postwar behind, Japan has now entered the post-3/11 age in which energy policy, life values, national priorities and war memories will all be thought through in the context of the tragedy that struck the Tohoku region in the hours following 2:46 pm on 11 March 2011.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to Sébastien Penmellen Boret, Anna Lisa Tota and Trever Hagen for their invaluable comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Notes  1  The URL I saw is no longer available.  2  The statements are available online at www.kantei.go.jp under ‘Speeches and Statements by the Prime Minister’.  3  The first references to Asia’s suffering were made by Morihiro Hosokawa in 1993 after the LDP’s historic electoral defeat that ended its 38 years in power. The 15 August commemorations are for Japan’s military war dead and are attended by around 5,000 bereaved relatives. The practice of mentioning the suffering of people in Asia had always been contentious for conservatives in Japan, because it seemed to negate the sacrifices of the Japanese war dead.  4  Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo has apotheosized the souls of 2.46 million soldiers or people ‘attached to the military’ who perished in wars from the mid–nineteenth century to 1945. Ever since the enshrinement of 14 class-A war criminals in 1978, visits by prime ministers have been interpreted internationally as condoning Japanese aggression.  5  There were also a number of reported suicides among soldiers traumatized by their experiences in the disaster zones.  6  The Fukushima Minpō is on DVD-Rom, which allows both keyword searches and viewing of complete pages of the newspaper; the Niigata Nippō is an online archive allowing only keyword searches for individual articles; and the Kōbe Shinbun is on microfilm, which allows for viewing pages in the original format but not for keyword searches. Keyword searches in the Fukushima Minpō brought up large numbers of readers’ letters mentioning both war (sensō) and earthquake (shinsai), so it was decided to do a content analysis of the letters page, which could be printed out as individual pages from the DVD-Rom. This survey could be replicated in the Kōbe Shinbun, which is on microfilm, but could not be replicated using the Niigata Nippō online database. However, adding the keyword ‘editorial’ (shasetsu) to the database search in the Niigata Nippō allowed for a focused survey of editorials about war and disaster across a long time span. The Niigata Nippō and Fukushima Minpō surveys were carried out in August 2013 at Nagaoka Municipal Library and Aizu-Wakamatsu Municipal Library respectively. The Kōbe Shinbun survey was carried out in October 2013 at the National Diet Library in Tokyo. 355

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Bibliography Ames, C. and Koguchi-Ames, Y. (2012) ‘Friends in Need: “Operation Tomodachi” and the Politics of US Military Disaster Relief in Japan’. In J. Kingston (ed) Natural Disaster and Nuclear Crisis in Japan: Response and Recovery after Japan’s 3/11, Routledge: London. Ashplant, T. G., Dawson, G. and Roper, M. (2004) ‘The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration: Contexts, Structures and Dynamics’. In T. G. Ashplant, G. Dawson and M. Roper (eds) Commemorating War: The Politics of Memory, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Birmingham, L. and McNeill, D. (2012) ‘Meltdown: On the Front Lines of Japan’s 3.11 Disaster’, The Asia-Pacific Journal, Volume 10, Issue 45, No. 1, November 5, 2012. Available online at www.japanfocus. org/-David-McNeill/3849 (accessed 5 November 2013). Boret, S. P. (2014) Japanese Tree Burial: Ecology, Kinship and the Culture of Death, Abingdon: Routledge. Cook, H. T. and Cook, T. F. (1992) Japan at War: An Oral History, New York: The New Press. Duus, P. (2012) ‘Dealing with Disaster’. In J. Kingston (ed) Natural Disaster and Nuclear Crisis in Japan: Response and Recovery after Japan’s 3/11, Routledge: London. Hood, C. P. (2013) ‘Disaster and Death in Japan’. In H. Suzuki (ed) Death and Dying in Contemporary Japan, Abingdon: Routledge. Kōbe Shinbun (1995a) ‘Heiwa negai tōrō nagashi’ (Lantern Floating Hoping for Peace), 6 August. ——. (1995b) ‘Shinsai ga kono 50-nen o toikakeru’ (The Earthquake Makes One Think about the Last 50 Years), 15 August. ——. (2011) ‘Sh sen no hi’ (The War End Anniversary), 15 August. Niigata Nippō (2005) ‘Nagaoka k sh 60-nen: jidai ni kataritsugu taisetsusa’ (Sixtieth Anniversary of the Nagaoka Air Raid: The Importance of Passing It Down to the Next Generation), 1 August. ——. (2006) ‘61-kaime no sh sen kinenbi: chinkon no shizukesa wa doko he’ (The Sixty-First War End Anniversary: Where Did the Quietness of the Requiem Go?), 15 August. ——. (2011a) ‘Genbaku no hi: “kaku to ningen” wo toinaosu’ (The Hiroshima Anniversary: Rethinking ‘Nuclear Energy and People’), 6 August. ——. (2011b) ‘Asu “sh sen no hi”: heiwa e no ashidori tashika ni’ (War End Anniversary Tomorrow: A Real Step toward Peace), 14 August. Ono, K. (2013) ‘Abe Oversees Japan’s 1st Nuclear Plant Export after 2011 Disaster’. The Asahi Shinbun, 30 October. Available online at http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/AJ201310300043 (accessed 12 November 2013). Popular Memory Group (1998) ‘Popular Memory: Theory, Politics, Methods’. In R. Perks and A. Thomson (eds) The Oral History Reader, London: Routledge. Sankei Shinbunsha (2012) Higashi Nihon Daishinsai: 1-nen no zenkiroku (The Great East Japan Earthquake: A Record of the Year), Tokyo: Sankei Shinbunsha. Seaton, P. A. (2007) Japan’s Contested War Memories: The ‘Memory Rifts’ in Historical Consciousness of World War II, London: Routledge. Takahashi, T. (2005) Kokka to gisei (The State and Sacrifice), Tokyo: NHK Books. ——. (2012) Gisei no shisutemu: Fukushima, Okinawa (The Sacrifice System: Fukushima, Okinawa), Tokyo: Sh eisha Shinsho. Yomiuri Shimbun (1996) ‘Sono asa, inoru Kōbe’ (That Morning, Kobe prays), 17 January.

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Disasters kill as many people as wars do. Yet, while wars and political atrocities dominate memory studies, memory of disaster has received scant scholarly attention. Disasters, however, can enrich our understanding of memory in various ways. In this chapter, I provide an overview of the scholarship of memory and disasters and make some preliminary suggestions for further research. I start with a discussion of unaddressed issues in Durkheim’s theory of memory and then move on to two themes in research on disaster and memory: social and political interpretations of disaster, trauma, and memory in various historical contexts and commemorations for disaster victims and their relations to cultural and political changes around the world. In the end, I suggest a new direction for disaster memory research: integrating the topic to the developing “cosmopolitan memory” agenda.

Durkheim’s theory of memory and disaster Emile Durkheim, a pioneer of the field of collective memory, includes disasters as one of the events that threaten human communities. These communities respond to disasters by rituals, particularly what he terms “piacular rites,” including mourning, praying, and engaging in some unusual symbolic practices, such as tooth extraction. In a widely cited chapter on mourning in his book, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim contends that mourning is not a spontaneous expression of individual emotions but a moral obligation imposed by a society on its members to confirm its cohesiveness and unity at the moment of loss. Thus, although disasters cause devastation and death, they also bring people together and reconfirm the community’s solidarity. These piacular rites perform the same function as joyful rites. Durkheim claims: When society is going through events that sadden, distress, or anger it, it pushes its members to give witness to their sadness, distress, or anger through expressive actions. It demands crying, lamenting, and wounding oneself and others as a matter of duty. It does so because those collective demonstrations, as well as the moral communion they simultaneously bear witness to and reinforce, restore to the group the energy that the events threated to take away, and thus enables it to recover its equilibrium [([1912] 1995: 415–416)]. 357

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Nevertheless, Durkheim stops here and leaves at least two important issues unaddressed. First, relations between disaster, community, and memory. In other words, what is a disaster? How do people make sense of disasters and the traumatic memory left on the community? The second issue is about mourning’s object, that is, mourning for whom? The following sections will begin from where Durkheim stops and address these two issues.

Disaster, trauma, and memory Durkheim views disaster as something outside of the community and befalling the community’s solidarity. This understanding of disaster, however, is little more than an outdated and conventional conception of disaster. It contradicts a widely accepted definition among modern disaster researchers. According to Kreps, “[d]isasters are non-routine events in societies or their larger subsystems (e.g., regions and communities) that involve conjunctions of physical conditions with social definitions of human harm and social disruption” (2001: 3718, italics added). This definition shows two points that most disaster researchers today agree upon. First, disaster is social. An earthquake per se is not a disaster; rather, it is a geological phenomenon. An earthquake that happens in an uninhabited desert without any immediate or long-term impacts on humans is not a disaster but a “hazard.” What makes an earthquake—a natural hazard—a disaster is its detrimental impacts on a community: for example, collapsed buildings, broken roads, and heavy casualties. Second, disaster is rooted in the social structure of a community and reveals problems in the community rather than threatens the community from outside, an idea Durkheim implies in his theory. A disaster’s destruction may be explained by social reasons instead of an earthquake’s magnitude. For example, a building may collapse in an earthquake because construction codes were not strictly implemented; or there were no codes at all; or there were design f laws; or there was corruption in the government contracting process that resulted in substandard construction; or the building was built on an earthquake fault line for economic and social reasons. At a deeper level, the collapse of buildings could also reveal crevices in social structures: buildings in wealthy communities survive but those in impoverished areas of the same city collapse. Explanations along this line reveal “social vulnerability” to an external natural or technical hazard. To reduce the vulnerability, a set of intervention practices, which are termed “mitigation” in disaster management, need to be done before the disaster. This conceptualization of disaster challenges Durkheim’s functional conception of disaster and commemoration. If a disaster is social rather than natural, it is the community’s own problems that cause the disaster. We certainly cannot deny that disasters sometimes bring the community together, but disasters usually make social and political issues within the community more visible. In this sense, Durkheim’s functional idea of “the social” has its limitations. We need to expand our scope of disaster memory from its functions for community solidarity to political and social issues intertwined with traumatic memories left by disasters. These issues are interpreted differently in different historical and political contexts by people with different social characteristics and have different impacts on subsequent social processes. An issue central to memories of a disaster is how to make sense of the disaster and the death and destruction it brings about. Why is there a massive disaster? Why me or us? Why do I or we have to suffer so much? In most times of human history, people interpret the devastation, casualties, and traumas as a result of external hazards and supernatural forces instead of the society’s own problems. In the Western world before the Enlightenment, disasters—mainly plagues, f loods, and earthquakes—were believed to be “acts of God.” For example, plagues 358

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were believed to be caused by Apollo’s arrows and Medusa’s snakes. In Christianity, f loods were believed to be God’s punishment for the sins of man. The first clash between modern conceptualizations of disaster and pre-modern theodicy in the West happened after a deadly earthquake hit Lisbon, a prosperous and vibrant commercial center at the time, in 1755. The earthquake seriously devastated the city and killed a large number of people, and estimates of the casualties ranged from 10,000 to 100,000. The Lisbon earthquake was widely seen as the first “modern” disaster, because the debate it provoked paved the way for modern conceptions of disasters. The debate took place between two prominent intellectuals, Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on how modern people should make sense of the horrible earthquake in Lisbon or suffering in general. At the time of the Lisbon earthquake, the prevailing mood in Europe, in both public and intellectual discourses, was an optimism that the world was a good place in which everything that happened was on a long view likely to be “for the best,” and so they lived their lives as happily as they could, very little troubled by any responsibility for the alleviation of collective unhappiness [(Kendrick 1956: 182)]. This optimism is reflected in Leibniz’s Theodicy (1705), particularly in this statement: “[T]his world is the best of all possible worlds,” or, more precisely, in the public misuse of this complicated philosophical statement (Murray and Greenberg 2013). But Voltaire picked up the public misuse of Leibniz’s philosophy as a symptom of the popular optimism in his Poem on the Lisbon Disaster (1756). The poem was written in a deep sorrow about the Lisbon residents’ suffering and raised a provocative question that challenged the optimism: If this world is the best of all possible worlds created by a benevolent God, then why does mankind have to suffer so much? Voltaire’s attack on optimism disturbed Rousseau, who wrote a letter to Voltaire to express his disagreement. Rousseau contended that the world is still the best one created by God with the least possible evil. It was mankind that should be responsible for the majority of suffering. For example, probably not so many Lisbon residents would have died if they had not crowded themselves into dangerous buildings. This argument defended the faith in an omnipotent and loving God and, somewhat unintendedly, indicated an idea very close to the modern social scientific inquiry of disasters: Disasters are always social instead of caused by a supernatural force (Dynes 2000). Voltaire wrote a satire novella Candide: or, Optimism ([1759] 2005) as an indirect answer to Rousseau as well as a caricature elaboration of his philosophical attack on optimism. The main character is Candide, a naïve young man who travels with Pangloss, a philosopher with unshakable faith in “the best of all possible worlds.” After the two men survive a shipwreck and land in Lisbon on a plank, the earthquake happens. They not only witness the tragedies and horrible human behaviors but also become victims of human atrocities. Pangloss is beaten and hanged. But when asked if he still believed “this world is the best of all possible,” Pangloss claims that he has not changed his philosophical faith, and “besides Leibniz could not have been wrong.” The earthquake and the intellectual debates undoubtedly provoked a suspicion about God’s divine rationality. Along another direction, Rousseau’s defense of the old optimism suggested something new: It was the mitigation problem and humans’ self-interests that caused the trauma and suffering. Immanuel Kant, who then was a twenty-four-year-old young man, also followed this scientific thinking and collected all available reports and materials about 359

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the earthquake and wrote a book that describes and explains the geological feature of the earthquake. In this sense, the Lisbon earthquake started two lines of thoughts about disasters: a suspicion about the optimism of God’s providence and a shift of focus from supernatural forces to social features of disasters. Both lines paved the way for the modern views of disasters and trauma. Pre-modern interpretations of disasters in other cultures, especially more secular cultures, did not experience such a dramatic change from supernatural to modern social-scientific interpretations. For example, traditional Chinese culture of disaster viewed natural disasters as a sign for the “heaven” to demonstrate its wrath toward the current rulers’ moral defects and policy failures. As “sons of heaven,” emperors must, at least symbolically, “incriminate” themselves for their problematic moral conduct, which was believed to cause people’s sufferings in the disasters. A regime’s failure to respond to a massive disaster and its aftermath, such as famines, riots, and other social upheavals, usually justified rebellions, because the chaos was a sign of the regime’s deviance from the right way (tao). Thus, despite its seemingly supernatural language, Chinese traditional culture of disaster had a strong emphasis on secular, political aspects of disasters. However, this moral-political culture did not have elective affinity with an agenda of scientific inquiry. Although apocalyptic interpretations of disasters do not disappear, a widely held conception today is that disasters are social, political, and technological phenomena triggered by natural and technological agents instead of supernatural forces. Thus, disaster-induced traumatic memories are interpreted within the modern framework of scientific-rational thinking. Scientists, psychiatrists, intellectuals, and activists replace prophets, emperors, and shamans as the major professionals to interpret disasters. Meanwhile, they do not monopolize the authority of interpretation, and making sense of disasters from political and scientific perspective has been pervasive in all kinds of public discourses. In this sense, memories of disasters are what Schwartz terms “model of society,” which ref lects present societies’ and groups’ interests, needs, desires, political agenda, and cultural values. Memories of disasters also serve as “model for the society”: People repeatedly evoke major disasters in the wake of similar disasters to frame their thinking, legitimize their practices, and mobilize them to take social and political actions (Schwartz 1996).

Individual trauma At an individual level, disasters-triggered traumatic memory is a common phenomenon in human societies, but it was not incorporated into the Western therapeutic-scientific culture until the 1980s, when post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) entered the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Psychiatrists’ first major case of PTSD was the Vietnam War veterans’ traumatic experience, but the scope of PTSD was later expanded to include other experiences, particularly those of disaster survivors. This intellectual expansion, in fact, was stimulated by global humanitarian aid to disaster-hit areas and disaster survivors. For example, the Kobe earthquake in Japan in 1995 attracted a team of PTSD experts from the United States to conduct research. Their research and clinical activities as part of the disaster response to the earthquake also began the history of diagnosis and treatment of PTSD in Japan (Breslau 2000). Thus, “PTSD expands the discourse of humanitarian crises by providing a means for discussion and comparison of psychological dimensions of suffering that carry the full legitimacy of scientific knowledge” (Breslau 2004). At a deeper level, PTSD provides a strong, medical causal narrative between the traumatic event and individual memory disorder. It implicitly or explicitly calls for humanitarian intervention to 360

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reduce sufferings—particularly those sufferings in non-Western, developing, and impoverished places prone to frequent disasters.

Collective trauma Disaster-induced trauma can also be collective. On this matter, the Durkheimian approach to memory and community remains strong, with significant revisions though. In 1972, Buffalo Creek, a small town in West Virginia was utterly destroyed by a mudslide mixed with mine wastes. Residents were killed and injured. The long-term cause of the flood was Buffalo Creek’s chronic disaster—a deteriorating environment due to a coal mining company’s total control of the town. The disaster’s worst damage, however, was to the survivors’ sense of communality, “a common feeling of belonging to, being a part of, a defined place” (Erikson 1976: 136). This loss of communality led to a collective trauma, “a blow to the basic tissues of social life that damages the bonds attaching people together and impairs the prevailing sense of communality” (Erikson 1976: 154). “I” and “you” as individuals continue to exist, but “we” no longer exist. The loss of the sense of “we” was a result of the damages to the physical spaces as well as to the social connections. The community was not habitable any more, and the residents had to move into cramped trailer camps. In this sense, Erikson innovatively uses Durkheim’s idea about community by suggesting a “negative” case, an absence of communality due to the disaster’s devastating power, instead of reaffirming a community’s self-renewal function. What is more insightful is the author’s point about the idealized and nostalgic notion of “good old days.” In people’s narratives, their old community was close-knit, idyllic, and safe. Close-knit indeed, but in reality it was not safe. It was always endangered by a “dam” on a local brook, which was formed by mine wastes the coal company dumped into the brook. The social life of the town residents was controlled by the totalitarian coal company. The community, in fact, provided the residents with an illusion of safety, which was a result of similarities among the residents—men working for the same company and kids going to the same school. A sense of order and communality was established and strengthened by the stagnant social life, although the risk of long-term disaster lurked. The f lood suddenly “stripped them of the illusion that they could be safe” (Erikson 1976: 241). In sum, the author clearly suggests that the fundamental cause of the disaster was the coal camps, which significantly changed the community’s physical and social features. In response to the rapid change and the company’s ruthlessness, and also due to the miners’ similarities, they developed a closeknit communality that provided emotional attachment, a sense of belonging, and some social and financial functions. But, the author does not idealize the community but indicates the communality was a reaction to the harsh environment; the problems in the environment and social features deteriorated. All these broke out in the moment of the f lood and led to individual and collective trauma. In this sense, Erikson’s study is deeply rooted in Durkheim’s functional theory of memory but also effectively combines it with a modern social scientific idea about disaster. In this sense, Erikson’s collective trauma is almost identical to the “cultural memory” concept raised by the Yale school of cultural sociology: Cultural trauma is “a dramatic loss of identity and meaning, a tear in the social fabric, affecting a group of people that has achieved some degree of cohesion” (Eyerman 2001: 2). But Erikson stops short of describing collective trauma’s broader social and cultural impacts beyond the immediate context of disaster. The Yale school takes a step further by emphasizing cultural trauma’s function of forming collective identity within a moral community (Alexander 2004), a theoretical thesis derived 361

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from Durkheim’s classical conception of “piacular rite.” However, the Yale school’s empirical cases are mainly political and social atrocities, such as the Holocaust and American slavery, instead of disasters. Whether disasters have the same level of shaping power for collective identity is still subject to further research. Along a different direction, other cases of collective trauma suggest that disaster memories ref lect present cultural patterns and interests. Disaster memory usually has a mythological structure, which ref lects the cultural conceptions in the era when the mythic past is constructed instead of when the event happens. Some elements of the “past” are retrospectively constructed to suit the present cultural structure. For example, the sinking of Titanic is neither the greatest marine disaster nor a historically significant event. Some other sinking incidents killed more people, and the sinking of Titanic did not change the trajectory of any important political and social events. Titanic was not unique, for it had an identical twin ship, Olympic, which never generated the same level of interest as Titanic. Moreover, Titanic was not called “unsinkable” until it sank. What was critical to collective memory of the Titanic incident was not as much about trauma as the popular culture in the late Edwardian period. The heroes in the myth had those idealized characteristics, which the Edwardian higher-class public prized but today’s readers might interpret as signs of snobbery: manliness (“Women and children first!”), manner and honor of higher class (“Die like a gentleman”), and even ideas about superior race and nationality (“Be British!”) (Howells 1999). Traumatic memories of disasters can also be used for commercial purposes. The Ukrainian government, for example, offers officially sanctioned tours of Chernobyl and Pripyat. The decision was partly driven by a resurgence of interest in Chernobyl in popular culture, such as S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, a shooting survival video game, and other products, as well as rising tourists’ interest in a “toxic holiday” (euphemized as “ecological tour”). But the government’s economic interest is also evident, particularly because in 2012 it co-hosted with Poland the UEFA Championship, an event as important as the FIFA World Cup in Europe. The tours were sanctioned before Euro 2012 in order to attract foreign visitors. As 6 percent of the government’s annual budget is spent on programs that deal with long-term aftermaths of the Chernobyl incident, this decision makes more sense in terms of its potential returns (Stone 2013).

Politics and trauma The Chernobyl incident is also a typical case of how memory of disasters is intertwined with political processes in the past and present. Shortly before the incident, the Gorbachev administration launched the glasnost reform, which was justified by Lenin’s uses of the term glasnost in various contexts. In the wake of the disaster, this justification through the Leninist past was soon incorporated into the administration’s response to the nuclear crisis. What is known today as the “Chernobyl nuclear station” in fact had an official name: V.I. Lenin Nuclear Power Station. After the disaster, the government put a thick and heavy concrete cap on No.4 reactor to constrain the release of radiation. It is not a pure coincidence that the cap was officially dubbed “sarcophagus”—a stone coffin to contain dead bodies, which, in that context, particularly referred to the one with Lenin’s body. The name, according to Petryna, was to “incite a sense of physical, moral, and spiritual rejuvenation within a Soviet population” (1995: 197), putting an end to the political corruption and other wrongs in the recent past, which was reflected in the technical and managerial chaos in the station, by placing an object that represented the openness in the Leninist past. 362

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Memories of Chernobyl also work as a model for the society but in a way different from what the government intends to be. In most cases, Chernobyl serves as a symbol, particularly for environmental activists to frame the meanings they attach to their activities. For example, Harper documents how memories of Chernobyl are ref lected in a series of “Chernobyl stories” told by Hungarian environmentalists around the tenth anniversary of the Chernobyl incident. Hungary was one of the European countries terrified by the radiation cloud drifting from Ukraine, and this explained the Hungarian ordinary citizens’ deep worry about the incident’s long-term impacts on human bodies and the environment. Some of the stories—for example, pregnant women’s and young mothers’ worry about impacts of nuclear fallout on their children—present the environmental concern as part of parental responsibilities. Others recount that the nuclear crisis caused everyday dilemmas—Eat the vegetables from the possibly contaminated soil or not? Let kids play outside or not? These dilemmas eventually drive them to participate in environment-related public affairs. For the community of scientists, the Chernobyl memories present their challenge to the authority of scientific expertise and politics of Cold War technology. Therefore, as Harper argues, memories of Chernobyl in Hungary present two types of politicization: “politicization of knowing” and “politicization of caring” (2001: 114). In other cases, trauma and memory of disaster are framed in a schema of war memories, which intensifies its political implications. For example, as Seaton suggests (chapter in this volume), the Fukushima incident in Japan in 2011 was presented as another war against the invisible “radiation” enemy: The incident was compared to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings; the responders were compared to “kamikaze,” who conducted suicide missions during World War II. It is also this war-infused framework that highlights the question “who should be responsible for the failure?” A similar case is memory of China’s Great Leap Forward Famine and its functions of both ref lecting and framing the present. In the late 1950s, the Chinese government unwisely advanced a comprehensive development program, “the Great Leap Forward,” aiming to surpass the US and UK in production of iron and steel and other major industrial products as well as to use collectivization to improve the agricultural output. The unrealistic program did not achieve its designed goal but led to a great famine that killed millions of Chinese peasants (Zhou 2012). At the local level, according to Thaxton’s ethnographic research, village and brigade officials took advantage of the starving peasants and abused their power for their own interests, and, thus, added to the peasants’ sufferings (Thaxton 2008). To deal with the catastrophe’s detrimental effects on the state’s legitimacy, the Chinese government used a variety of methods to alter, reinterpret, and even erase memories of the famine. The government euphemized it as “three years of natural disasters” and explained it as an unfortunate aftermath of droughts and f loods instead of a policy failure. In the 1960s, when the famine was just over, the state sent work teams to local villages to push the Socialist Education Movement, aiming to reframe the memories of the famine by a practice called yiku sitian (“remembering the bitter past and savoring the sweet present”). During the yiku sitian mass meetings, peasants were asked to deny sufferings from the famine, such as begging and death due to starvation, and to claim that, despite the starvation, their situation was still better than that before the 1949 Liberation (Thaxton 2008). These strategies from a totalitarian regime, however, did not erase the memories. Instead, the memories were embodied—feelings of hunger in the peasants’ stomachs—and remained in their minds. After the Cultural Revolution, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, the villagers launched an undeclared war to retaliate against the abusive local officials by torching their houses and beating them up. At the time, when an official reconciliation of the famine 363

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was absent and impossible, those micro-level retaliations functioned as weapons of the weak for the villagers themselves to come to terms with the painful memories of the famine. On the positive side, the memories of the famine drove local officials in those hard-hit areas— such as Anhui Province—to seek institutional innovations to solve the problem of “eating.” In other words, the memory of hunger provided a motivation for later bottom-up economic reforms in rural areas, which dramatically improved China’s agricultural productivity in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Yang 1996). In a different context, the 150th commemorations of the Irish Famine (1845–50) revealed more the famine’s function as a model of the present politics and culture. This boom of commemorations in various places around the world—including Ireland, the United States, and Australia—was not seen before, not even in the centenary of the famine in the 1940s. Historian Peter Gray (2004) explains this unusual revival of disaster commemorations by examining several factors pertaining to contemporary Irish culture and politics as well as Irish diasporas’ search for their identity. The traditional nationalist narrative interpreted the famine as mainly the British government’s intentional inaction, but the Irish public and government in the late 20th century constructed a new Irish identity as a cosmopolitan nation with a moral voice in world affairs. Some inf luential Ireland-based international non-governmental organizations turned the famine memory into a cultural basis for charitable activities for contemporary famines and other global issues. The political atmosphere during the Robinson administration facilitated all kinds of commemorations around the 150th anniversary. President Mary Robinson played a critical role in sponsoring the Famine Museum and connecting the famine with contemporary global famine problems. In the United States, the already wealthy and politically powerful Irish Americans sought to revive a faltering ethnic tradition and reconstruct their mythical past in order to highlight their ethnic identity. All these factors worked together and contributed to the boom of the famine memories in a globalized world.

Commemorations and disasters The second issue in Durkheim’s conception of disaster and memory is about his theory of mourning or “piacular ritual” in general. Durkheim argues that mourning for community members is a way for the community to demonstrate its collective consciousness and renew its solidarity. Thus, disasters and any other unfortunate happenings that kill people and threaten the community give the community an opportunity to reunify. This theory is not wrong within its limit but does not address a more important topic it should have addressed: For whom is the mourning held? Durkheim assumes a homogeneous “community,” in which one member’s loss is equal to another’s. Yet, human societies are always hierarchically structured, although communality does exist in some groups at some moments. This social hierarchy not only exists in the social life of people who are still alive but also is central to symbolic and practical practices about death. In other words, asking “for whom the bell tolls” means asking a series of questions pertaining to worthiness, values, and dignity about life and death: Who deserves public mourning? Who should be mourned by the state? Who does the society actually mourn? What social factors influence the object of public mourning? The most addressed mourning genres in the existing literature are mourning for war dead and mourning for leaders (Winter 1995; Mosse 1990; Verba 1965; Schwartz 1991). Wars involve people whose identities are ideologically and institutionally defined in accordance with their relations to the state—those with official ranks, such as generals and soldiers, and those without official ranks, such as war victims, whose deaths are caused by an enemy state’s purposeful military actions. Public mourning for them, on many occasions, is heavily used by 364

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the nation-state to construct a grand narrative that affirms unity of the nation and legitimacy of the state and justifies the state’s further actions. In other words, mourning for the war dead gives clear answers to the “who” questions: The mourning is held for those who die for their nations’ or die of other nations’ military action. Mourning for leaders and important figures also clearly defines who should be mourned: leaders, heroes, dignitaries, high-ranking officials, and important figures. They are the people who command crowds, create miracles, and sacrifice for higher causes. They are not ordinary people. Disasters differ from wars and other political actions in that they are not humans’ intentional actions targeted at a specific population. Disasters can be attributed to people’s negligence, wrong planning, and other problems; and, as discussed above, disasters involve a variety of political and social processes. But compared to wars and explicit political actions, disasters’ agents are not social actors with explicit political intentions but natural phenomena and technology. Disaster victims do not die of or die for states’ military actions, and, thus, their identity is not defined by their official ranks or political roles. Among disaster victims, there may or may not be important people, but in most cases, the victims are ordinary people who do not become victims because they have certain social and political characteristics but because they happen to live in a particular disaster-hit area. In other words, disaster victims differ from the war dead and socially inscribed important people in that they are politically and socially “ordinary.” The questions of “who” matter because of their significant political implications: Ordinary people deserve the same respect that leaders, dignitaries, heroes, and soldiers receive. As I indicate elsewhere, if one person’s loss is the whole community’s loss, as Durkheim argues, then the community has an obligation to mourn everybody, not just leaders or dignitaries. If the community’s sacredness rests on the victims’ ordinariness, the ordinariness of those who are mourned, confirms the sacredness of the community [(Xu 2013b: 46)]. In this sense, disaster mourning contains an egalitarian ideal that is consistent with Durkheim’s moral philosophy. Nevertheless, it also suggests something that Durkheim’s functional sociology does not cover. The sacred object of the mourning shifts from leaders and other important figures to ordinary people without any heroic deeds but simply as victims of misfortunes. This is an extraordinary shift in culture, on which, however, Durkheim and his followers keep silent. Scholars have documented many cases of disaster mourning (Eyre 2007). In 1989, a football match between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest in England caused an unexpected incident: 96 Liverpool fans were crushed to death against a security fence in the overcrowded Hillsborough Stadium. Immediately after the Hillsborough disaster, the United Kingdom saw an instant “outpouring of grief ” and “spontaneous mourning” rituals for the victims: About a million people observed silence, laid f lowers, and sang “You’ll Never Walk Alone” in Anfield, Liverpool’s home stadium (Walter 1991). In 1992, a cargo plane crashed in Bijlmer, a neighborhood in southeast Amsterdam where many immigrants from former Dutch colonies lived. A historically significant mourning ritual was advocated by civil society organizations, especially immigrant organizations, and sanctioned by the Dutch government. More than 500 organizations were involved in the planning of the memorial. The mourning contained a silent procession, the content of which was deliberately left open in order that everyone might express their grief and sympathy in their own manner, was only minimally directed…. 365

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The dignitaries mixed with the crowd. Small groups danced, sung and drummed during the march [(Post et al. 2003: 88)]. In 2008, the Chinese government, for the first time in history, held a national mourning ritual for victims of the Sichuan earthquake, which hit southwest China and killed about 86,000 people. The mourning was historically unprecedented and emotionally moving. Numerous people around the country stood still to observe a three-minute silence; air sirens blared; cars honked; and national flags flew at half-mast. The Chinese government received unanimous praise for holding the mourning for ordinary victims from the whole Chinese-speaking world, including otherwise hostile Hong Kong and Taiwan publics (Xu 2013a). It has become a convention for people in modern societies to hold public mourning for disaster victims, even if they never met any of the victims or speak their language. Public mourning occurred in the wake of recent massive disasters, such as the Haiti earthquake in 2010 and Japan’s triple disasters (earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown) in 2011 (see Seaton chapter in this volume). Another related phenomenon is the emergence of “spontaneous shrines” or “grassroots memorials” that ordinary citizens set up in public spaces in remembrance of relatives who died in disasters and accidents (Santino 2006). These memorials somewhat change the graveside tradition by moving sites of memory from traditional designated places—cemeteries, for example—to neutral public spaces, which do not usually function as memorial sites. For example, roadside memorials are usually erected on highway medians and urban intersections for victims of motor vehicle accidents (Owens 2006). The fundamental cultural message implied in these grassroots memorials is respecting individuals in a public way and turning individual families’ sorrow and memory into a public recognition of the ordinary individuals. Most high-profile public mourning for disaster victims has happened in recent decades, more specifically, since the second half of the 20th century, a historical period Barry Schwartz terms the “post-heroic era.” In this era, great men or greatness fades, while individuality, diversity, and equality are celebrated. The decline of Lincoln’s image, he argues, is part of this larger cultural pattern shift, which involves new openness and acceptance of all peoples, regardless of social characteristics, and deterioration and coarsening of traditional symbols and practices (Schwartz 2008). Mourning for disaster victims and its egalitarian implications is part of the cultural change from a heroic era to an age of diversity, multiculturalism, individuality, and equality. This cultural change is the result of a variety of social movements that advocate for people’s rights—women, ethnic minorities, immigrants, gays and lesbians— which have been inf luencing the world’s political awareness and worldviews since the 1960s. Even an undemocratic regime is institutionally and culturally inf luenced by this pattern shift. For example, the national mourning for the Sichuan earthquake victims resulted from advocacy from a morally conscious Chinese civil society, which used other countries’ mourning to criticize the government’s “blatant neglect” of ordinary people’s lives and dignity. In order to construct a respectable moral image in an Olympic year and also to shore up its moral legitimacy, the Chinese government accepted the mourning proposal (Xu 2013a). However, this cultural pattern shift is still intertwined with complicated political and social processes at various levels. Disaster mourning is made possible by a variety of social and political factors, and its emotional power also triggers public debates and political actions on responsibility and victimhood. The Hillsborough mourning, according to Tony Walter’s study, was made possible by a social advocacy process: [O]ne individual, or a pair of individuals, thought up the idea; they advertised it through local radio and the local press; and they gained support from inf luential local figures. 366

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In addition … the authorities responded very quickly to spontaneous action by ordinary people [(Walter 1991: 616)]. Dignitaries from the local and national governments attended the public mourning to present a morally favorable image in the moment of sorrow. In the mourning for the Bijlmer disaster victims, the Dutch government clearly used this opportunity to demonstrate its care for people with multicultural and ethnic backgrounds. Prime Minister Lubbers delivered a speech that stressed and embraced the multiculturality of the Netherlands: “Only through all this grief and misery can a colourful Netherlands become a reality” (Post et al. 2003: 91). Japan’s commemorations of the 3/11 disasters (earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima incident) were also highly politicized in a subtle way. When presiding over the first anniversary commemoration of the 3/11 disaster, Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda made only a few references to wars and post-war recovery and also changed his predecessor Naoto Kan’s term of “independence from nuclear energy” to “reduced dependence.” His successor, Shinzō Abe, made barely any reference to wars. This subtle difference in language of commemorations, as Seaton argues, reflects the three prime ministers’ different political backgrounds (Kan’s progressive stance versus Noda’s conservative and Abe’s ultraconservative stances) and different political contexts of commemorations (Seaton chapter, this volume). The Sichuan earthquake is even more politically meaningful and significant. No such mourning had been held for disaster victims before Sichuan, not even in the deadlier Tangshan earthquake, which killed 240,000 people in 1976. Instead, the casualties of the Tangshan earthquake was not released to the press until three years later. Therefore, the Sichuan earthquake mourning was a result of some long-term changes in structural state-society relations in China in the 2000s, such as the rapidly developing civil society with moral consciousness and the more adaptive authoritarian Chinese state with concern about its moral legitimacy. These changes were strengthened in the situational dynamics in 2008, especially the spotlight effect of the Beijing Olympics, which led to the state’s acceptance of a mourning proposal from the public sphere. But in the subsequent anniversaries of the Sichuan earthquake, the state regained its dominant status and used official narratives to justify its disaster recovery policies. Meanwhile, another issue changed the emotional atmosphere from compassion to moral outrage: Many schools in the quake zone collapsed after the earthquake and killed thousands of students. Yet, the state cracked down upon the parents’ and activists’ protests and activisms. At the time of the first anniversary, they were prevented from official mourning rites. In other words, the egalitarian cultural meaning of this unprecedented “mourning for the ordinary” was limited by its political context (Xu 2013a).

Further remarks While disaster raises some issues central to memory studies, the scholarship on the topic lacks landmark empirical studies and major theories and, therefore, is far from an established field. The studies reviewed and discussed in this chapter are scattered in various fields within and outside of memory studies. Nevertheless, demand from the social world exceeds the academic supply. As large-scale wars and military conflicts become fewer, disasters will surpass wars to become the number-one cause of human casualties in the near future, if not already now. Traumatic memories and commemorations related to disasters will eventually become a new sphere for memory studies. Meanwhile, the recent massive disasters are mostly global disasters or what Hannigan terms “disasters without borders” (Hannigan 2012): they not only attract global public attention but 367

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also have social and political impacts beyond the affected countries. For example, the Haiti earthquake in 2010 and Japan’s triple disasters in 2011 received assistance from people around the world and, at the same time, provoked global debates about nuclear power, humanitarian aid, and global inequality. What is less examined is the globalization of the traumas caused by disasters and related moral questions: Should we care about the “distant suffering” (Boltanski 1999) of others? How do we express our moral concerns through symbolic practices, such as commemorations? What social factors—social characteristics and identities of the victims— can inf luence our moral decisions? For example, do we mourn those disaster victims who are citizens of our rival country? Some traditional topics in memory studies, such as truth and reconciliation, may have new implications. For example, reconciliation may take place between disaster victims and multinational corporations that generate pollutions and cause local residents’ illness and death. Traditional memory studies have been developing mostly within nation-states or between nation-states with a focus on wars and political atrocities. The globalization or “cosmopolitanization” of memory may suggest a paradigm shift within memory studies. Scholars such as Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider have been pursuing this new paradigm of “cosmopolitan memory” by extending the nation-based frame, such as the Holocaust, to a moral universalism that transcends nation-states and by shifting focus from contestation and mutual disdain to reconciliation (Levy and Sznaider 2006, 2010; Sznaider 1998). Jeffrey Alexander is also expanding his cultural trauma theory to a global context (Alexander 2012). Disaster memory may add something new into this theoretical agenda. The key question to cosmopolitan memory is about our moral responsibility for the “Others.” It is relatively easier for us to express our moral sentiments toward those who suffer from disasters than to mourn those who die of military actions and whose identity as perpetrators or victims are still contested. Therefore, it might be possible for disaster memory to become an important factor in constituting cosmopolitan memory in particular and a cosmopolitan culture in general. A few aforementioned cases already show impacts of cosmopolitanism. The Irish Famine is transformed from a nationalistic narrative to an explicitly cosmopolitan narrative about famine as a global problem. Even the Chinese government’s decision to hold national mourning was inf luenced by the civil society’s cosmopolitan idea about human dignity as well as the international community’s moral pressure in an Olympic year. Also, despite the ongoing disputes over history and the Diaoyu/ Senkaku Islands, the Japanese people donated a large sum of money after the Sichuan earthquake, and the Chinese did the same after 3/11. In all these cases, the “ordinariness” of disaster victims somewhat depoliticizes the disasters and facilitates a global expression of sympathy and sorrow. Does this new cosmopolitanism of disaster mean Durkheim’s solidarity argument is correct at a new level of global moral community? Or, does the politics of memory approach still work in a global field of power struggle? Or, are politics and moral community two sides of a new coin? These questions need to be explored in a dedicated research agenda.

References Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2004. Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2012. Trauma: A Social Theory. Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity. Boltanski, Luc. 1999. Distant Suffering: Morality, Media, and Politics, Cambridge Cultural Social Studies. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press. Breslau, Joshua. 2000. “Globalizing Disaster Trauma: Psychiatry, Science, and Culture after the Kobe Earthquake.” Ethos 28 (2):174–197. doi: 10.1525/eth.2000.28.2.174. Breslau, Joshua. 2004. “Introduction: Cultures of Trauma: Anthropological Views of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in International Health.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 28 (2):113–126. doi: 10.1023/B:MEDI.0000034421.07612.c8. 368

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Durkheim, Emile. [1912] 1995. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Translated by Karen E. Fields. New York: Free Press. Dynes, Russell R. 2000. “The Dialogue between Voltaire and Rousseau on the Lisbon Earthquake: The Emergence of a Social Science View.” International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters 18 (1):97–115. Erikson, Kai. 1976. Everything in Its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood. New York: Simon and Schuster. Eyerman, Ron. 2001. Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity, Cambridge Cultural Social Studies. New York: Cambridge University Press. Eyre, Anne. 2007. “Remembering: Community Commemoration After Disaster.” In Handbook of Disaster Research, edited by Havi âdán Rodríguez, E. L. Quarantelli, and Russell Rowe Dynes. New York: Springer, pp. 441–455. Gray, Peter. 2004. “Memory and the Commemoration of the Great Irish Famine.” In The Memory of Catastrophe, edited by Peter Gray and Kendrick Oliver. Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press, pp. 46–64. Hannigan, John A. 2012. Disasters without Borders:The International Politics of Natural Disasters. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Harper, Krista M. 2001. “Chernobyl Stories and Anthropological Shock in Hungary.” Anthropological Quarterly 74 (3):114–123. Howells, Richard. 1999. The Myth of the Titanic. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Kendrick, T. D. 1956. The Lisbon Earthquake. London: Methuen. Kreps, Gary A. 2001. “Sociology of Disaster.” In International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences, edited by Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes. Amsterdam: Elsevier Publishing Company. Levy, Daniel, and Natan Sznaider. 2006. The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age, translated by Assenka Oksiloff. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Levy, Daniel, and Natan Sznaider. 2010. Human Rights and Memory, Essays on Human Rights. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Mosse, George L. 1990. Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars. New York: Oxford University Press. Murray, Michael, and Sean Greenberg. 2013. “Leibniz on the Problem of Evil.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. Stanford, CA: Metaphysics Research Lab, Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University. Owens, Maida. 2006. “Lousiana Roadside Memorials.” In Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death: Negotiating an Emerging Tradition, edited by Jack Santino. New York; Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 119–145. Petryna, Adriana. 1995. “Sarcophagus: Chernobyl in Historical Light.” Cultural Anthropology 10 (2):196– 220. doi: 10.1525/can.1995.10.2.02a00030. Post, P., R. L. Grimes, A. Nugteren, P. Pettersson, and H. Zondag. 2003. Disaster Ritual: Explorations of an Emerging Ritual Repertoire. Leuven, Belgium; Dudley, MA: Peeters. Santino, Jack, ed. 2006. Spontaneous Shrines and the Public Memorialization of Death. New York; Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Schwartz, Barry. 1991. “Mourning and the Making of a Sacred Symbol: Durkheim and the Lincoln Assassination.” Social Forces 70 (2):343–366. Schwartz, Barry. 1996. “Memory as a Cultural System: Abraham Lincoln in World War II.” American Sociological Review 61 (5):908–927. Schwartz, Barry. 2008. Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era: History and Memory in Late Twentieth-Century America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stone, Philip R. 2013. “Dark Tourism, Heterotopias and Post-Apocalyptic Places: The Case of Chernobyl.” In Dark Tourism and Place Identity: Managing and Interpreting Dark Places, edited by Leanne White and Elspeth Frew. London: Routledge, pp. 79–94. Sznaider, Natan. 1998. “The Sociology of Compassion: A Study in the Sociology of Morals.” Cultural Values 2 (1):117–139. Thaxton, Ralph. 2008. Catastrophe and Contention in Rural China: Mao’s Great Leap Forward Famine and the Origins of Righteous Resistance in Da Fo Village. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press. Verba, Sidney. 1965. “The Kennedy Assassination and the Nature of Political Commitment.” In The Kennedy Assassination and the American Public, edited by Bradley S. Greenberg and Edwin B. Parker. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 348–360. 369

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Voltaire. [1759]/2005. Candide, or Optimism. Trans. Theo Cuffe. New York, NY: Penguin Books. Walter, Tony. 1991. “The Mourning after Hillsborough.” Sociological Review 39 (3):599–625. Winter, J. M. 1995. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press. Xu, Bin. 2013a. “For Whom the Bell Tolls: State-Society Relations and the Sichuan Earthquake Mourning in China.” Theory and Society 42 (5):509–542. Xu, Bin. 2013b. “Mourning Becomes Democratic.” Contexts 12 (1):42–46. Yang, Dali L. 1996. Calamity and Reform in China: State, Rural Society, and Institutional Change since the Great Leap Famine. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Zhou, Xun. 2012. The Great Famine in China, 1958–1962: A Documentary History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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29 Memory and the recent past Chile, from revolution to repression Isabel Torres Dujisin

Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers, and how one remembers it in order to recount it. Gabriel García Márquez

In general terms, Latin America’s recent past can be characterized by three stages. The emergence of military dictatorships in the seventies, transition processes in the eighties, and democratization in the nineties. Although these are present in the case of Chile, there are a series of features that make it distinct from other Latin American dictatorships. Among these are the transitional contexts that have brought about new political dynamics and forms of social participation. Paradoxically, a certain degree of disaffection, or a downplaying of the sense and effectiveness of representative democracy, many times accompanies these transitional contexts. As a result, low electoral turnout levels, along with the emergence of neopopulisms and anti-systemic groups, follow the aforementioned political dynamics. In this scenario, the question of how to guarantee electoral participation has lost importance. It can be argued that we live in a world characterized by citizens’ estrangement where the collective has given way to the private sphere. What can historians say about this? How should this new reality be addressed? Assuming that there are no historians who are neutral, nor lacking either an implicit or explicit political vision, the researcher’s challenge is to interpret what actually occurred— instead of what would have been preferred or imagined to occur—through the historical method and source analysis. In other words, in order to deepen our knowledge and ref lection, events must be understood not as having an order with their own purpose (thus discarding any explanation of a teleological nature); rather, these must be understood as an expression of the dialectical intertwining between the instantaneous and the long-lasting, or permanence. This chapter examines the Chilean political process that started with the 1970s triumph of a government wanting to lay the foundations for socialism and whose plans ended abruptly with a far-right military coup in 1973. Today, over forty years after the military coup in Chile, the political fracture this event represented is still present in many aspects. The astonishment and horror about what occurred allows us to affirm that “[t]here are pasts that do not pass, and there are those ones that impose themselves upon the present” (Cavdevila 2009: 3), 371

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a present in which the possibility of imagining the future is necessarily linked to the understanding of that past. What does the assertion “the past is still present” mean? How does it interfere in the current context, and most importantly, in the building of the future? Koselleck (1993) defines “historical time” as the intertwining between future and past, where the spaces of experience are retained and the horizon of expectations is projected. Thus, a historical time can be situated in the event of Chile’s 1973 coup d’état.

From democratic elections to constitutional stability Understanding the coup d’état from historical epistemology implies claiming the event itself not as isolated or unique, but as the tangible expression of a broader and more complex social process. It is in this complex process that such an event constitutes an interpretive matrix that makes it possible to examine the historical processes of the present time. From the point of view of political, social, cultural and economic development, the coup d’état marked a turning point. The dismantling of democracy came to be known as a monstrous event, that is, an event that breaks a trajectory and whose fracture allows the understanding of an era’s fundamental senses. Some authors also call it a crucial moment, that is, “a point upon which an intelligibility model is constructed” (Aróstegui 2004: 198). A key example of such a crucial moment occurred on 4 September 2013. In Chile, the forty-third anniversary of Salvador Allende’s victory was celebrated, marking not only a crucial period in the country’s history but also forty years since the fracture of the democratic system that occurred on 11 September 1973. Indeed, both are dates of a past that bring us to the present. Thus, they require us to be meticulous when it comes to understanding these two inevitably intertwined events. The following sections in this chapter attempt to carefully examine those events.

Elections, terror, stability The election results of 1970 were narrow. Salvador Allende, representing the forces of the Left, obtained 36.2 percent of the vote, followed by the candidate of the entrepreneurial sector and the right-wing party, Jorge Alessandri, with 34.9 percent, and then Radomiro Tomic, leader of the progressive sector of the Christian Democrats, with 27.8 percent. According to those results, two-thirds of the voters supported the implementation of profound reforms or revolutions. However, despite the Left’s elected mandate for change, the 35 percent of the vote obtained by the Right began to bare its teeth. So while the election meant the beginning of the revolution for some, it confirmed others’ worst fears. Such was the perception and division that emerged in the country. Indeed, Allende’s triumph drew international attention. For the first time a leftist coalition, which planned to carry out a revolutionary process supported by the Chilean legal framework (the so-called Chilean path to socialism or the Chilean experience), triumphed at the polls. If this process was successful, then not only would the Popular Unity (UP) coalition government be the founder of a new paradigm to progress in the construction of a socialist society, but also, as Allende put it, this paradigm would be carried out in accordance with the UP’s democratic, plural and libertarian tradition. This is the reason why international leftwing groups paid close attention to the Chilean process, as did the United States government. On the night of 4 September 1970, many people took to the streets to celebrate the triumph of the compañero Presidente. From the FECH1 balcony, Allende addressed thousands of his supporters with a moving speech: 372

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The victory achieved by you has a profound national significance. From here I solemnly declare that I will respect the rights of all Chileans, but I also declare, and I want you to definitely know that upon our arrival to La Moneda,2 and the people being the ones who govern, we will follow through on our historical commitment we had made to realize the Popular Unity Program … We are and will be respectful of the self-determination and of no-intervention … We will carry out the changes that Chile claims and needs … We will make a revolutionary government … Revolution does not imply destroying, but constructing; it does not imply devastating but building; and the people of Chile are getting ready for this big task at this transcendental time of our lives … Latin America and those beyond the borders of our people look at our tomorrow (Allende, Speech, 5 September 1970). Given that it was the third time Allende ran for the presidency as a member of the Left, his triumph gave rise to great enthusiasm and optimism toward the future in this sector. However, for the Right, his victory was seen as a menace; ultimately it brought about a sense of panic, which led those supporting this party to take desperate, last-minute measures, such as the massive withdrawal of bank deposits or even leaving the country. All of this contributed to a climate of extreme unrest; even as early as 1970, there were rumors going around of a coup d’état. Despite its defeat, the Right had carried out a so-called campaign of terror during the 1970 election. The campaign particularly targeted women and its main purpose was to frighten the middle classes. For instance, there were campaign advertisements signed by Acción Mujeres de Chile and Chile Joven. In these advertisements, it was common to identify Allende with communism and to explicitly state the dangers of what his becoming president entailed. Among other examples were the broadcasting of images of repression in socialist countries, such as Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968); the constant repetition of Kruschev’s denunciation of Stalin’s crimes; the use of manipulated photographs of what were supposedly USSR tanks trespassing on La Moneda and whose caption read: Czechoslovakia never thought this could happen. But the Soviet tanks got there as soon as they had the chance. A government which is a puppet of communism will open the Chilean doors to those tanks that will definitely run over what we hold most sacred: freedom (El Mercurio 1970). Allusions such as this were aimed at “warning” people of the dangers Allende’s arrival to the presidency would imply. In spite of these “campaign of terror” efforts to dissuade voters from backing Allende, the Left triumphed. This frightened those in charge of the campaign thus creating a selffulfilling prophecy for the Right in that the results were seen as “the end of the world,” the arrival of a new Cuba, communism, and the end of existing freedoms. It should be noted that these fears were rooted in the most radical vision of different left-wing parties within the UP coalition government, such as the Socialist Party (PS), the United Popular Action Movement (MAPU) 3 and the Left Revolutionary Movement (MIR). Given this political climate, if the UP government wanted to make progress in the direction that Allende promoted, then it should have considered what support it could count on as well as the nature of the opposition. As far as the Christian Democrats were concerned, they showed some signs of internal fracture. One sector favored agreements with the UP, while the other was attempting to “go on its own path” and distance itself, particularly from the Communist Party. 373

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On the side of the opposition, the Right demonstrated its electoral strength. From the very first day the parties comprising the opposition agreed together to stop Allende from taking office. Later on they agreed to overthrow him thanks to the financial support of Nixon’s government and the direct intervention of the CIA. The latter was confirmed by The Church Committee Report, written by the United States Senate. It recorded in detail the US government’s intervention in the 1970 campaign. According to the report, that year’s election had a more decisive role for the US government than that of 1964, since it brought about the definition of a new strategy: In March 1970, the 40 Committee4 decided that the United States should not support any single candidate in the election but should instead wage “spoiling” operations against the Popular Unity coalition which supported the Marxist candidate, Salvador Allende…. The CIA felt it was not in a position to support Tomic actively because ambassadorial “ground rules” of the previous few years had prevented the CIA from dealing with the Christian Democrats (ibid.).5 Therefore, through both right-wing parties and large entrepreneurs, there was an unyielding and systematic harassment and blocks on different fronts so as to prevent Allende from taking office. The blocks became apparent in the events that occurred between election day, 4 September, and 3 November, when Salvador Allende was inaugurated president by the Chilean Congress.6 Indeed, this period was full of tension, which even put democratic stability at risk. In view of the imminent Christian Democrats’ support of the UP, the Right became desperate. Thus, “Track 1” was discarded and “Track 2” 7 was put into action. The new strategy consisted of promoting an extraconstitutional exit, one aimed at creating a climate of political instability, which justified intervention of the Armed Forces and the annulment of the election. Conspirators instigated the idea of kidnapping Chilean Army Commander-in-Chief Rene Schneider, so as to bring about anarchy and put pressure on congress not to choose Allende. On 22 October at 8:15 am, a group of youngsters of the far-right attacked General Schneider. After intense gunfire the group was unable to kidnap him, they did, however, severely injure him, eventually causing his death. This event had huge national impact and brought about an unexpected outcome: every sector condemned the assassination and adherence to all constitutional procedures was reinforced. President Eduardo Frei and Salvador Allende attended Schneider’s funeral. October 24 signaled a new cycle in Chile’s national democratic history. After congressional election, Allende won 153 votes over Alessandri, who obtained 35 votes and 7 blank votes. Thus, a president who defined himself as Marxist had been elected by universal suffrage, as it was later ratified by congress. Moreover, with his victory also came that of his coalition, which previous to the election had been a minority, but afterward reached a slight majority. Given these events, the political system demonstrated once more its high capacity for conf lict resolution.

Building a coalition As soon as the UP came to power, it would have to deal with a complex political scenario if it was to carry out its project of profound economic, political and social changes, while at the same time respecting the judiciary-political institutions of the time. Whereas at first the UP 374

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had favorable conditions to build relations with the Christian Democrats, some sectors within the Christian Democrats were less willing to form an alliance with the UP, sectors which quickly gained more ground. Within the Left itself was the Communist Party, which was closer to Allende’s views and was characterized by a dogmatic vision that alluded to the dictatorship of the proletariat and also by a reformist behavior: in other words, by a desire to make gradual progress through different stages. This was expressed in their idea to “progress via consolidation,” which implied seeking agreements beyond their own sector—the Left—and specifically with Christian Democrats. More radical groups, in contrast, led the Socialist Party. Carlos Altamirano, one of its strongest supporters and who became secretary general of the party in 1971, adhered to the strategy of “progress with no compromise” based on the assumption that “the pacific and legal means themselves did not lead to power.”8 Truth be told, the party’s leaders did not believe at all in elections as a transitional stage toward socialism, not even as a strategy for power. Taking into account the complex scenario described above, it goes without saying that the 1970s electoral triumph by itself was not enough to carry out a transformative project. For the UP government to be successful, and also able to govern, it was essential that it broaden its base of political support, which could have been achieved by: first, being more open to reach agreements with the Christian Democrats; and second, by having a coalition with a single political strategy that was devoted to a common project. Furthermore, not to yield to the pressures of the far-left was a must. It should be noted that the period from 1958 to 1970 was one of democratic expansion and an undeniable broadening of social participation. Yet these two processes had a paradoxical effect. On the one hand, for one sector of the Left, the democratic expansion was seen as a dream come true. Ultimately, it was the moment they had been waiting for to make the revolution happen. Unfortunately, with that idea in mind, the social and political progress, which had been made through a long and steady struggle for society’s democratization, was minimized and underestimated. On the other hand, those on the far right drew the conclusion that the moment had come to disregard democratic institutions in order to avoid the revolution. For the most part, this conclusion came from the fact that the 1970s UP government program could not leave large entrepreneurs indifferent if it intended to expropriate banks, large companies, and enforce land confiscation. Neither could it leave the United States indifferent if it announced the nationalization of copper companies. Ultimately, if the question was who isolated whom, it was evident that the Right greatly succeeded in this effort, since it knew how to exploit the middle sectors’ fear of the possibility that Chile would become “a second Cuba.”9 Returning to the matter of the government’s need to broaden its support base, an interview with Volodia Teitelboim—an important leader of the Communist Party—revealed that, when asked about what he criticized about himself and the UP in view of the failure of Allende’s government, he replied: “I think Popular Unity should have built up a relation with the Christian Democrats. I was for the UP to build up a relation with the DC” (Mendoza 2011: 35). Indeed, in order to ensure the implementation of social policies it was necessary to broaden the support base, which meant searching for the agreements and alliances that made it easier for the government to approach the parties in the center. Regrettably, this condition was not met because the UP did not firmly believe that particular strategy was the correct one. On the contrary, the president was encouraged to “progress with no compromise” as the 375

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aforementioned Socialist Party stated. As a result, more often than not, Allende was faced with countless internal conf licts within the UP, as well as with handling disputes between the Communist Party and the Left Revolutionary Movement (MIR)—even though this movement did not belong to the government’s coalition, it remained close to the Socialist Party’s most radical sectors and even to the president himself with whom it had close ties.10 As Allende’s term continued, differences within the UP grew sharper. Part of the Left, the Socialists, became more and more convinced that it was all about “defending the process”; their slogan said: “the people will know how to defend themselves,” without clarifying what that actually meant. The other sector, the Communists, called for a “no to civil war.” Both slogans lacked a real implementation that was consistent with their diagnoses. At the time, there was neither military training to “defend the process” nor was there evidence of a division within the Armed Forces that justified the idea of a civil war. In fact, it was quite the contrary because it was believed that the Armed Forces were non-deliberating, without taking into account how strongly inf luenced they were by the National Security Doctrine11 characteristic of the School of the Americas since the seventies. The disagreements and contradictions among the governmental parties paved the way for those groups within the Christian Democrats that were more inclined toward an alliance with the Right to justify a breach. Although within the Christian Democrats there was a sector in favor of legal reforms arrived at by consensus, it gradually turned into an uncompromising opposition that fostered the extraconstitutional option. By the time the Christian Democrats shifted toward the right and the center was left empty, the die had been cast. As it can be seen, the opposition to the UP transformed the political spectrum from the initial three-thirds model—when the Christian Democrats kept their distance from both the Left and the Right—to a polarized model in which the right-wing parties were finally able to homogenize the opposition to the UP by attracting the Christian Democrats, as they had intended to do from the outset. In the following years, the Right put its republican scruples aside and deliberately opted for sabotage, boycott, and terrorist attacks as a way to overthrow Allende’s government. Several authors have presented different ideas as to what may have caused the fracture. The first has to do with the loss of basic consensus in the political, economic, and social areas, and the subsequent loss of legitimacy and authority of state powers—which include the democratic instruments for conf lict resolution (Boeninger 1997). For other authors, such as Arturo Valenzuela (1989), the 1973 crisis is considered a critical juncture despite its war-prone conditions and the subsequent passionate and “irrational” ideological climate arising from the diminished capacity for compromise and negotiation, which had been causing some imbalance since 1964 (Aldunate and Flisfisch 1985). However, a more global interpretation suggests that the breakdown of democracy is to be understood as the failure to structure a feasible political center in a highly polarized society with strong centrifugal tendencies (Valenzuela 1989). Others have focused on several economic and financial factors that brought about discontent in many sectors. Among these is the increase of social demands, the uncontrolled inf lation, and the impossibility to materialize reforms due to the difficult relations between Allende’s government and the parliament, which was dominated by the opposition (Angell 1993). Finally, casuists attribute great significance to the speech given on 9 September 1973 by the secretary general of the Socialist Party, Carlos Altamirano, which is described by Politzer as “sparking the fire,” and undeniably confrontational: I have been accused of attending meetings with navy officers and sub officials: the truth is I attended a meeting to which I was invited in order to listen to sub officials and some navy 376

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officers’ denunciation of subversive acts allegedly committed by officials of that Armed institution.… And I will attend every single time I am invited to denounce any act against the legitimate and constitutional government of president Salvador Allende! … the Right’s conspiracy—our party believes—can only be crushed with the invincible force of the people together with troops, classes, sub officials and officials who are loyal to the constituted government. Let it be known: the Socialist Party will not let itself be crushed by an oligarchic and seditious minority. We will not accept arbitrariness no matter where it comes from, or whether those who enforce it are armed or not (qtd. in Politzer 1990: 189–194). According to this interpretation, Altamirano’s words were taken as a call for subversion or division of the Armed Forces. Casuists believe that Altamirano’s admission of contact with navy officers and army sub officials gave those behind the coup d’état a final excuse. Two days later, a military uprising came and “Chile moved towards the cliff ” (Allamand 1999).

To repression In order to understand the extent of the political role played by the Right during the authoritarian regime of 1973–1989, it must be clear that the Armed Forces’ usurpation of power counted on the consent of the Right. Human rights violations, together with the social and cultural costs, were seen as the “price” that needed to be paid so as to end “Marxism” and be able to implement a neoliberal model, which required an authoritarian regime capable of facing social pressures and demands. The first images of the coup d’état seen around the world provide a very telling example of its nature. Just to mention the most renowned ones: a photograph of La Moneda bombarded and completely destroyed by the bombs launched from Hawker Hunter planes—the most symbolic of the devastation and dismantling of democracy; pictures of the detention premises and the violence displayed; the pier of f laming books that resembled the Nazi’s; and a symbolic photograph of Pinochet, seated in the forefront with his dark sunglasses. According to Miguel Rojas Mix, “with [this photograph] emerges the satrap icon, the dictator by antonomasia. His sunglasses became an essential attribute of his imagery” (2006: 69). Such were the representations in the social and political imagery that transcended after the coup d’état. In other words, from the perspective of symbols, the military dictatorship set itself up with images of brutality and Pinochet, who would eventually become the dictator’s cliché. In this widely condemned symbolic scenario, we should contextualize the Right’s conduct immediately after the coup d’état, which consisted of declaring its unconditional support to the new regime. Despite being the only sector that the dictatorship left untouched, it decided to dissolve. As such, it supported and celebrated the end of its legislative power with the closing of the National Congress, the suspension of the rule of law, the ban of any left-wing parties, the end of free press, and human rights violations. This series of acts demonstrated that the accusations of illegality against the UP were in fact not based on sustained claims and that after all, the defense of the democratic system had been no more than words. As the Right’s vision was totalitarian and anti-democratic, they unscrupulously changed their previous discourse, which had been used to criticize the UP government, to one which fully and readily supported democratic restrictions. The change was such that the democratic system became associated with demagogy and was blamed for the country’s crisis and decadence at the time. Furthermore, the Right suggested that political maneuvering and demagogy were the cancers of democracy, or as Pinochet put it, “democracy is the breeding ground for communism and this government 377

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hates communists.”12 In sum, political democracy did not appear as an organizing axis in the newly established regime; it was quite the opposite, that is, a series of ideological restrictions were established. Democracy was understood as an instrument that could either be useful at some point or be left aside when unnecessary.

Military dictatorship A few months after the coup d’état, a member of the National Party13 pointed out that a true nationalist and constructive revolution had started in Chile and that “the actions of the Armed Forces could not be called a mere coup d’état.” Furthermore, he asserted that they should carry out their actions no matter what, which is why “they could not call for elections in the short-term.”14 In his opinion, to do that meant making the mistakes of the past, which for the Right simply meant returning to the democratic regime that had existed until 1973. The Right delegated its power to the military; thereby the civilians who worked for the government remained subdued to military power. Thus, the Right made the military the driving force behind the neoliberal modernization project. The main reason for delegating power to the military is that such a project was seen as impossible to carry out in a democratic regime. The Chilean Right firmly believed that members of the Armed Forces were the only ones able to keep the country under control. In fact, the Right saw the “members of the Armed Forces as those who best embodied the ideals of nationalism, authority, discipline, and service to the nation, which were all necessary to bring the country back on its feet” (ibid.). It can be observed that such admiration of the Armed Forces was expressed and embodied in Pinochet’s image. The Right justified its support of the military dictatorship, and in particular of Pinochet, as a display of the importance it gave to a democratic system. It thus contextualizes the Right’s political behavior not only during the dictatorship, but also in the transitional period toward democracy. As for the Right’s closeness and unconditional allegiance to Pinochet and his regime, it was an expression of distrust in the country’s former democratic system. The Right saw it as a malformation of representation, and therefore, it was seen as a determining condition of the circumstances that followed. There is no question about the fact that the Chilean coup d’état of 11 September 1973 brought about a human, social and political tragedy. The violent end to the UP government caused great national and international commotion, not only for being brutal, but also for the abrupt end to democratic stability that the country had had for over forty years. As dramatic as it was, it should be noted that the coup was not an unexpected event. In fact, sectors from both the Right and the Left noticed the complex situation at the time and warned the country about it in their own way. On the one hand, the Left repeatedly mentioned the need to avoid a “civil war;” on the other hand, the opposition argued that to face crisis, it was necessary to resort to the military as those who could guarantee democracy. As firm as it may seem, not all right-wing groups agreed on the latter. As it has already been pointed out, Allende’s coming to power awakened the Right’s deepest fears and caused havoc within its groups. Consequently, this support of the coup had a wide interpretation within the opposition. While a few saw the military intervention as a temporal solution, others supported and encouraged a coup d’état.

Conclusions: past lessons and democratic memory The political struggle in Chile between 1970 and 1973 triggered an unavoidable chain of events, as in a great Greek tragedy, in which fatality emerged before everyone’s eyes while 378

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there was no way to keep it from unfolding. This ill-fated dynamic was not a result of chance, but of a process that involved—in one way or another—the whole of society. Was it possible in 1973 that constitutional social changes aiming at greater social justice and the joining of forces between the Christian Democrats and the Left could have prospered? Which was Chile’s biggest loss in 1973? Revolution or democracy? Without a doubt, it was democracy. All the progress that had been made since the 1930s and that had been consolidating since 1958 was lost in a climate of polarization, fear, and ideological hatred. Finally, the moment came when, for a variety of reasons, democracy did not have enough defenders. The dictatorship was a traumatic experience that left a permanent scar on more than one generation. In my opinion, the acknowledgment of democracy as the basis for modern civilization must not admit any relativism especially when respecting human rights. Historical analysis always faces the difficulty of studying the past with the set of concepts of the present, and in so doing, it runs the risk of obstructing our view of the spirit of the time; even more so if the latter was as densely loaded ideologically as the period studied here. Anachronistic views about the historical-discursive material studied should be avoided; this does not imply that the historian should take a neutral attitude, though. Whether by action or omission, we judge history from certain values and principles. Ultimately, in order to advance in the understanding of what occurred, effort must be made to look at the past with severity, without letting oneself be inf luenced by myths, and leaving aside interpretive schemes that seek to adjust the interpretation of reality. As uncomfortable as it may be, we must acknowledge uncomfortable truths (Ottone and Muñoz 2008), because they are essential for a productive ref lection. For this reason, understanding the past and the lessons of history does not imply a return to the past to search for formulas that prevent us from making mistakes; this understanding implies admitting that in order to learn from history, questions and unsolved issues must not be silenced nor repressed but faced. On that subject, Habermas’ (1998) work, A Berlin Republic: Writings on Germany is a remarkable contribution to the idea of the possibility and the sense of learning from the past. The author points out that the approach from the logic of the Magistra Vitae has valuable aspects to take into account; furthermore, he highlights that the desire to want to learn from history and the “usefulness of history for life,” should not be understood as if history were a type of recipe to face the problems of the present. In his view, to gain an understanding of the past and the lessons that history implies, the past should not be used simply as a means to find formulas in order to avoid repeating mistakes. Rather, we should accept that the present is also part of the historical process and it can therefore be illuminated as much by the past as by the future. In order to learn from history, Habermas says, we must face rather than silence questions and unsolved problems because when we are in the process of learning from that disillusionment, we always run into a background of unfulfilled expectations. Such a background is constantly being constructed by traditions, life-forms and practices that we share as members of a nation, a state, or a culture—from traditions that unsolved problems have suddenly aroused and challenged (Habermas 1998: 45). Habermas asserts that we learn from positive experiences that lead us to imitation to which we must add that “history acts as an invitation, not so much to imitations, but to revisions.” He adds: [W]e always learn from our traditions, but the question is whether we can learn from those events [that] ref lect the failure of tradition. Here I am talking especially about those 379

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situations in which participants—be it with acquired attitudes, interpretations and capacities—are neither able to face the problems nor to avoid them (Habermas 1998: 51). What is past is past and cannot be changed; what is important and what can in fact be changed is the sense of the past. That means that it is not just a matter of turning the page, as if that were part of the “past,” or only a matter of historians’ concern; on the contrary, we must learn to build a social memory about that traumatic event. As Garretón (2004: 35) puts it, “[l]ife and societies are not books of many pages that are turned over, but a single page that is written time and again.” In this light, the call for memory—as both an individual and collective expression at the same time—constitutes a space of political debate that is necessary to understand our past and project ourselves toward the future. Whether we like it or not, the past seeps through the cracks of the present, and what is more, as described by Spanish historian Juliá (2006: 17), “[it seeps] many times through large windows that remained open wide: it is not that we had to remember the past; it is just that we lived with the past stuck to our backs.” That is what happens in processes that strike and leave deep scars not only on the generations that directly experienced the events, but also on subsequent generations. For this reason, memory constitutes a part of the necessary elements when it comes to reconstructing historical milestones. A way to do that is by superimposing and mixing different narratives and testimonies, which will allow us to make progress in the struggle for memory; in other words, the space for memory should be conceived as a way of fighting against oblivion, a “remembering so as not to repeat,” which becomes a way to exorcize that past in order to be able to face the future. The historical narrative gives sense to the present and most of all it opens the perspectives of the future. The designing of policies must institutionalize a democratic memory; that is, one that both acknowledges conf lict and plurality and allows current and future generations to know what happened. In the face of a monstrous event, we may wonder: is it possible to draw lessons from history? Or more simply put, can we learn from history? We think we can. Even more so from mistakes.

Notes   1  Federación de Estudiantes de Chile.   2  Seat of the President of Chile.   3  This was a party formed from part of the Christian Democrats that would support Salvador Allende in 1970.   4  Organization belonging to the executive power that reviews the proposals for important undercover activities.   5  In his Critical Memories, Carlos Altamirano asserts that the agreements made in the Congress of Linares (1965) and Chillán (1967) were theoretically justified and that to intend to carry out a revolution without a dose of authoritarianism was impossible (Salazar 2010: 173).   6  According to the Constitution of 1925, when a candidate for presidency does not obtain 50 percent of the votes, the congress is in charge of ratifying the president of the country.   7  Terms used by North American organizations to prevent Allende from taking office.   8  This position was approved by the 1967 Chillán Congress and ratified by the June 1972 Declaration De Lo.   9  See Torres Dujisin 2014.  10  One of the president’s daughters was a member of the Left Revolutionary Movement.  11  National Security Doctrine is the name given to the military training provided by the United States to Latin American armed forces in the context of the Cold War. 380

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 12  El Mercurio. 25 April 1974.  13  This party was created in 1966 from a merger between the Conservative and Liberal Parties.  14  Interview of Sergio Onofre Jarpa to Qué Pasa magazine, N 133, Nov–Dec 1973.

Bibliography Aldunate, A., A. FlisFisch and T. Moulian. (1985). Estudio del sistema de partidos en Chile, Santiago: Editorial FLACSO. Allamand, A. (1999). La travesía del desierto, Santiago: Editorial Aguilar. Allende, S. Speech of Salvador Allende on the Balcony of FECH, 5 September 1970. Available online at www.archivochile.com (Accessed 8 June 2015). Angell, A. (1993). Chile de Alessandri a Pinochet: en busca de la utopía, Santiago: Editorial Andrés Bello. Aróstegui, J. (2004). La historia vivida. Sobre la Historia del Presente, Madrid: Editorial Alianza Ensayo. Boeninger, E. (1997). Democracia en Chile. Lecciones para la Gobernabilidad, Santiago: Editorial Andrés Bello. Cavdevila, L. (2009). La sombra de las víctimas oscurece el busto de los héroes. Cuestiones del Tiempo Presente. Available online at http://nuevomundo.revues.org/57306 (accessed 22 July 2014). The Church Committee Report. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975. Available online at http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/history/johnson/churchreport.htm#3 (accessed 22 July 2014). Garretón, M. A. (2004). Qué recordar y para qué recordar. Encuentros con la memoria, Santiago: Editorial LOM. Habermas, J. (1998). Mas allá del estado nacional, México DF: Editorial Fondo de Cultura Económica. Juliá, S. (2006). Memoria de la guerra y del franquismo, Madrid: Editorial Taurus. Koselleck, R. (1993). Futuro pasado. Para una semántica de los tiempos históricos, Bs. Aires: Editorial Paidós. Mendoza, M. (2011). Todos confesos, Santiago: Editorial Mandrágora. El Mercurio. 25 April 1970, p. 24. Ottone, E. and S. Muñoz. (2008). Después de la Quimera, Santiago: Editorial Random House, Serie Debates. Qué Pasa. N 133, Nov–Dec 1973. Politzer, P. (1990). Altamirano, Santiago: Ediciones Grupo Zeta. Rojas Mix, M. (2006). El imaginario. Civilización y cultura del siglo XXI, Buenos Aires: Editorial Prometeo. Salazar, G. (2010). Conversaciones con Carlos Altamirano. Memorias Críticas, Santiago: Editorial Random House Mondadori. Torres Dujisin, I. (2014). La crisis del sistema democrático: Las elecciones presidenciales y los proyectos políticos excluyentes, Santiago: Editorial Universitaria. Valenzuela, A. (1989). El quiebre de la democracia en Chile, Santiago: Editorial FLACSO.

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30 An ‘unaccomplished memory’ The period of the ‘strategy of tension’ in Italy (1969–1993) and the Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan Lia Luchetti and Anna Lisa Tota1

1. Introduction: the Italian cultural trauma The terrorist attacks that took place in Italy between 1969 and 1993 (during the so-called strategy of tension period described below) have never been inscribed in the nation’s public discourse. As a result, the Italian public lacks an understanding of the country’s recent history. Since 1970, these deaths and massacres have not been included in the majority of terrorist cases properly understood and remembered. This absence of collective awareness has been the ‘natural’ consequence of various forms of amnesia instigated in the past and today. At the international level there is also a lack of awareness that there is any terrorism of this kind in Italy. Only the crimes of the Red Brigades and the Mafia have been properly inscribed in the international public debate on contemporary Italian history. Why is this so? One hypothesis, often propounded but never proven, is that the ‘strategy of tension’ was made possible in Italy by a degree of cooperation between the deviant part of the Italian state intelligence services and the activities of international intelligence services, especially clandestine operations of the CIA. There would be a purported analogy between what happened during the 1970s in South America 2 and Italy. After addressing the issue of the political implications of the ‘strategy of tension’ and the involvement of international intelligence services in Italian politics, this chapter focuses on the specific characteristics of the trauma of the first Italian terrorist attack. This happened in Piazza Fontana (Milan, 12 December 1969) and initiated an obscure period in recent Italian history. This chapter examines the cultural forms of ‘Piazza Fontana memory’ to verify their degree of importance and visibility in the public sphere and to analyse the negotiations among different social groups competing to define this crucial event. Finally, it considers the relation between, on the one hand, the recent powerful role of the association of victims’ relatives and new reconciliation policies, and on the other hand, the inscription of this terrorist attack in Italian public discourse. In contemporary societies, cultural codes are often required to intervene actively in the public definition of ‘crucial events’, such as wars, terrorist attacks or disasters. These events impact on the entire collectivity, and they usually require a long process of public elaboration 382

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(Alexander 2004). Cultural codes shape both the contemporary representation of a crucial event and its future public memory. To what extent can cultural trauma theories (Eyerman 2001; Alexander et al. 2004) be applied to the case of the Italian terrorist attacks? In the majority of these cases, access to the legal arena was not available to process the cultural trauma: when ‘state terror’ occurred in Italy, access to the legal arena was systematically denied through a variety of tactics. For this reason, cultural elaboration of the trauma took place on other levels, such as aesthetic ones. By conducting a case study on the Piazza Fontana terrorist attack, this chapter investigates the specific characteristics of the trauma process in the Italian context and its consequences for 1) the inscription of the crucial event in public discourse, and 2) its relation with notions of justice. Moreover, it will illustrate how and to what extent aesthetic codes affect the public definition of justice and the collective understanding of what happened. The question of how to locate terror in the public space is a complex one. It is analysed here by considering the nature of the aesthetic codes used to transform a place of violence into a space of collective remembering. The process of transforming place is shaped by the performative nature of the narratives used in various national contexts. The sensitive nature of these places can be analysed by looking at social and public trajectories of the commemorative sites that have been planned and constructed where the terror attack occurred. Cultural symbols and artistic codes become resources with which to articulate the struggles over the past that inf luence the process of constructing national identities. In Italy, for example, there is a long history of state collusion between parts of the government and criminal organizations, such as the Mafia and the Camorra. This collusion has deeply affected the functioning of the legal system, which is normally the most important arena for the expression of collective trauma. When this mode of expression is denied, the expression of trauma is pushed outside the formal legal and political system. In these cases, cultural elaboration of the trauma takes place at the aesthetic level, and the culturally produced memories are very often counter-memories (Tota 2002, 2010).

2. The ‘unaccomplished’ public memory of ‘State Terror’ in Italy (1969–1993) The period of modern Italian history between 1969 and 1993 is characterized by a perception of the state as unable to defend its citizens, lacking the political and institutional will to pursue terrorists and, in some cases, as being the instigator of terror attacks. During this period, violence and terror were used as a political means to obtain political consensus in a process commonly referred to as the ‘strategy of tension’. Citizens’ access to the legal arena for justice was frequently denied. Indeed, numerous terrorists have not yet been prosecuted. In many cases, even after decades, there have been no convictions. The terrorist attacks, rather, entered public discourse only through their cultural depictions (films, theatrical performances, exhibitions, concerts). In light of Alexander’s model (2004), it can be argued that the cultural process of healing the nation and the Italian citizens from these traumas was enacted in the artistic arena. Terrorist organizations had been highly active in Italy since 1970, with numerous attacks resulting in many deaths and mass casualties caused by bombings in railway stations and central squares of cities. There is a long list of such terrorist attacks, but most Italian citizens have forgotten this chapter of Italy’s past. As Dickie et al. attest, [t]he extent and duration of the period of the stragi in postwar Italy have no real precedent in contemporary Europe. The series of peacetime outrages that marked the 1969–84 383

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period cannot be compared with the effects of various coups or civil wars in other southern European countries. Only in Italy did the strategy of tension last for so long and cause so much damage within a democratic system. Only in Italy do many of these outrages remain a mystery to this day. Few of the protagonists of the postwar stragi … have ever been convicted. Many were not even tried. (2002: 46) In the Italian case, the expression ‘strategy of tension’ has come to denote the past four decades of internal terrorist attacks. Yet, as said, behind this veneer lies a strategy of terror and violence pursued by an extremist part of the democratic state and the intelligence services in order to gain and maintain a political consensus unobtainable through democratic elections. Surprisingly, despite the frequency of terrorist attacks, this recent past has been largely forgotten. Numerous Italians, especially younger ones, cannot remember key details of these tragedies – dates, victims and places. In 1992, Cuore, a satirical magazine, published a series of student essays on the massacre in Piazza Fontana. It was evident that the majority of these students had no idea of what had happened only 23 years previously (Foot 2002). Yet the real problem is not forgetfulness, because, as Foot (2002) argues, you cannot forget something you have never learned. As already mentioned, the Italian public seems to lack a complete understanding of the country’s recent history. Since 1970, these deaths and massacres have not been included in the nation’s public discourse. Can one imagine that this is due to various forms of amnesia instigated in the past and today? It is interesting to note that at the international level there is a lack of awareness of any terrorism of this kind in Italy: within international public debate on contemporary Italian past only the crimes of the Red Brigades and the Mafia have been considered. This entire period remains relatively unknown to the rest of the world, not to mention its obscurity in the collective consciousness of Italian citizens. It is an ‘unaccomplished memory’, in this sense, in that it could never be inscribed in public debate because of the public’s lack of awareness of a large part of these terrorist actions. As said, the hypothesis, often propounded but never proven, is that the strategy of tension was made possible in Italy by collusion between the deviant part of the Italian state intelligence services and the activities of the international intelligence services, especially the CIA. Without direct understanding of the role played by the CIA, and perhaps also by other international intelligence services cooperating with the United States, it is impossible for this public memory to accomplish its complete form. It is not just a matter of elaborating what happened at the public level. It is a matter of granting the Italian nation and its citizens the right to properly ‘label’, or to name, what happened, and therefore subsequently the right to forget. As said, there is an analogy between what happened in the 1970s in South America and Italy, even if the democratic state was maintained in the Italian case. During Bill Clinton’s second term as the US President, the CIA acknowledged that it had played a role in Chilean politics prior to the coup, but its degree of involvement is still debated. Perhaps in the future the CIA will also acknowledge that it played a role in Italian politics during the strategy of tension. Aldo Moro, Prime Minister of Italy from 1963 to 1968, was kidnapped by the Red Brigades on 16 March 1978 and murdered after 55 days of captivity. In an extract from the report of the Red Brigades on their interrogations of Moro during his imprisonment, he underlines the role of associate countries in the strategy of tension: The so-called strategy of tension had the purpose, although fortunately not attained, to restore Italy to normality after the events of 1968 and the so-called ‘hot autumn’. It can be assumed that the associated countries [who were] interested in various ways in our 384

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policy and therefore interested in sponsoring a certain politics were somehow involved through their [intelligence] services. (Commissione Stragi, Memoriale Aldo Moro, 2: 360) On 14 November 1974, Pier Paolo Pasolini, an Italian intellectual, writer, filmmaker and poet, published a long article under the headline “What Is This Coup d’etat? I know” in Corriere della Sera, one of the leading newspapers in Italy. It is considered his death sentence. Pasolini was beaten to death on 2 November 1975 on the beach at Ostia, near Rome. Giuseppe Pelosi, a 17-year-old hustler, was arrested. He confessed to Pasolini’s murder. On 7 May 2005 Giuseppe Pelosi retracted his confession, which he said he made under the threat of violence to his family. This is the part of Pasolini’s article where he mentions the role of the CIA in the Italian strategy of tension: I know. I know the names of those responsible for what has been called a coup (and what was in fact a series of coups organised as a power protection system). I know the names of those responsible for the Milan bloodbath of 12 December 1969. I know the names of those responsible for the atrocities committed in Brescia and Bologna in the early months of 1974. I know the names of the powerful people who, with the CIA’s help, first created (although they failed miserably) an anti-Communist crusade … and later, again with the help and inspiration of the CIA, recovered a fascist identity to reverse the disaster of the referendum…. I know the names of those who, between one church mass and another, gave orders to, and ensured the political protection of, old generals (kept in reserve, ready for a coup d’état), young neo-fascists or rather neo-nazis (to create a real base of anticommunist tension), and common criminals.… I know all the names and I know what they are guilty of (attacks on institutions and public bloodbaths). I know. But I have no proof. I have not one clue. Probably – if American power will allow it – maybe deciding ‘diplomatically’ to grant to another democracy the same prerogative that the American democracy has granted about Nixon – these names sooner or later will be revealed. I know because I am an intellectual, a writer who tries to keep abreast of what is happening, to read everything that is written, to imagine things that nobody admits to knowing or things that are left unsaid.… After all, it is not that difficult to reconstruct the truth about what has been happening in Italy since 1968. (Pasolini 1974) During the trial for Pasolini’s murder, Guido Calvi, the prosecutor, said: Why did Pasolini die? Indeed, one does not need to be an intellectual or a storyteller to acquire the awareness that drove Pasolini’s pen that day. Millions of Italians ‘know’, and every day in city squares, factories, schools, everywhere, they express the dissident fruit of their knowledge. In the same way, we know who are the real instigators and the ‘ideal’ perpetrators of Pasolini’s murder, as they stand behind the scenes. And the crowd of Romans full of anguish and rage who came to bid farewell to Pasolini in Campo de’ Fiori, they knew. That crowd, so heterogeneous, so ‘Roman’ and therefore so ‘unreliable’, they knew and they know. But like us, they have no proof. Only a few clues. (Calvi 1976) Boschetti and Ciammitti (2010), in their book on the Bologna terrorist attack, argue that international intelligence services, mainly the CIA, were involved. According to these 385

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authors, during the strategy of tension in Italy the NAR (Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari), a neofascist terrorist group found guilty of many attacks (including the bomb attack at Bologna railway station on 2 August 1980, which killed 85 persons) played a central role as the link between the Italian intelligence services, the CIA and a group of Italian politicians who wanted to take control of Italy’s right-wing political parties, even through a coup. On 7 December 1970 there occurred in Italy a failed coup d’état known as the ‘Golpe Borghese’, taken from the name of the fascist Prince Junio Valerio Borghese, who was its main organizer. It took until 18 March 1971 for the coup attempt to become public knowledge, thanks to an article in the left-wing newspaper Paese Sera titled ‘Subversive Conspiracy against the Republic: Far-Right Plot Discovered’. To be noted, 7 December is the anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack (7 December 1941). In its final phase, the plan for the coup may have seen the involvement of US and NATO warships on alert in the Mediterranean Sea, but this remains a conjecture. The most detailed study on the role of NATO’s secret armies and terrorism in Western Europe was conducted by Daniele Ganser, a Swiss historian who has investigated the role of a ‘stay-behind’ paramilitary organization with the off icial mission of countering a possible Soviet invasion of Europe (Ganser 2005). This organization was called ‘Gladio’ and its origin can be traced to alleged ‘anti-communist NATO protocols’, which enrolled various intelligence services of NATO member states with the purpose to exclude communist parties from power in Western Europe by any means. According to Ganser, CIA director Allen Dulles was one of the key organizers of Gladio with the CIA, having financed most Gladio operations. During the Cold War era, this paramilitary organization was tasked with limiting Soviet inf luence within Europe. In Italy, the existence and the activities of Gladio were first revealed on 24 October 1980 by Giulio Andreotti, an Italian politician of the Christian Democracy Party. Andreotti, who died in 2013, served seven times as Prime Minister and held the office during Aldo Moro’s kidnapping and murder by the Red Brigades. He also served eight times as Minister of Defence. On that occasion he described Gladio as a structure of defence, information and safety. A film was made about his very controversial life: Il Divo (2008), directed by Paolo Sorrentino. This film documents Giulio Andreotti’s strong inf luence on Italy’s recent past, with a special focus on the strategy of tension period and the relation between the Mafia and the state. However, the existence of Gladio in Europe had been already revealed by William Colby (1978), CIA director from 1973 to 1975, in a book about his career in the CIA. This is the very complex national and international context that aids understanding of the terrorist attacks in Italy from 1969 until 1993. There is no direct proof, but several clues that make the hypothesis of the CIA’s involvement plausible. Perhaps the day of official acknowledgement by the CIA of its role in Italy during the strategy of tension will soon come. American, European and Italian citizens deserve to know the truth and the right to memory. Table 30.1 lists the terrorist attacks of the strategy of tension period. However, the names of the perpetrators are missing. This is because in most cases they are still unknown. But not all acts of terrorism have been forgotten in Italy. There are several differences among the ways in which these crucial events have been inscribed, or otherwise dealt with, in Italian public discourse. However, notwithstanding the marked differences, one discerns a common pattern that can be taken as a concise representation of what happened. In all cases, the trauma process (i.e. the gap between the event and its public representation) could not be performed in legal and political arenas, but only in aesthetic ones because the Italian intelligence services have systematically misled judicial investigations. For instance, whenever a 386

An ‘unaccomplished memory’ Table 30.1  Terrorist attacks in Italy during the strategy of tension period, 1969–1993 Date

Place

Number of victims

12 Dec 1969 22 July 1970 31 May 1972 17 May 1973 28 May 1974 4 Aug 1974 27 June 1980 2 Aug 1980 23 Dec 1984 27 May 1993 27 July 1993

Milan (Piazza Fontana) Gioia Taura (train) Peteano di Sagrado Milan Brescia (Piazza della Loggia) San Benedetto Val di Sambro, Italicus Ustica, DC9 aircraft Bologna Railway Station San Benedetto Val di Sambro, Train 904 Florence (Georgofili) Milan (Palestro)

17 dead, 88 injured 6 dead, 72 injured 3 dead, 1 injured 4 dead, 76 injured 8 dead, 103 injured 12 dead, 44 injured 81 dead 85 dead, 200 injured 15 dead, 267 injured 5 dead, 41 injured 5 dead, 14 injured

magistrate has been on the brink of discovering the truth, the trial has been moved to another city. Thus a new magistrate has had to take up the case and in fact start the investigation from the beginning. This was, for example, the case of the investigations related to the Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan. The trial was moved from Rome to Milan and then to Catanzaro and Bari, two cities in the south of Italy more than 1,200 kilometers from the site of the massacre. In more extreme measures, other magistrates were murdered because their investigations were too efficient and effective: neo-fascist terrorists murdered the Italian magistrate Mario Amato on 23 June 1980 (only some weeks before the Bologna massacre of 2 August 1980). When he was killed, he was investigating the role of the NAR and their relationship with the Italian and international intelligence services. He died before being able to reveal what he had discovered. This prompts the following question: what are the main consequences of cultural, aesthetic processes for and in a democracy, particularly when there is no legal recourse available? The public gains its knowledge of the recent Italian past from films and exhibitions, as in the case of Romanzo di una strage (2012), a film related to the Piazza Fontana bombing directed by Marco Tullio Giordana.3 In other words, in order to understand past events in their country, Italians must go to the theatre, museums or the cinema. However, in the end, they have ‘only’ been at the theatre or at the cinema or in a museum. Put otherwise, public knowledge of this particular past has been produced through the aesthetic mode of production. This public knowledge has a ‘degree of truth’ not comparable, for example, with that of traditional historical or political discourse. In the end, citizens will be induced to think that ‘perhaps it tells the truth, but it is only a film’. Thus reaffirmed is a type of ‘conspiracy narrative’ in regard to those traumas: plausible, yet the degree of reality produced through aesthetic codes is insufficient to compete with other narratives in the nation’s public discourse. Moreover, in most cases, the cultural memories generated in relation to the terrorist attacks are ‘counter-memories’. They are sometimes marginal voices. Other times they can become hegemonic ones, but they are nevertheless counter-memories (Foucault 1977). When in a democracy, a large portion of the recent past can only be recounted as ‘counter-memory’. This is likely to have a major impact on the collective identity of the entire nation. However, despite all of these constraints mentioned, commemorative rituals in Italy are opportunities for civil and political society to contribute to the values of democracy. They

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are also significant for the hegemony process, in that they make democracy possible. Because cultural trauma processes can be carried out at least in the artistic arena in Italy, it is possible to reaffirm the ideal of belonging to a democratic state. Hence, ultimately, notwithstanding the above-mentioned constraints, the cultural forms of these controversial pasts contribute to making democracy possible in Italy. The following section examines the case of the Piazza Fontana terrorist attack in 1969 and analyses the extent to which aesthetic codes have shaped the public knowledge and memory of that crucial event.

3. Piazza Fontana, 12 December 1969: the beginning of the ‘strategy of tension’4 The National Bank of Agriculture is located in Piazza Fontana, a small square in the centre of Milan, just behind the city’s cathedral. On 12 December 1969 at 4:37 pm, an explosion in the bank’s hall killed 17 men, 14 upon impact. The blast additionally injured 88, including 33 employees of the bank. The victims were in the bank for the agricultural market held on Fridays after normal business hours. The blast was a tragedy that struck the nation, in part because of the socio-demographic profile of the bank’s customers on that particular afternoon: a bomb seemingly placed at random but appearing as a symbolic assault on the working class employed in the agricultural sector. A few minutes before the explosion at the National Bank of Agriculture, a second bomb was found undetonated in the headquarters of the Italian Commercial Bank, in Piazza della Scala, again in the centre of Milan. Investigations were made, but on the same evening, at 9:25 pm, the bomb discharged, destroying all possible evidence with which to identify who had prepared the explosive devices. On the same afternoon, additional explosions occurred in Rome: one at the National Bank of Labour and two in front of a famous Italian monument, the Altar of the Fatherland (Altare della Patria) in Piazza Venezia, with about 20 wounded. In total, five terrorist attacks concentrated within just 53 minutes occurred simultaneously in Italy’s two largest cities. Thus began the so-called strategy of tension. The victims’ funerals were held at the cathedral of Milan on 15 December 1969. Even though it was a cold and grey day, 300,000 people gathered in the cathedral square. The hearse passed through the crowds silent and disciplined. There were no f lags, no party symbols, no one shouted or clapped. All maintained respectful silence in honour of the Milanese dead and to support the victims’ relatives. The crowd seemed to form a ‘human wall’ as if to defend the country from those who wanted to provoke a reactionary backlash. One relative of a victim, Francesca Dendena, remembers that during the funeral, Prime Minister Mariano Rumor approached victims’ relatives to embrace them (Dendena 2012). Dendena, who was 17, wouldn’t return the embrace. She disapproved of the state for not doing anything to prevent the massacre. Dendena’s remembrance is significant, because it shows how, as a victim’s relative, she is required to deal with the public dimension of this tragedy. Dendena made a two-fold choice: to attend the state funeral and to refuse proximity with the institutional authority. December 15 was also the day of the death of Giuseppe Pinelli, an anarchist railway worker taken to the police station by the police inspector Luigi Calabresi on the evening of the massacre together with other left-wing activists. After Pinelli was questioned continuously for three days, he ‘fell’ from the window of Calabresi’s office on the fourth f loor. The police’s official version was that Pinelli committed suicide. Police commissioner Marcello Guida told a press conference that Pinelli’s action was a voluntary act resulting from the

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Figure 30.1  Piazza Duomo in Milan, the day of the victims’ funerals Source: Courtesy of Rcs Quotidiani.

collapse of his alibi and thus, indirectly, evidence of his involvement in the massacre. Most newspapers complied with the police version. The headlines read: Dramatic turn of events: suspect kills himself in police station (Corriere della Sera, 16 December 1969). Dramatic fall from the fourth f loor of the police headquarters by railway anarchist (Il Gazzettino, 16 December 1969). Anarchist kills himself by jumping from the window at police headquarters (Il Giorno, 16 December 1969). Pinelli was a leading suspect (Il Giorno, 16 December 1969). Revealing Action (La Notte, 16 December 1969). Yet some courageous reporters began to organize counter-information: Lotta Continua, an extra-parliamentary left-wing Italian movement, launched an aggressive campaign in its weekly magazine to prove the inconsistencies in the police version and undermine the credibility of the police, especially police inspector Luigi Calabresi, who always claimed that he was not in the room at the moment of Pinelli’s death. In 1970 Calabresi brought legal action against the editor-in-chief of the Lotta Continua newspaper, while Pinelli’s wife and mother, in 1971, brought suit against Calabresi and the police present during the questioning for

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voluntary manslaughter, kidnapping, private violence, abuse of office and abuse of authority. Luigi Calabresi, however, did not see the end of the process because he was murdered outside his home on 17 May 1972 with two gunshots.5 The trial, presided over by judge D’Ambrosio, ended in 1975 with not guilty verdicts for all the defendants on the basis of ‘lack of evidence’; Pinelli’s fall was considered the consequence of an ‘active illness’.6 It is important to consider the Piazza Fontana trial because it affords understanding of many of the political divisions that are still today apparent during the commemorative ceremonies. The courts first tried anarchists, then fascists and anarchists together, later fascists together with officers of the Italian intelligence services. Guido Salvini, the investigating judge in the last inquiry (from 1989 to 1997), explained in his indictment the motive for the bombs: to induce the Prime Minister at the time of attack, the Christian Democrat Mariano Rumor, to declare a state of emergency in the country. The declaration of a state of emergency would thereby facilitate the establishment of an authoritarian government, and it would halt union advances and the growth of the left (Salvini 1995). But Prime Minister Rumor never proclaimed a state of emergency. The slaughter at Piazza Fontana and the mass participation in the funeral ceremony had frightened him. Aldo Moro (at that time the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs) had also advised him not to declare a state of emergency. This is most likely why Rumor was the target of a bomb that exploded in 1973 at the Milan police headquarters during the commemoration of Luigi Calabresi’s death, which killed four people and injured 52.

4. Cultural forms and public knowledge of the Piazza Fontana case After the terrorist attack, the media became the primary arena in which the conflict between the two opposite political and ideological movements took place. Left-wing newspapers, such as l’Unità, mounted a campaign to explain the reason for the bomb attacks; right-wing ones, such as La Notte, hunted the attackers, who were immediately identified as members of two anarchist associations called Ponte della Ghisolfa and 22 Marzo. Many newspapers, such as Corriere della Sera and Corriere d’Informazione, complied with the official version of Pinelli’s involvement as provided by the police and the judiciary, while others, such as La Stampa and Il Giorno, contested the controversial account of Pinelli’s death. Besides the ‘orthodoxy’ of the majority of newspapers, there were some journalists who decided to set up defence committees and who anonymously published in 1970 a book titled State Slaughter. A Counter-Inquiry (La strage di Stato. Controinchiesta). Hence counter-information became, besides cultural artefacts, a means to articulate a counter-memory in the media and aesthetic arenas of Piazza Fontana. As Tota argues, [i]f there is a pattern to the Italian experience of terror, it has surely to do with the concept of counter-memory conceived in a Foucaultian sense of a collective (group) memory grounded and based in the civil society, conf licting and competing with the state’s version of that past. (2004: 283) In addition to the news media, the arts began to play an increasing role in affecting public knowledge for those who had not experienced the event and represented a past that had difficulty finding space within the institutional arena. The first two emblematic cultural artefacts representing the Pinelli case analysed here are: 1) the painting Anarchist Pinelli’s funeral (I funerali dell’anarchico Pinelli) by Enrico Baj, and 2) the play Accidental Death of an Anarchist (Morte accidentale di un anarchico) by Nobel laureate Dario Fo. 390

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Baj’s monumental collage work7 is composed of 18 figures cut from wood that are suffering at Pinelli’s death and 11 hands descending from the top of the picture. It directs the viewer’s gaze from the core of Pinelli’s figure, which is falling headlong from above, to three foregrounded figures representing his wife and his two daughters with expressions of extreme grief. The artwork simultaneously depicts the anarchist’s fall and the funeral. Compared to the divided memories of Piazza Fontana, it takes care to summarize into an organic and single symbolic representation the different versions of Pinelli’s death. In the painting, Pinelli is caught between two oppositional tensions: a group of ‘generals’ – typical Bajian figures symbolizing the police and the authorities – on the right and crying anarchists on the left. The story of this picture is emblematic: Calabresi was murdered in Milan in the morning of the same day that Baj’s exhibition was inaugurated at Palazzo Reale in the centre of Milan (17 May 1972), a few meters distance from Piazza Fontana. The exhibition was immediately suspended, and the painting became a symbol of ‘counter-memory’. It also became a case of ‘memory in fragments’ as it was dismantled and abandoned in a warehouse. Finally, in 2012, the exhibition took place in exactly the same place that it had been originally inaugurated decades before (Palazzo Reale in Milan), but it was only open for three months. The painting, owned by the Marconi Foundation, was thus canonized in public discourse on the massacre and there is now a petition for it to be part of a permanent exhibition. Baj’s painting has become a visible ‘piece’ of public discourse on the massacre and demonstrates how art can create public opinion and assume a role of moral and civil proof (Foot 2009). Fo’s play is certainly the best-known Italian example of ‘counter-memory’. Immediately after the massacre, in 1970, it proposed an antagonistic version of Pinelli’s death. Dario Fo, in open conf lict with the official channels of information, decided to denounce an injustice and staged what he regarded as the truth with his expressive codes of satire and farce. The timing was the prime variable because Fo wanted to intervene immediately in the tragic affair of Pinelli’s death. Fo plays a madman who is arrested 12 times for pretending to be another person (a surgeon, a naval engineer, a bishop). While being questioned at the police station, he impersonates a judge investigating the accidental death of an anarchist. In a grotesque and ridiculous manner, Fo shows the incongruities in the police reports on the Pinelli case. The performance of the play led to more than 40 libel suits filed against Fo in various parts of Italy. To avoid problems, however, Fo moved the action of the play from Italy to the United States, where in New York in 1920 a true story similar to Pinelli’s happened to Andrea Salsedo, an Italian anarchist who fell from a window of the police headquarters on 3 May 1920 after being questioned and beaten by policemen for several days. Fo used the similarity between the two cases to narrate the Pinelli case without directly mentioning his name. The story of this play, like Baj’s painting, is emblematic of Italy’s forgetting. It has been staged throughout the world but only a few times in Italy and always with a clear communicative intent to take a position on disputes related to Pinelli’s case: for instance in 1987 Fo restaged the work in Milan to denounce the attempted removal of an anarchist plaque to Pinelli in Piazza Fontana. Besides an ethical role, artworks regarding the terrorist attack at Piazza Fontana have a marked emotional function. Artistic productions, such as films, plays, comics, paintings and music, seek to produce in their receivers some sort of identification with the victims so that they share the pain that the event caused. Facing the traumatic process within aesthetic arenas triggers the catharsis of painful events in the audience. In the case of Piazza Fontana, this transference effect with the victim happens more directly because all of them are based on the testimony of the victims. This transference seems most significant in theatre and in comics. 391

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Comics8 have been powerful mnemonic artefacts in the case of Piazza Fontana because of their capacity to reach a wide audience and produce a transformation in public knowledge of the past. In the past ten years in Italy, publishing houses, such as Round Robin, Coconino Press and BeccoGiallo, have used the comics as a form of civic politics in order to narrate some of the most controversial episodes in the country’s past. In particular, the comic book Piazza Fontana (Barilli and Fenoglio 2009) focuses on the memory of the massacre by the victims’ relatives, the moral entrepreneurs conveying the trauma to the audience. The comic book is victim-centred through the figures and accounts of Fortunato Zinni, an employee of the bank who survived the massacre; Francesca Dendena, daughter of a victim and the first president of The Piazza Fontana Association; and Licia Pinelli, Giuseppe Pinelli’s wife. The comic book recounts the explosion, investigations and trials and is combined with verses from Pasolini’s Patmos, a poem dedicated to each victim, which he wrote immediately after the massacre. In this way the poetry constitutes a sort of ‘requiem’ composed in ink to honour the 18 victims, including Giuseppe Pinelli. In general, the analysis of these cultural artefacts – Baj’s collage, Fo’s play, the Piazza Fontana comic and Pasolini’s poem – reveals the central role assigned to the moral testimonies of the victims and their relatives.

5. Commemorative meanings and new public history Activities of victims’ relatives of the Piazza Fontana case can be divided into two temporal phases: 1) from 1969 to 2009 and 2) from 2009 to the present. Family members initially acted jointly in a spontaneous manner: filing a civil action, finding a lawyer, organizing attendance at legal hearings, consoling each other (Carlo Arnoldi, interview: 13 June 2013). At the beginning, widows of the victims created a network of support that was characterized by strong affectivity and a capacity to exchange both organizational information and emotional comfort. The widows were especially concerned about family management. They faced enormous practical, economic and emotional difficulties and their children were not mature enough to cope with the trauma. The mothers encouraged their sons to go on with their studies and extracurricular activities in order to lead them to good personal growth (Carlo Arnoldi, interview: 13 June 2013). After the Bologna massacre (see Table 30.1) in 1981, the most active Piazza Fontana victims’ families decided to form an association but without formalizing it with a notary. The widows felt that a man could better represent them (Carlo Arnoldi, interview: 13 June 2013) so Luigi Passera9 became the association’s spokesperson while Francesca Dendena, one of the most dynamic relatives, acted as secretary. Originally this non-formalized association was composed of a small number of family members. The majority of them did not reside in Milan but were scattered throughout the province. The non-formalized association supported the activities of two official associations, the Partisans’ Association and the Union of Victims’ Relatives of Massacres (established in 1983), by taking part in trials, organizing commemorative ceremonies and giving out press releases. These two official associations represented the interests of the victims’ relatives and helped them to understand what had happened. They had to group together to build a shared version of the past. Adding to the failure of the legal process to render a material consequence to the trauma is the memory battle between two opposite social groups on the legitimate version of Pinelli’s tragic ‘fall’ from the fourth f loor of the police headquarters. Two antithetical frames (murdered/died), which are still propounded by two political groups, right- and left-wing, are condensed in the inscriptions on two adjacent memorial plaques to Pinelli in Piazza Fontana, 392

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analysed by Foot (2002). The first, placed by anarchists in 1977 without official permission, reads, ‘To Giuseppe Pinelli, anarchist railway worker, innocent and killed in the police headquarters of Milan on 16 December 1969. Milanese students and democrats’. The second one, placed by the city of Milan in 2006, after an attempt by the municipality to replace the first plaque, reads, ‘To Giuseppe Pinelli, anarchist railway worker, innocent but tragically died in the police headquarters of Milan on 15 December 1969’. The result of this war of definitions is a visible part of the public discourse and identity of a city divided about a controversial and painful past. This controversy has also greatly complicated the commemorative frame in which the victims’ relatives proceed. Therefore, the inscriptions are very similar: they both recognize Pinelli’s innocence. The main difference is in the frame of the anarchist’s death; in the first plaque, Pinelli was killed, in the second he died tragically. Considering the two stones side by side, the repetition of the adjective ‘innocent’ (KILLED – innocent / innocent – DEAD) produces an oxymoron: the imaginary intersection between the words ‘killed’ and ‘dead’ creates an estrangement effect and prompts reconsideration of the meaning of the first plaque. This is clear from the statement of Claudia, Giuseppe Pinelli’s youngest daughter: I didn’t give great importance to the plaque in Piazza Fontana. I almost thought that Pino didn’t need memorial stones, until the plaque with the words ‘killed innocent’ was removed and replaced with that of the municipality saying ‘innocent but tragically dead’, almost as if he died by accident. And in the replacement of that word I saw the intent to clear the state officials, who had held him illegally and questioned him, of any kind of responsibility. (Claudia Pinelli, interview: 24 June 2013) Besides suggesting reflection, the two plaques provoke action: there is evidence of several acts of sabotage on the two commemorative plaques. These acts seem similar to the creative resistance10 and ‘semiotic guerrilla’ strategies implemented by so-called culture jammers. These inscriptions have been manipulated to overturn their meanings and bring the municipality of Milan’s plaque back into the frame of Pinelli’s murder (Luchetti 2013). For example, students sabotaged the municipality’s plaque in 2010 and changed the sentence ‘innocent but tragically dead’, which emphasized the correction to ‘innocent but tragically killed’. Again in 2010, during the morning commemorative march, students threw red paint at the municipality’s plaque to underline with the color of blood the tragic murder of Pinelli and the inadequacy of the official explanation (accidental death due to the so-called active illness). In 2011, students covered the inscription on the municipality’s plaque with a sticker of the same shape but with the phrase ‘innocent but shamefully killed’. Finally, in July 2013, after the City Council issued a regulation that plaques must display only the judicial truth, some activists made a ‘corrective’ intervention to the first Pinelli memorial plaque: the word ucciso (killed) was changed to uccisosi, which means ‘committed suicide’. Such an intervention again put forth the incriminating suicide version originally issued by Milan police commissioner Marcello Guida in 1969. Thus a third alternative meaning proposed to the two frames ‘killed/died’ crystallized on the marble. The distortion of the inscriptions has a strong oppositional and symbolic tension and evidences how different social groups engage in ‘semiotic guerrilla’ actions in order to impose their definition of a controversial past. The process of re-signification performed on the two memorial plaques ref lects in the divided public memory of the Piazza Fontana massacre. 393

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In 2005, after seven trials (in Rome, Milan, Catanzaro, again Catanzaro, Bari, Catanzaro and Milan) and 33 years of investigations, the Corte di Cassazione of Milan (the court of last instance) confirmed the not guilty verdicts for all the defendants in the Piazza Fontana bombing case. In particular, Freda and Ventura, two Venetian Nazi-fascists belonging to the Ordine Nuovo group, had already been acquitted in 1987 by the Corte di Cassazione of Bari for lack of evidence and the action of ne bis in idem, the Italian double jeopardy principle. The judgement of the Milan court, however, stated that the Piazza Fontana massacre had not been committed by a ‘splinter group, but was the result of a well-organized conspiracy, though of obscure origin’. Even though no convictions were made, the legal arena had performed its function within cultural trauma process by recognizing the responsibility of the Ordine Nuovo neo-fascist group and discussing the material consequences of trauma. The victims’ families regarded this verdict as one of two breakthrough events that ushered in a new phase in public history. In 2005, when the Supreme Court’s judgment put the ‘headstone’ on the legal truth, the Piazza Fontana victims’ families began to feel the need to be an official and public actor in order to become independent from the other associations and to more forcefully disseminate the historical truth revealed by the sentence. They first managed to dialogue directly with civil society, lodging an appeal with the city of Milan immediately after the final judgment. Punitive damages were awarded to civil parties, including the victims’ families, in compensation for all court costs. This issue testifies to the resilience shown by the association’s members, and it became the driving force for the official establishment of the association. More than the legal arena, it was the institutional one that was crucial for the decision to establish the association in a structured form and for its enhanced visibility in the public sphere. The second breakthrough event was Law no. 56 of 4 May 2007, which instituted the Remembrance Day for Victims of Terrorism and Massacres as being 9 May, the anniversary of Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro’s murder by the Red Brigades. During the second celebration of the Remembrance Day, in the same year of the fortieth anniversary of the Piazza Fontana massacre, President Giorgio Napolitano focused on the memory of the Piazza Fontana massacre: Remember that the massacre, and with it the start of an obscure ‘strategy of tension’, means remembering a long and harrowing story of investigations and trials which have not produced complete legal truth…. The purpose was to create an atmosphere of convulsive alarm and confusion and thus destabilize the democratic system in order to create the conditions for an authoritarian turn in the country…. Not minor pieces of the plot – in particular misleading activity by part of the state – were often not able to clearly identify those who were responsible. Also a painful part of Italian history in the second half of the twentieth century is what remains unfinished in the pursuit of truth and justice, especially in punishing criminal responsibility for the terrible destruction of human lives. Our democratic state, because it has always remained a democratic state and not a phantom ‘dual state’, places this burden upon itself. (Napolitano 2009) With these words, the President accomplished a crucial act of taking responsibility because he legitimated a specific version of this controversial past within the public sphere. Napolitano 394

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made it possible for the cultural trauma of the massacre to be inscribed in the national public discourse by defining all the issues underlined by Alexander (2004: 12–15): a) the nature of the pain in the ‘creation of an atmosphere of convulsive alarm and confusion’ and in ‘destabilization of the democratic system in order to create the conditions for an authoritarian turn’; b) the nature of the victims in ‘those who have suffered not only for terrible personal and family losses, but for every ambiguity and lack of response to their expectations and their calls’; c) the relation of the trauma victim to the wider audience, recognizing the role of guarantors of associations as ‘people who provide such an essential moral and civic engagement’ and victims’ family members ‘first overwhelmed by the loud and shameless exhibitionism of the guilty, and discouraged by the indifference and ambiguity of the information media’; d) attributing the responsibilities for the massacre because ‘a historical truth has been achieved, with the emergence from the judgments of the neo-fascist extreme right matrix’. The 9 May 2009 celebration was also an opportunity to carry out an intense and unexpected act of reconciliation by recognizing Giuseppe Pinelli as the eighteenth victim of the massacre. The President pronounced this speech in front of the widows of Pinelli and Calabresi. With this act Napolitano wanted to resolve the dispute between two social groups that had competed for years to assert their own definition of the past. Analysis of the in-depth interviews with Giuseppe Pinelli’s two daughters shows that the reconciliation was accepted with some reservations: because Pinelli was innocent, the institutional act was not a rehabilitation, but rather an official sanction that allowed public recognition. This was not a reconciliation, which would have required also ‘knowing what happened that night in that room, and we still do not know’ (Silvia Pinelli, interview: 7 July 2013). Finally, national policy was successful in strengthening the association’s role as a guarantor of this past. Similarly, local government helped in this project: in 2011 the mayor of Milan recognized 12 December as the Remembrance Day for all the Milanese victims. The establishment, in 2007, of the Remembrance Day for Victims of Terrorism and Massacres expressed the proximity of a state, which had been felt to be absent or adverse. Finally, on 28 January 2009, the association decided to proceed with legal recognition by acquiring its own statute and internal organization. Francesca Dendena held the role of president, and after her premature death on 6 October 2010, it moved to Carlo Arnoldi. Thereafter, a new public subject was off icially born – the Association Piazza Fontana 12 December 1969, a centre of studies and initiatives on the political massacres of the 70s – which established direct relations with civil society, media and institutions. The Association’s mission was to become a powerful ethical lobby able to help elaborate the cultural trauma in civil society. A new visibility of the traumatic event within artistic arenas has recently been apparent. Since 2010, the Association’s members have very often lent their voices to writers, filmmakers, journalists, photographers, dramatists and graphic novel authors. Moreover, the Association organizes, with the support of cultural associations and local governments, meetings and discussions in schools in order to disseminate the historical truth that emerged from the 2005 judgment and especially to make young people aware of it. The passing of the memory baton to younger generations is a key moment in the transmission of public memory of the Piazza Fontana massacre. 395

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6. Conclusion The ‘strategy of tension’ (1969–1993) is still a very obscure period in the recent Italian past. Although the terrorist attacks occurred only a few decades ago, they are in many cases almost forgotten or, at least, not yet properly inscribed in the Italian and international public discourse. It seems that some sort of instigated amnesia has been at work, with the consequence that even Italian citizens lack a public understanding of what happened in those years. Why is this so? It is probably because this public memory cannot be accomplished. There is a ‘missing piece’ that needs to be finally acknowledged. Is it true or not that a part of the international intelligence services (especially the CIA) played a role in the Italian strategy of tension? Is it true or not that the terrorist attacks of those years were intended to provoke an authoritarian turn in Italy and prevent the leftist parties from gaining too much consent in the elections? These are crucial questions that today, many decades after the end of the Cold War, should be finally answered. The second part of this chapter analysed the social trajectories of the public memory of the Piazza Fontana terrorist attack. Piazza Fontana marked the beginning of the strategy of tension. It is for this reason that it is so important. It has been shown that, even if the role played by the victims’ relatives association became more effective and prominent over time, the memory of Piazza Fontana is still divided and ‘unaccomplished’, because its meaning cannot be placed in its international context. How long must American, European and Italian citizens wait to know the truth?

Notes   1   Sections 1, 2 and 6 are written by Anna Lisa Tota; sections 3, 4 and 5 by Lia Luchetti.   2  For example, in the case of Salvador Allende in Chile. See Torres Dujisin in this volume.   3 Also the film Romanzo di una strage (2012) suggests a relationship among NATO, international intelligence services, Italian ones and the NAR (Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari).   4  This case study by Lia Luchetti (2013) is based on data collected through: a) ethnographic observation during the commemorative ceremonies held on the anniversary; b) 25 in-depth interviews with members of the Piazza Fontana victims’ relatives association, Pinelli’s daughters, members of the Italian Union of Victims’ Relatives, Italian Partisans’ Association and other witnesses; c) documentary analysis of 580 news articles published in nine national newspapers and magazines. Moreover, all the significant material (commemorative programs, speeches by victims’ relatives belonging to the association and the Italian President, videos, social media contents) and all the cultural artefacts (books, comics, songs, paintings, theatrical performances and movies) have been analysed. The research started in September 2011 and ended in December 2014.   5  Sixteen years later a Lotta Continua activist, Leonardo Marino, admitted that he was one of the perpetrators and gave the names of his accomplice, Ovidio Bompressi, and the instigators, Giorgio Pietrostefani and Adriano Sofri, who, although they declared their innocence, were sentenced in 1997 to 22 years in prison after a long trial.   6  In Italian it is unclear what the term ‘malore attivo’ is supposed to mean.   7  12 x 3 meters, inspired by Picasso’s Guernica.   8 For example, Art Spiegelman’s Maus.   9  The son-in-law of Carlo Garavaglia, one of the victims of the bombing.  10  Obviously, compared with the advertising that activists seek to sabotage with distortive actions (subvertising, billboard banditry and media hoaxing), in the case of the plaques the targets of the attack were not corporate strategies or brand images.

References Alexander, J. C. (2004) ‘Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma’, in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, edited by J. C. Alexander, R. Eyerman, B. Giesen, N. J. Smelser and P. Sztompka, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 1–30. 396

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Alexander, J. C., Eyerman, R., Giesen, B., Smelser, N. J., Sztompka, P. (eds.) (2004) Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, Berkeley: University of California Press. Barilli, F. and Fenoglio, M. (2009) Piazza Fontana, Padova: BeccoGiallo. Boschetti, A. and Ciammitti, A. (2010) La strage di Bologna, Padova: Beccogiallo. Calvi, G. (1976) Address of the lawyer Guido Calvi during the trial for the murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini, 24 April. Available online at www.pasolini.net (accessed March 26, 2014). Colby, W. (1978) Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA, New York: Simon and Schuster. Commissione Stragi (Parliamentary Inquiry Commission on terrorism in Italy and on the causes of the lack of identif ication of those responsible for the massacres) (2001) Memoriale Aldo Moro, 2, pp. 360–380, Senato della Repubblica, Camera dei Deputati. Dendena, M. (2012) Ora che ricordo ancora. Francesca Dendena: storia di un eroe civile, Milano: Maingraf edizioni. Dickie, J., Foot, J., Snowden, M. (eds.) (2002) Disastro! Disasters in Italy since 1860: Culture, Politics and Society, New York: Palgrave. Eyerman, R. (2001) Cultural Trauma. Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foot, J. (2002) ‘Memory, the Massacre, and the City: Milan and Piazza Fontana since 1969’, in J. Dickie, J. Foot, M. Snowden (eds.) Disastro! Disasters in Italy since 1860: Culture, Politics and Society, New York: Palgrave, pp. 256–281. Foot, J. (2009) Italy’s Divided Country, New York: Palgrave. Foucault, M. (1977) Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Edited by Donald F. Bouchard, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Ganser, D. (2005) NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation GLADIO and Terrorism in Western Europe, London: Frank Cass Publishers. Luchetti, L. (2013) Piazza Fontana 12 dicembre 69: la memoria pubblica della strage, PhD Dissertation, University La Sapienza, Rome. Napolitano, G. (2009) Speech by President of the Republic, Giorgio Napolitano, at the Remembrance Day for Victims of Terrorism and Massacres, Quirinale Palace, May 9. Available online at http://presidenti. quirinale.it/elementi/Continua.aspx?tipo=Discorso&key=1526 (accessed June 7, 2015). Pasolini, P. (1974) What Is This Coup d’etat? I Know, Corriere della Sera, November 14. Salvini, G. (1995) Sentenza ordinanza del Giudice Istruttore presso il Tribunale Civile e Penale di Milano nel procedimento penale nei confronti di ROGNONI Giancarlo ed altri. Available online at www.strano.net/ stragi/tstragi/salvini/index.html (accessed March 26, 2014). Tota, A. L. (2002) ‘A Persistant Past: The Bologna Massacre, 1980–2000’, in J. Dickie, J. Foot, M. Snowden (eds.) Disastro! Disasters in Italy since 1860: Culture, Politics and Society, New York: Palgrave, pp. 281–300. Tota, A. L. (2004) ‘Counter-Memories of Terror: Technologies of Remembering and Technologies of Forgetting’, in M. Jacobs and N. Hanrahan (eds.) Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Culture, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 272–285. Tota, A. L. (2010) ‘Ethnographying Public Memory: The Commemorative Genre for the Victims of Terrorism in Italy’, in P. Atkinson and S. Delamont, Vol. 4 (2), Sage Qualitative Research Methods, London: Sage, pp. 131–159.

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31 Making absence present The September 11 memorial1 Alexandra Délano and Benjamin Nienass

My design tries to make absence visible. Michael Arad, architect and designer of the 9/11 memorial (Arad 2012)

Halting the rush to memory The various links between 9/11 and national self-assertion are well established. A few days after the event, New York’s mayor Rudy Giuliani spoke of the “tremendous feelings of patriotism” (quoted in Doss 2010: 51) that he experienced when entering the site. Giuliani was, of course, not an exception. Efforts to make sense of senseless acts tend to fall back on categories that provide a clearly defined notion of the self as well as a feeling of security in the midst of uncertainty. Particularly Jenny Edkins’ (2003) analysis has powerfully demonstrated that 9/11 was followed by a “memory rush,” a quick move to define the narrative about the event and its seemingly inevitable consequences in (foreign) policy through preaching strength. The link between 9/11 and the Iraq War was pushed so clearly by the George W. Bush administration that Edkins (2003: 243) observes that “the war became (a) memorial” in itself. September 11th was thus used in both a symbolic and literal sense to defend the nation. The urge to represent the “impermeable, invulnerable, relentlessly aggressive national subject,” in Judith Butler’s (2010a) terms, seemed especially high exactly at a time when US vulnerability had been so powerfully and painfully exposed.2 Amid the political urgency to interpret and react, 9/11 also marked a caesura, leading to a moment of grief, of pause and reflection, perhaps even to a questioning of established ways to make sense of the world. As Bell (2006: 15) remarks, “[m]emory is capable of being yoked to state power, in the name of nationalism, or employed in opposition, as a challenge to the dominant narratives. The aftermath of 9/11 serves as a case in point.” The debates about rebuilding at the World Trade Center site took place in this context, in which commercial interests, urban renewal, foreign policy, and security concerns were debated alongside the need for a space for mourning and memorialization.3 For many, there was a sense “that the identity of the country was inextricably linked to the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site” and that whatever was built there “would reveal nothing less than what makes us American” (Greenspan 2013: xi–xii). 398

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The 9/11 memorial, in its ref lection on absence and in its remarkable constraint with regard to obvious messages, certainly does not strike observers as part of the nationalist fervor embraced and exemplified by the Bush administration and many others. Where the discourse immediately after the event favored resoluteness and decision, the memorial encourages its audience to halt any rush to come to conclusions and intends to allow for mourning beyond obvious collective implications. “I wanted to show that this is not a political calculus,” said Michael Arad, the architect behind the memorial (quoted in Kingwell 2012: 68). Memory scholar James Young, who served on the jury that eventually chose Michael Arad and Peter Walker’s design for the memorial at Ground Zero, places the 9/11 memorial in a larger trajectory of memorials that have moved from uncritical self-aggrandizing to critical introspection (Young 2010). Most strikingly, the memorial succeeds in raising (and perhaps even answering) some of the most pressing questions in the wake of loss: How do we resist the urge to “fill” emptiness with false consolation? How do we let voids speak for themselves? How does one address renewal in the face of absence? Especially in the case of 9/11, in which the victims were not only killed but also wiped out and erased, these questions needed to be addressed by any serious contender for a public commemoration effort.4 The Memorial Mission Statement of the experts picked by the memorial’s advisory council had proposed to remember the site as a place “made sacred through tragic loss” and hence to depict this loss and make it present to the visitor. In a similar vein, architects Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio had suggested leaving the area empty and letting silence be a statement in itself (Levitt 2011: 67). The winning design by Arad embodies these ideas in many of its choices. Whether we think of the pools that mark the former locations of the twin towers, the masses of water disappearing into the ground, the inability of visitors to see where

Figure 31.1  T  he 9/11 memorial, September 2013 Source: Paul Roer.

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the water ends up, or the inscribed names of the victims as carved out spaces—each of these elements is successful and is a painful reminder of irretrievable loss. In all of these cases, the absence is paradoxically and vividly made present for the visitor. In fact, most of the finalists had a version of the towers’ footprints in their design.5 However, Young praises Arad’s design in particular because it allows “absence to speak for itself ” (Young 2010).

Visibility and absence The very notion of allowing absence to “speak” implies that absence needs some support to show itself or that it needs to be teased out and (re-)produced. Visibility and absence are thus by no means opposites but rather notions that work in tandem in Arad’s design. Making absence present is a prerequisite to reflecting on it. However, the suggestion of the presence of absence in the memorial also opens up a space to reflect on what is not visible here. Given the fact that material evidence to account for many of the victims is impossible to retrieve from the site, there is an obvious yet unsettling question about whether there are absences that are not made present, whether by explicit choice or because they remain outside of the frames used to account for what is or should be present. In fact, during the discussions about what kind of memorial would be built at the site, there was a proposal to build a tomb for the “unknown” victims. Such a space would gather the unidentified remains of victims and would also represent those whose remains were not found (Gittrich et al. 2002). This seems particularly relevant given the fact that, despite improvements in DNA technology, as of April 2013 the Office of Chief Medical Examiner in New York had not been able to provide DNA matches for 41 percent of the victims on the city’s official list and 38 percent of the remains found have not been identified.6 Ellen Borakove, Director of Public Affairs at the Medical Examiner’s Office, explains that her office has found 27 unique profiles that don’t match existing DNA samples from families (E. Borakove, personal interview, May 6, 2013). Forensic examiners working on these cases claim that these remains could belong to a victim whose family did not provide a DNA sample, “or to an undocumented immigrant or to a homeless person” (Hampson and Moore 2003).7 Discrepancies in the number of victims were certainly present during the initial years of the recovery of remains and the evaluation of claims from family members. However, more than a decade later, some families continue to wait for official recognition that their loved one died at the site. The Mexican Consulate in New York reports that as recently as 2011 it received a call from someone in Mexico reporting a family member as a victim of the attacks and asking if there could be an official recognition or some support from compensation funds (M. Cuevas, personal interview, March 2, 2012). At first, the consulate explained that this was a new claim, which raised suspicion about its validity given that almost a decade had already passed, but after further inquiry the office of consular protection found out that, in fact, this family had been in touch in 2002 and various times thereafter to inquire about this case. However, back then the family did not submit any evidence to the US Embassy in Mexico, as was required, and the case was abandoned. It is impossible to know whether this is a true case of a victim who is not acknowledged, but this example sheds light on the cases of foreign nationals, particularly undocumented migrants, whose families had limited access to information, were afraid to come forward, or did not have the evidence required to prove that their family member was at the World Trade Center at the time of the attacks (Délano and Nienass 2014). Comparing the list of victims of 9/11 at the Mexican Consulate in New York with the official list now set in stone by the memorial, it is clear that a number 400

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of names are excluded in the latter. In all of these cases, the individuals named by the consulate but left out by the official memorial were undocumented immigrants. Questions about these types of cases remain unanswered in terms of material evidence, but they also remain invisible in the memorial. Their names are not listed; the uncertainty of who was lost that day is not made visible. Other memorial artifacts, such as the Flag of Honor that was created by John Michelotti and his wife and is displayed at the entrance of the museum store (and at many security checkpoints in New York City airports), while playing unsubtly with a purely national(istic) reading of the attacks, do include the marker “Others” at the end of the list of names, recognizing that some people were not acknowledged, that some people are still dying as a result of the attacks, and that the list might never be complete ( J. Michelotti, personal interview, February 14, 2014). In response to questions about why the choice was made not to include this type of inscription in the memorial, Michael Arad and representatives from the 9/11 memorial museum make reference to a panel with an empty space at the end of the list of names on the South Pool that was left in case new names needed to be added, recognizing the level of uncertainty that was present particularly in the first years after September 11 (M. Arad, personal interview, October 18, 2012; L. Rasic, personal interview, February 19, 2014). In fact, one name was recently added to this panel. This person was Jerry J. Borg, an

Figure 31.2  A visitor at the 9/11 memorial displays the Flag of Honor, purchased at the 9/11 memorial visitor center, September 2012 Source: Alexandra Délano.

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accountant who worked in an office a block or two from the World Trade Center, who died on December 15, 2010, of complications of pulmonary sarcoidosis, an inf lammatory disease of the lungs. Borg is one of only three victims whose deaths have been recognized by the city as caused by exposure “to toxic substances in the dust cloud thrown up by the collapsing twin towers.” A New York Times report states that Borg became “the 2,753rd official victim of the Sept. 11 attack on the trade center” (Hartocollis 2011, emphasis added). It is a name short enough to fit on the space available on the last panel on the South Pool, even though it does not follow the principle of “meaningful adjacency” by which the designers sought to organize the names according to their connections or relationships with other people who died at the site. Despite this recent addition, Arad argues that at this point “the current list of names that we have is definitive” (Arad 2012). In his view, allowing any space for a name or a suggestion of something that is less than 100 percent certain could have negative implications given the questions that are still raised about the event, even though he recognizes that there were people, such as undocumented migrants, in whose cases it is impossible to have that absolute certainty: [T]o place a name on the memorial where any doubt existed about it would have been a disservice, I think…. So I can understand why the need for a thorough and complete documentation pervaded the process. And I can also see how it would disenfranchise certain people who are already disenfranchised on a day-to-day basis. And here we have this

Figure 31.3  Panel S-66, March 2012 Source: Alexandra Délano.

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disenfranchisement being rendered permanent, which is painful. But I think that if we were to open the door to anything that was less than 100 percent certainty, it would in some ways strengthen the case of all of these other [conspiracy theories]…. As a designer I don’t know that that decision lay with me. I thought it was important to adhere as closely as we could to the known facts and tell that story in a clear and direct way…. You have to establish a bar that you reach, but if, you know, you make an exception for one, where is the next one and the next one? I hope that the path that we’ve taken has not caused distress to many people. (M. Arad, personal interview, October 18, 2012) Arad thus places the question of naming in a context of our need for clarity surrounding the events of 9/11. At the same time, he explains that he sees the memorial as a space that is open for new interpretations: “And how … meaning is then teased out over time is going to be up to other people. Once that meaning is there it is like the seed that has been sown and might flower in different places” (M. Arad, personal interview, October 18, 2012). A fuller picture of the victims, or even of the fact that that full picture is unattainable in this case, seems like a desirable goal in itself. The role of numbers in collective traumas is a much-discussed issue, and most observers would probably concur with the view that the impact of 9/11 is hardly a ref lection of the number of victims, nor should it be, at least in any straightforward sense. Dan Barry (2003) from the New York Times astutely addressed this issue in the direct aftermath of 9/11, when initial estimates were being constantly revised: “what do we do with this information—this 2,752, down from 2,792? Do we grieve less? Are we happy? What does it mean?” We do not grieve less when the numbers go down, nor do we necessarily claim that the reverse is or should be true. But any recognition of formerly unrecognized victims is a critical endeavor in so far as it makes sure that the victims are not, to use Adorno’s (1986) words, “cheated even out of the one thing that our powerlessness can grant them: remembrance.” However, the very notion of powerlessness, evoked here through Adorno, points in another important direction. Beyond the mere fact that there were victims who never received recognition, we are interested in the possible meaning behind the fact that some of these unrecognized victims shared the background of an unauthorized existence. In other words, before the event they had all been confined to a “space of non-existence” as undocumented migrants (Coutin 2003) and now this non-existence seems to have found its replication and final installment in a design and in a logic of evidence that is otherwise deeply ref lective about issues of absence and invisibility.

Undocumented, ungrievable On the tenth anniversary of September 11th, shortly after the official commemoration ceremony took place at the 9/11 memorial, the Mexican Consulate in New York also held its own commemorative ceremony. It was a small and modest ceremony that included the family members of some of the victims, the leaders of community organizations, volunteers who had worked at the WTC site, and the press. However, at this ceremony, in addition to the five names of Mexican victims read out loud at the 9/11 memorial,8 ten other Mexican victims’ names were mentioned.9 In his speech, the Consul General of Mexico in New York, Carlos Sada, brought attention to the fact that the ceremony was also honoring the memory of many other Mexican victims whose names and identities were not known (Sada 2011). 403

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Interviews with consular officials, journalists, members of Mexican community organizations, and former workers of Windows on the World confirm that the individuals named by the consulate but left out by the official memorial were undocumented immigrants. In this case absence does in fact not speak for itself but needs to be actively remembered and reproduced. Some absences thus go unnoticed. The Mexican Consulate in New York was well aware that there would be problems identifying undocumented migrants as victims of September 11, 2001, given that many undocumented migrants do not have identification or use forged documents (N. Terrazas, personal interview, March 14, 2012). From an initial list of about 2,500 disappearances, a few weeks after the attacks, the consulate’s investigations had already narrowed down the list of presumed Mexican victims to about 35. By the following year, it was narrowed down to 15 names, the same that were read at the ten-year anniversary ceremony in 2011. Five Mexican victims were officially recognized by the city, based on a list from Union Local 100, which meant that the families could receive a death certificate and money from the 9/11 compensation fund. These five names were also on the Mexican consulate’s list: Antonio Javier Álvarez, Leobardo López Pascual, Antonio Meléndez, Martín Morales Zempoaltecatl, and Juan Ortega Campos. For the other ten, Alicia Acevedo Carranza, Arturo Alva Moreno, Margarito Casillas, José Manuel Contreras Fernández, Germán Castillo Galicia, Joel Guevara González, Fernando Jiménez Molinar, Víctor Antonio Martínez Pastrana, Juan Romero Orozco, and Jorge Octavio Santos Anaya, the evidence was considered insufficient. There were no DNA matches, no proof of address, phone numbers or anything else that could officially link the presumed victims to New York or to the World Trade Center. Finding evidence was complicated by the fact that many immigrants were presumably working under another name or were not actively in touch with their families back home (or at least this contact could not be proven). These ten names remained on the consulate’s list of victims based solely on the testimonies of the families and other witnesses. City authorities recognized that undocumented migrants might not be willing or able to report disappearances or claim compensation for their deceased family members, partly out of fear of revealing their own irregular status: “Undocumented workers and their families posed special problems for the [Compensation] Fund, due to difficulties in locating the claimants and reluctance by some to enter the Fund for fear of legal sanctions” (Feinberg 2004: 29–30). Thus, the Special Master for the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund of 2001 made “intensive outreach efforts to convince these eligible claimants that they were welcome in the Program” (ibid.) and that the INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) would not use this information to initiate immigration proceedings against anyone with irregular migratory status (Feinberg 2004: 70). Despite the recognition on the part of city and federal government agencies of the difficulties faced by undocumented migrants, which was partly a result of community groups and relief agencies asking for this kind of support, in practice, many people were excluded (Délano and Nienass 2014). There was limited information about the services available, many people did not know how to access them or were afraid of doing so given their migratory status, and the personnel in charge in many cases was insensitive to issues of undocumented status, which alienated immigrant communities (McHugh 2002). In the end, according to the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, 11 families of deceased victims confirmed to be “undocumented aliens” were considered eligible for the claims, while 45 claims were dismissed due to a lack of proof of death, proof of presence at the site, or proof that the death was related to the 9/11 attacks (Feinberg 2004: 22). The high stakes of access to the compensation fund made the process even more complex as claims were rigorously 404

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investigated by the FBI. Various instances of fraud were reported, including Mexican nationals who had already received donations from private funds, as in the case of Arturo Alva Moreno, one of the few cases that was thoroughly reported on in the media (Torre 2011). A Mexican national, living and working in New York with forged papers, Arturo Alva was reported as disappeared a few days after September 11, 2001, when his family stopped receiving his calls and his wallet was reportedly found in the rubble of the World Trade Center by a man who then called the family in Mexico. However, during the ensuing investigations, the family was not able to provide any evidence to support the claim that he lived and worked in New York, and the wallet was never found (Torre 2011). Although the government offices in charge of compiling information about the victims and investigating the claims explicitly said they would not discriminate against any person based on their migratory status, proving the presence of those who were absent from the legal framework was often an impossible task for family members and community organizations. In Terrazas’s words: “How does an undocumented migrant accredit his presence if, for all practical purposes, he does not exist?” (N. Terrazas, personal interview, 2012). After the final deadline to present victims’ claims in 2003, Alva’s name was removed from the city’s official list of victims. Alva, and the other nine Mexicans, were kept on the consulate’s list indefinitely but over the years their families stopped calling to ask for updates or requested to not be contacted again by the consulate because it was too painful (M. Cuevas, personal interview, April 26, 2012). On the Mexican government’s side there was a sense that further inquiries into these inconclusive cases would be futile.10

Unknown in the “nation of immigrants” This reading of the memorial raises questions about these unknown or unidentified victims; or rather, it reveals the absence of such questions. At the level of the bureaucratic inquiry processes, it exposes some of the challenges that governments face in identifying undocumented migrants, particularly at the moment of death. But at a symbolic level, the absence of these unknown or unidentified victims in the memorial also illustrates the silences and ambiguities that exist among government institutions and society at large with regard to these invisible members of the “nation of immigrants,” the United States. The memorial’s design itself does not explicitly point out the possibility that there might be other victims that are unknown, suggesting a finality with regard to naming the victims that seems to run counter to the view of the memorial as a “never-to-be-completed process” (Young 2010: 82). Among those who are not included are those whose presence could not be proven, according to what the state considers legitimate evidence. This case thus reveals what scholars working at the intersection of memory studies and forensics have identified as the problem of “negative evidence” (see for example Cyr 2013). If the presence of a corpse and artifacts are proof of the crime and the existence of a victim, then is the lack of material evidence reason enough to come to the opposite conclusion? Particularly in the context of mass atrocities these questions of “negative evidence” have gained attention, for example during the International Criminal Tribunal on Yugoslavia. These discussions also reveal something about our ways of making sense of memory: As French historian Pierre Nora (1989: 13) claims, modern memory is based “on the materiality of the trace.” In the case discussed here, any existence of “legitimate” traces was often precluded by the very status of the victim before the event. From the perspective of the politics of memory, the question of absence is significant, because it touches upon debates about national belonging, about the integration of migrants into the host society, and about the definition and redefinition of the nation both in relation 405

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to the past and to its current members (Glynn and Kleist 2012b: 16). Memories create and reimagine modes of belonging and models of social cohesion, and they can determine the paths of incorporation or exclusion for immigrants (Kleist 2012: 206). Ref lecting on our silences about the presence of invisible migrants among us, Winter thus asks: “Whose memories are collective? Those of legal migrants or those of undocumented ones?” (Winter 2012: viii, x). This is significant not just in evaluating the present and the way in which this event was processed by this generation, but—given the magnitude of the event and the different memories and memorials associated with it—it is also important to ref lect on the ideas of political community that may inf luence perceptions of migrants in the future (Glynn and Kleist 2012b: 4). The fact that this event took place in New York, a place traditionally associated with migration, and the fact that many of the victims were migrants, makes this connection between memory and migration all the more relevant. The process of investigation, the gathering of evidence, and the dialogue between the city authorities, consulate authorities, community organizations, victims’ families, and witnesses reveal much about the inability of state and non-state institutions to effectively deal with the invisibility of undocumented migrants at a moment of tragedy. But their absence from the memorial, even in the form of a recognition of those “unknown,” as other memorials do,11 has a specific symbolic value in a space that is now a key lieu de memoire for the American nation. When these questions are absent or avoided, undocumented migrants and their families are not afforded the same opportunities as others to be remembered and to be mourned. As a consular official of the Mexican Consulate in New York expressed in an interview: “They aren’t even allowed a decent death” (M. Cuevas, personal interview, March 2, 2012). On the individual and family level, this deprivation adds insult to injury; in larger political terms this lack of visibility speaks to a specific imaginary or frame that does not allow for certain deaths to become publicly acknowledged. Judith Butler’s work (2006, 2010b) on grief as a question of and for politics has demonstrated how recognition is allocated according to different standards of “grievability.” For Butler, the task is not simply to include more subjects in existing regimes or frames of recognition, but also to question the conditions for exclusion. What are the conditions under which we mourn some lives while others remain unrecognized? If “grievability is a presupposition for the life that matters” (Butler 2010b: 14), then we must ask which frames are responsible for the deprivation of grief and mourning for some lives, while others enjoy full recognition, in life and in death. As our account here shows, the regulative visual field of grievable life cuts through the very site of memory at Ground Zero itself. Butler (2010a) evokes Antigone when she says that “a life that is not supposed to be grieved is also a life that is not supposed to have existed at all, whose ‘negation’ is built into its very public definition” (our emphasis). The life of an undocumented worker is the quintessential example of a life that has this negation built into its public definition. “[I]t does not count, carries no weight, cannot be demonstrated” (Coutin 2003: 175), neither in life nor in death.12 The idea that temporary migrants live in a “short present tense” (Bauböck 1998: 334) suggests that their claim to rights, responsibilities, and contributions in the society in which they reside cannot be based on a shared past or future. However, this “presentness” of a migrant’s existence is not inevitable, it is at least partly the outcome of memory politics and could potentially be challenged by memorials and narratives that acknowledge their presence. Memories can be used politically both to exclude and to include migrants, to reject them or to facilitate their incorporation (Glynn and Kleist 2012a: 241). Claims to memory and recognition from unacknowledged participants in public life (or their representatives), as 406

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those by the families described above, are acts of citizenship beyond any formal framework of established rights and can challenge the status quo of belonging and political activity (see Rothberg and Yildiz 2011). In other words, in mnemonic acts and artifacts, ideas of inclusion and exclusion can be created, reproduced, challenged, thought anew, and reinforced, perhaps even more so at a moment of collective trauma. Edkins claims convincingly that “sovereign power … is … productive of [the] distinction between those who are inside (citizen, friend, fellow American) and need to be heard, and those who are excluded or politically disqualified (alien, enemy, dissident)” and that “traumatic events … can challenge that form of power by demonstrating the impossibility of such distinctions” (Edkins 2003: 245). As the memorial represents a “symbolic space of ordered meaning” (Sturken 2004: 319) that structures public perceptions of an otherwise painfully “arbitrary” event, its ordering not only raises political questions but also shapes our present and future ways of answering them. To an extent, the event of 9/11 and its memorial challenge a purely national reading. References to the diversity of New York City, to the cosmopolitan community of the WTC site, and to the rhetoric of “the nation of immigrants” have abounded in the discourse surrounding the event and the memorial,13 as have constructions of 9/11 as a traumatic event for the West as a whole. The ceremony for the ten-year anniversary that included many international delegations serves as the most recent powerful reminder of these frames. Daniel Libeskind won the initial architectural design competition, as Sturken (2004: 321) convincingly claims, not least because he had presented his approach not from the angle of an architect, but from the perspective of a “mourning citizen.” This autobiography as a citizen was explicitly presented as an immigrant’s story. In a recent interview, Libeskind once again reiterated the relevance of his background for his motivations to help rebuild the site: “Almost everyone is an immigrant. That is what interested me.”14 Michael Arad also draws on his story as an immigrant to explain his reaction to the 9/11 attacks and his approach to the memorial: [T]hat sense of not being a member of this community just disappeared in an instant. I think everybody who was here in New York regardless of their age, race, national origins, legal status, whatever it was, we all felt united…. My own personal sense of identity and community changed…. And I wanted this memorial that I proposed for the WTC site to create a place that gives the opportunity for people to come together as a community. (M. Arad, personal interview, October 18, 2012) However, these were particular immigrant stories. For Sturken (2004: 321), “Libeskind is the grateful refugee, the immigrant who has even greater patriotism than those who preceded him.” This persona arguably crowded out other immigrant stories, particularly those of the undocumented who worked anonymously in or around the two buildings when the two planes struck. Their stories seem to be an uncomfortable presence at the moment when the nation wants to overcome trauma by preaching strength, particularly when that trauma exposed perceived weaknesses in immigration and security institutions. The lack of commemoration of some of the undocumented workers who perished in the twin towers gains a specific significance, especially given the linkage that was established between migration and terrorism after 9/11 (Kaschuba 2010: 72).15 The issue of remembering unidentified migrants is present in other tragic events as well, particularly in border areas where many migrants have died in the desert during their journey 407

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to the United States. In many cases, their remains are not claimed or identified (Marchi 2009: 73–75). When efforts to identify the victims fail, their remains are buried or placed in urns. Their presence is marked with small cement blocks labeled “John Doe” or “Jane Doe.” Some of them are represented by crosses that are placed near border areas or on the border fence by local immigrant organizations with the inscription “no identificado” (­unidentified), “no olvidado” (not forgotten), or “desconocido/a” (unknown) (Délano and Nienass f­orthcoming).16 Of course, these memorials addressing deaths at the border constitute a more direct encounter with the issue of undocumented migration than the 9/11 memorial. What is striking in the case of 9/11, however, is that despite their unequal social and legal status, both citizens and non-citizens, and documented and undocumented immigrants, were in a tragic sense made “equal” for a moment in time by the sheer arbitrariness of their victimization.17 Yet, this equality did not fully enter the ordered space of meaning created by the memorial. Instead some presences/absences—in the case of the undocumented: absences existing before and after the attacks—went fully unnoticed. Public memorials can acknowledge these presences and the reasons why they often remain “unknown” and silenced in a “nation of immigrants” in order to give a fuller ref lection of the social and historical moment that they represent. Perhaps a symbolic act, such as inscribing the word “Unknown” or “Others” in the 9/11 memorial would not have filled the void of those who are left without formal recognition, but it could have hinted at the issue of representation of the lives lost that day and opened a space for a deeper ref lection on the questions raised by this event and the ways in which we remember it. It would address the inevitable openness of memorial designs—their inherently unsuccessful attempts to make any final claims—and it could draw attention to the position of vulnerability that specific ungrievable lives find themselves in current political constellations. In this sense, the debates about the 9/11 memorial are indeed “essentially ethical-political disputes about our collective responsibilities and obligations” (Bernstein 2004: 176). Guisan evokes a “sense of identification with the other through the common experiences of suffering and mourning” (2009: 572) to think through the links of 9/11 and its emergent cosmopolitan commitments. This sense of identification—or its absence—becomes especially tangible in our case of the doubly absent described here, even if it has to be said that their incorporation would not inevitably lead to cosmopolitan identifications but could very well be incorporated into existing narratives of national innocence or fault lines of grievability that still exclude the victims of the wars, as described by Judith Butler. A recent attempt by activist and artist Camilo Godoy, who assembled the word “Unknown” out of letters of the existing names in the memorial in a rubbing, using the materials provided by the 9/11 memorial, presents the notion that the current memorial may provide the resources to bring forth the unacknowledged deaths.18 The tactility of the names allows for Godoy’s symbolic effort to show that the unknown are indeed among us and that memorials have a strange way of allowing new memories, counter-memories, or alternative memories to emerge. Godoy’s rubbings also illuminate the interactive possibilities of Arad’s design that transcend the purely contemplative functions of the memorial and that give a special meaning to Filler’s (2011) description of the name panels as a “typographic tour de force.”19 However, if “performances of memory” by migrants are viewed as potential informal acts of citizenship as “they model new ways of being-in-common that complicate established understandings of what constitutes ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ forms of belonging,” as Rothberg and Yildiz (2011: 34) powerfully claim in their recent study in the German context, then we also have to ask how far these acts are an option for those migrants living in the most precarious situation due to their lack of status. “Memory citizenship”—the term coined by Rothberg 408

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Figure 31.4  C  amilo Godoy’s work on the “Unknown” at the 9/11 memorial, September 2012 Source: Alexandra Délano.

and Yildiz to describe these informal performances of memory—while ultimately evoked to challenge overly formal views of belonging, was not an accessible practice for the reasons we present above, as relatives feared their own criminalization or met stringent conditions for documentation. This not only prevented these families from being included in the memorial’s “community of grief ” (however broadly understood), but also precluded them from actively 409

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shaping a process of debating the memorial in which victims’ families often had direct input and inf luence (see Levitt 2011). In the case of the undocumented victims of 9/11 and their families, the “space of non-existence” disallowed these options and ultimately cemented the invisibility of the undocumented migrant, even in the moment of death.

Notes   1  Authors listed in alphabetical order. We dedicate this chapter to Ary Zolberg and Vera Zolberg, whose work and support was an inspiration for this project. A previous version of this chapter was presented at the conference “From the Art of Memory to Memory and Art: A One-Day Conference Honoring Professor Vera L. Zolberg’s Career” on April 28, 2012, at the New School for Social Research, New York. We thank participants at the conference for their comments and suggestions and J. Alberto Fernández and Jackie Vimo for their research assistance.   2  This is not to suggest that these frames emerged without contestation. O’Brien (2011) shows that the emerging frame of war (i.e. to view the attack as an act of war and to suggest war as a response) did not go unchallenged and that the challenging frames were relatively quickly dismissed, especially in the direct aftermath of the event. Gutman (2009) focuses on the multi-faceted means of contesting the narratives about 9/11 around the actual site of Ground Zero, especially before the official memorial was finalized.   3  Goldberger (2011) formulates the interplay of the diverging concerns of contemplation and renewal like this: “You are in the middle of the city, part of an urban life that was as much a target of the terrorists in 2001 as the lives of three thousand people. The people will not come back, but the life of the city has to. When you stand in Arad and Walker’s park and look toward the footprints ringed by names and the new towers behind them, you feel the profound connection between these two truths.”   4  For a view that Arad’s design remains firmly in a tradition that actually fills the void, namely through instruction and catharsis, see McKim (2008). Simpson (2006: 79–80), however, detects in the memorial a departure from the exceptionalism, jingoism, and grandeur of the site master plan, specifically because Arad’s memorial makes the visitor look down rather than up.   5  Sturken (2004: 318) claims that this “fetishizing of the footprints of the two towers demonstrates a desire to situate the towers’ absence within a recognizable tradition of memorial sites.” Specifically, “[t]he idea that a destroyed structure leaves a footprint evokes the site-specific concept of memory in modernity and the concrete materiality of ruins” (our emphasis). This is an interesting take, particularly since Young (2003: 217) explicitly argues against the notion of ruins in the memorial: “[A]mericans have never made ruins their home or allowed ruins to define—and thereby shape—their future. The power of ruins is undeniable, and while it may be fitting to preserve a shard or a piece of the towers’ façade as a gesture to the moment of destruction, it would be a mistake to stop with such a gesture and allow it alone to stand for all those rich and varied lives that were lost. For by itself, such a remnant (no matter how aesthetically pleasing) would recall—and thereby reduce—all this rich life to the terrible moment of destruction, just as the terrorists themselves would have us remember their victims.”   6  Office of Chief Medical Examiner World Trade Center Operational Statistics, April 16, 2013. See also Nessen 2013.   7  See also “Los forenses siguen luchando para identificar víctimas del 11-S,” Radio Netherlands Worldwide, August 22, 2011. Available online at www.rnw.nl/espanol/bulletin/los-forenses-siguen-luchando-paraidentificar-v%C3%ADctimas-del-11-s (accessed July 19, 2012).   8  The fact that these were Mexican nationals was only confirmed by the list of victims provided by the Mexican Consulate on September 11, 2011. As of July 24, 2014, five persons come up in a search by “Birthplace or Residence” with the word “Mexico” on the 9/11 memorial website (http:// names.911memorial.org/#lang=en_US&page=search).   9  The consulate actually had a list of 16 names but further research on the 9/11 memorial website revealed that one of them was Puerto Rican. In the consulate’s list, the birthplace of this person was listed as “unknown.” Further interviews revealed that the list the consulate was using that day was not the most up-to-date list as the consulate had confirmed a few years back that this person was not Mexican (N. Terrazas, interview, 2012). In a further interview with the current head of Consular Protection, Mario Cuevas, we mentioned this fact, and he said it was the first time he heard of it. This reveals that even on the side of the Mexican consulate, which proved to be more flexible than New York City in recognizing some claims as valid, there were inaccuracies in dealing with this issue. 410

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  10  However, we learned that at the initiative of a consular official at the Mexican Consulate in New York, a new case was brought forward as recently as 2014 to the Office of Chief Medical Examiner (OCME). After a long process of inquiries, the OCME agreed to consider the case and check its DNA database against a sample from the family in Mexico (informal conversation with consular official, September 22, 2014). Preliminary results did not show a match, although the final outcome is not yet known. However, the fact that a new case is being considered challenges the official response of the OCME’s office of public relations to our inquiries regarding the statement that the list is definitive.   11  See Wittman (2011) for a comprehensive history of the idea of the unknown in memorials.   12  See also Ruin’s chapter in this volume. According to Ruin, a “burial is experienced as a call or demand from the underworld or from the dead…. It becomes an ‘ethical’ demand, in an experience of how the living owe something to the dead.” The encounter with death has to be seen, according to Ruin, “as a ‘continuation of sociality.’” In our case described in this chapter, the fact that the call of many of the undocumented migrants who perished in the attacks could not be heard is, in a sense, a continuation of their non-existence, their lack of access to “sociality.”   13  See, for example, Barack Obama’s Op-Ed, “The Partnerships We Need,” published in newspapers around the world on the tenth anniversary of the attacks (the article was released on September 7, 2011, and is available online at http://iipdigital.usembassy.gov/st/english/article/2011/09/20110909 132507su0.22102.html#axzz217rWGHdq), or Alejandro Mayorkas’ (the Director of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services) blog post, “A Nation of Laws and a Nation of Immigrants,” available online at http://blog.uscis.gov/2011/08/nation-of-laws-and-nation-of-immigrants.html, or see the ImmigrationProfBlog’s “9/11 Victims Remind Us: We are a Nation of Immigrants,” available online at http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2011/09/911-victims-remind-us-we-are-a-nationof-immigrants.html.   14  See WNYC’s interview with Daniel Libeskind, May 14, 2013. Available online at www.wnyc.org/ shows/bl/2013/may/14/master-planner (accessed May 20, 2013).   15  Similarly, as Brown, Allen, and Reavey explain (this volume), in the United Kingdom, the 7/7 Bombings were framed as “an ideologically motivated attack on the nation.” Their work shows that the stories told by survivors and relatives about the event do not support and in some cases diverge completely from the “commemorative narrative of national resilience in the face of political terror,” which points out the tension between the different narratives (individual and collective).   16  “¡No identificados, jamás olvidados!” interview with Enrique Morones, head of Border Angels. Available online at http://hispanopolis.com/bin/segmentos.cgi?pid=139&sid=3042 (accessed July 21, 2012).   17  On the notion of equality and individuality of the victims, see also Edkins (2003).   18  Godoy’s work was part of a project at the New York–based organization Immigrant Movement International.   19  This resonates with Goldfarb’s point (this volume) that sites of memory are “interpreted by visitors in both predictable and unpredictable ways.”

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. (1986) “What Does ‘Coming to Terms with the Past’ Mean?” In G. Hartman (ed.) Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective. Bloomington: Indiana University Press: 114–129. Arad, M. (2012) Peace Week keynote speech at Friends Seminary, New York, Thursday, February 9. Barry, D. (2003) “About New York; A New Account of Sept. 11 Loss, with 40 Fewer Souls to Mourn.” The New York Times, October 29, 2003. Available online at www.nytimes.com/2003/10/29/nyregion/ about-new-york-a-new-account-of-sept-11-loss-with-40-fewer-souls-to-mourn.html (accessed April 10, 2014). Bauböck, R. (1998) “Sharing History and Future-Time Horizons of Democratic Membership in an Age of Migration,” Constellations, 4 (3): 320–345. Bell, D. (2006) “Introduction: Memory, Trauma, and World Politics.” In D. Bell (ed.) Memory, Trauma, and World Politics: Reflections on the Relationship between Past and Present. New York: Palgrave Macmillan: 1–29. Bernstein, R. (2004) “The Culture of Memory,” History and Theory, Theme Issue, 43, December 2004: 165–178. Butler, J. (2006) Precarious Life. The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso. Butler, J. (2010a) “Ungrievable Lives,” interview on Re-public. Available online at www.re-public.gr/ en/?p=317 (accessed September 5, 2012). Butler, J. (2010b) Frames of War. When Is Life Grievable? New York: Verso. 411

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Coutin, S. (2003) “Borderlands, Illegality and the Spaces of Non-existence.” In R. Perry and B. Maurer (eds.) Globalization and Governmentalities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 171–202. Cyr, R. (2013) “Testifying Absence in the Era of Forensic Testimony,” International Journal for Politics, Culture, and Society, 26 (1): 93–106. Délano, A. and B. Nienass (2014) “Invisible Victims: Undocumented Migrants and the Aftermath of September 11,” Politics & Society, 42 (3): 399–421. Délano, A. and B. Nienass (Forthcoming) “Deaths, Visibility, and the Politics of Dissensus at the United States–Mexico Border.” In A. Oberprantacher and A. Siclodi (eds.) Subjectivation: Political Theory in Contemporary Practices, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Doss, E. (2010) Memorial Mania. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Edkins, J. (2003) “The Rush to Memory and the Rhetoric of War,” Journal of Political and Military Sociology, 31 (2): 231–250. Feinberg, K. (2004) “Final Report of the Special Master for the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund of 2001, Department of Justice.” Available online at www.justice.gov/final_report.pdf (accessed July 19, 2012). Filler, M. (2011) “At the Edge of the Abyss,” The New York Review of Books Blog, September 21. Available online at www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/sep/21/at-the-edge-of-abyss-september-11-memorial (accessed April 10, 2014). Gittrich, G., P. Shin, and E. Gest (2002) “Tomb of Unknowns Could Be Part of Ground Zero Memorial,” New York Daily News, April 18, 2002. Available online at http://articles.nydailynews.com/2002-04-18/ news/18187695_1_victims-families-permanent-memorial-tomb (accessed April 10, 2014). Glynn, I. and J. O. Kleist (2012a) “History, Memory and Migration: Comparisons, Challenges and Outlooks.” In I. Glynn and J. O. Kleist (eds.) History, Memory and Migration: Perceptions of the Past and the Politics of Incorporation, London: Palgrave Macmillan: 237–244. Glynn, I. and J. O. Kleist (2012b) “The Memory and Migration Nexus: An Overview.” In I. Glynn and J. O. Kleist (eds.) History, Memory and Migration: Perceptions of the Past and the Politics of Incorporation, London: Palgrave Macmillan: 3–29. Goldberger, P. (2011) “Shaping the Void: How Successful Is the New World Trade Center?” The New Yorker, September 12. Available online at www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/skyline/2011/09/12/110912crsk_ skyline_goldberger (accessed April 10, 2014). Greenspan, E. (2013) Battle for Ground Zero: Inside the Political Struggle to Rebuild the World Trade Center, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Guisan, C. (2009) “Of September 11, Mourning, and Cosmopolitan Politics,” Constellations, 16: 563–578. Gutman, Y. (2009) “Where Do We Go from Here: The Pasts, Presents, and Futures of 9/11,” Memory Studies, 2: 55–70. Hampson, R. and M. Moore (2003) “Closure from 9/11 Elusive for Many,” USA TODAY, September 3. Available online at www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2003-09-03-sept-11-son_x.htm (accessed July 19, 2012). Hartocollis, A. (2011) “An Actor, Inventor, Accountant, and Now, a 9/11 Victim,” New York Times, June 17. Available online at http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/17/another-name-added-to-the-listof-sept-11-victims/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0 (accessed April 10, 2014). Kaschuba, W. (2010) “Iconic Remembering and Religious Icons: Fundamentalist Strategies in European Memory Politics?” In M. Pakier and B. Strath (eds.) A European Memory? Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance, New York: Berghahn. Kingwell, M. (2012) “Retouching the Void. The WTC’s Memorials Impossible Compromises,” Harper’s Magazine: 68–72. Kleist, J. O. (2012) “Migrant Incorporation and Political Memories: Transformations of Civic and Communal Belonging in Australia since 1949.” In I. Glynn and J. O. Kleist (eds.) History, Memory and Migration: Perceptions of the Past and the Politics of Incorporation, London: Palgrave Macmillan: 189–213. Levitt, L. (2011) “Speaking Memory, Building History: The Influence of Victims’ Families at the World Trade Center Site,” Radical History Review, Issue 111 (Fall 2011): 65–78. McHugh, M. (2002) “Reminiscences of Margaret McHugh: Oral History, 2002,” September 11, 2001 Response and Recovery Oral History Project. Columbia University. McKim, J. (2008) “Agamben at Ground Zero: A Memorial without Content,” Theory, Culture and Society, 25: 83–103. Marchi, R. (2009) Day of the Dead in the USA: The Migration and Transformation of a Cultural Phenomenon, Piscataway, NY: Rutgers University Press. 412

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Nessen, S. (2013) “City Sifts Debris for 9/11 Remains,” WNYC News, April 1. Available online at www.wnyc.org/articles/wnyc-news/2013/apr/01/city-resumes-search-911-remains (accessed May 21, 2013). Nora, P. (1989) “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations, 26: 7–25. O’Brien, J. (2011) “The Contested Meaning of 9/11,” Radical History Review, Issue 111 (Fall 2011): 5–27. Rothberg, M. and Y. Yildiz (2011) “Memory Citizenship: Migrant Archives of Holocaust Remembrance in Contemporary Germany,” Parallax, 17: 4, 32–48. Sada, C. (2011) Speech at Mexican Consulate, New York, September 11. Simpson, D. (2006) 9/11. The Culture of Commemoration. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Sturken, M. (2004) “The Aesthetics of Absence. Rebuilding Ground Zero,” American Ethnologist, 31: 311–325. Torre, W. (2011) “La víctima número cero,” Excélsior, September 10. Winter, J. (2012) “Foreword.” In I. Glynn and J. Kleist (eds.) History, Memory and Migration: Perceptions of the Past and the Politics of Incorporation, London: Palgrave Macmillan: viii–xi. Wittman, L. (2011) The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Modern Mourning, and the Reinvention of the Mystical Body, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Young, J. (2003) “Remember Life with Life: The New World Trade Center.” In Trauma at Home – After 9/11, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press: 216–222. Young, J. (2010) “Memory and the Monument after 9/11.” In R. Crownshaw, J. Kilby, and A. Rowland (eds.) The Future of Memory, New York: Berghahn: 77–92.

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32 The Madrid 2004 bombing Understanding the puzzle of 11-M’s flawed commemorative process Cristina Flesher Fominaya1

Introduction On 11 March 2004, ten bombs exploded on four trains killing 192 people and wounding over a thousand more in Madrid, Spain. The trains were all destined for Madrid’s central Atocha Train Station, but some of the bombs exploded before reaching the station. The trains carried primarily commuters going to work and to university, and the victims were of 17 nationalities. Despite initial confusion over who perpetrated the attacks (as no one claimed responsibility immediately), the incumbent Popular Party immediately began to propagate Basque nationalist separatist terrorist group ETA’s responsibility, insisting on this position despite emerging evidence to the contrary over the following three days leading up to the Spanish general election (Flesher Fominaya 2011). As I discuss below, this immediate response to the bombings by the government, and its political consequences, had crucial implications for the commemorative process. National traumas, such as terrorist attacks, pose a threat to the social order (Neal 2005) and culture (Smelser 2004a, 2004b), which nations then seek to restore through a process of collective memory that reaffirms core values (Tota 2004; Simpson 2006; Neal 2005). Despite the fact that terrorist attacks usually generate an outpouring of sympathy and support for the victims and their families, the social process of commemorating national traumas is fraught with contention and competing interests (Alexander 2004; Smelser 2004a). The collective memory process is mediated through a number of carrier groups that compete to inscribe the events with particular meanings, whether in the interest of a particular group or organization (i.e. a particular victims’ association or political party) or to reaffirm core values (i.e. freedom, democracy). National traumas can be unifying but can also have fragmenting effects (Neal 2005: 31; Tota 2004). When nations are under attack, political divisions are generally set aside and citizens rally around the government (Smelser 2004b: 270). Yet in Spain after “11-M,” as the event is known, there was no unity. Instead political divisions marked the immediate aftermath and continued to play a crucial role in the commemoration over the following five years, marginalizing the victims in the process. Ultimately, the victims were “forgotten”: in sharp contrast to the commemoration of 9/11 in the U.S., where the fifth anniversary carried special 414

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meaning as a significant anniversary “milestone” year (often highlighted in five-year periods), by the fifth anniversary in Spain, there was no official state-level commemoration at all. Victims expressed their disappointment but were not surprised: “The victims are worse off than before, the only change is that now there is no photo op ( foto de ocasión)—we have fallen into the background. I guess that after five years of throwing our dead at each other’s feet they [the political parties] have come to a cordial understanding”(Manjón 2009). The lack of national unity and the marginalization of victims is all the more striking given that this was a transnational terrorist attack, being perpetrated and orchestrated by non-native Spaniards who were locally organized but connected to global networks committed to “jihadist” goals and who acted in pursuit of global not national ends (Reinares 2010).2 As I have argued elsewhere (Flesher Fominaya and Barberet 2012), terrorist acts within the context of internecine conf licts are rife with contestations and ambiguities over who is the victim and who is the perpetrator, as well as over the moral legitimacy of both. It is unexpected, however, to find such contestation in a context in which there is no ambiguity whatsoever about the blamelessness of the victims and where the victims themselves were not inserted into a context of political conf lict prior to the terrorist attack. Given that transnational terrorist attacks generally result in a strong commemorative process, what explains this desire on the part of Spanish political elites to “forget”? Why have the victims of 11-M been marginalized? Although most commemorations of national trauma events are fraught with contention and competing narratives and interests, the degree to which states can satisfy victims’ desire for consultation and actively try to reconcile divergent demands and claims varies greatly from one national context to another. My research (Flesher Fominaya and Barberet 2012) shows that satisfaction with commemoration relates to feelings of being respected, consulted and included in the commemorative process even when victims recognize that not everyone can be satisfied with the actual forms commemoration takes. Victims are very aware of the difference between individual commemoration and public or collective commemoration (See Baer and Sznaider, this volume) as well as draw different meanings from grassroots versus official commemorations (as I discuss below). In our understanding, f lawed commemoration processes are those in which the state engages in forms of “institutional forgetting,” and fails to satisfy (any of ) the victims, due to feelings of active exclusion, marginalization and instrumentalization throughout the commemorative process.

Methods This chapter analyzes official commemoration and political and public discourse around that commemoration; it does not analyze grassroots commemoration of the victims, which is profound, extensive and long-lasting. Analysis presented here is based on three data sources: news articles, semi-structured interviews with representatives of victims of terrorism associations, and the web page content of victims of terrorism associations. Media accounts were accessed through Factiva, a global news database. Keyword searches using Spanish synonyms for “commemoration” and “victims” on the original dates of the attack and for five years after the attack (2004–2009) yielded approximately 1,600 articles. I searched in El País (EP), Spain’s center-left national newspaper, and in ABC, the center-right national newspaper, using the terms “11-M” and at least one of “homenaj*,” “Atocha,” “conmemora*,” “aniversario” and “monumento.” The news analysis covers the five-year period following the attacks. I conducted interviews in 2011 with the founding representatives of all three terrorist victims’ associations representing victims of 3/11—Asociación 11M Afectados del Terrorismo 415

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(A11MAT), Asociación Víctimas del Terrorismo (AVT), and Asociación de Ayuda a las Víctimas del 11-M (AAV11M)—as well as the President of the Fundación Víctimas del Terrorismo (FVT) (Madrid, 3–12 July 2011). Interviews lasted two to three hours and were transcribed and coded.3 The interviews were conducted in 2011. This enabled a tracking of frames and changes in government responses to the victims over time and allowed for a contrast between victim narratives shortly after the bombings with later narratives that evaluated the longerterm response of the state and the commemorative process.

The importance of timing: commemoration and partisan divisions The timing of the Madrid bombings, just three days before the 2004 general elections, had a crucial, immediate and ongoing impact on the commemorative process. The handling of the aftermath by the government had important ramifications, especially the fact that despite mounting evidence to the contrary, the Popular Party (Partido Popular, PP), then in power, insisted on ETA’s responsibility. Public opinion was deeply divided as to whether ETA or Al-Qaeda was responsible for the attacks. On 13 March 2004, the day before the elections, thousands of protestors took to the streets to protest against the PP, which they felt was deliberately lying to the Spanish people about the perpetrators and using the victims of terrorism in order to win the elections (Flesher Fominaya 2011). Many also felt that the media, especially the government-controlled public television, were actively participating in a cover-up. (Moreno 2005; Olmeda 2005; Torcal and Rico 2004; Van Biezen 2005). In addition, unlike in the U.S. case of 9/11, there was a significant part of public opinion that linked President Aznar’s support of U.S. president George W. Bush and the invasion of Iraq directly to the terrorist attacks, and therefore attributed part of the blame to Aznar and the PP. The PP accused the Socialist Party (Partido Socialista Obrero Español, PSOE) of orchestrating the protests and stealing the elections (Flesher Fominaya 2011). The question over attribution of perpetration of the attacks continued over the following years. Particular sectors of the PP and right-wing news media fostered this uncertainty, with some victims in 2011 still convinced that ETA had indeed been involved despite no evidence being produced during the investigative trial to convincingly support this assertion, according to the judges. This continuing division of opinion caused additional distress to the victims, both to those who believed ETA was responsible (and therefore had not been brought to justice) and those who did not (and therefore felt that allegations of ETA responsibility denied the validity of a judicial process that condemned the real perpetrators). The political fallout of this conflict directly affected the victims of 11-M in profound ways. Not only were the victims themselves subject to insults, taunts, and allegations of partisanship, but they were also marginalized and excluded from commemorative processes purportedly held to honor them. Victims’ families, particularly Asociación 11M Afectados Terrorismo (11M Association of those Affected by Terrorism, A11MAT) and its president, Pilar Manjón, who lost her son in the attack, were subjected to insults from PP supporters because of Manjón’s criticism of President Aznar’s implication in the invasion of Iraq and (mis)handling of information following the bombings. As Manjón entered Congress’ 11-M Investigation Commission (Comisión del 11-M) in 2004, Aznar supporters waving PP flags chanted: “You can shove your dead up your ass!” She also received death threats, as did other association members, and emails with photographs of her son’s corpse (ABC 2005; América Económica 2004; Radio Cable 2007). The timing of the attack means that 11 March represents the anniversary of the bombings but also recalls the event that led to the bitter defeat of the PP three days later and the victory 416

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of the PSOE. Each subsequent anniversary was marked by a desire of some sectors of the PP to shift the emphasis away from their electoral defeat and questions about their integrity and instead either reassert the ETA conspiracy thesis (that argues that in reality ETA was behind the attacks as the intellectual authors and that the PP was “right” to accuse them after all) or shift attention toward the PSOE’s (“poor”) handling of the problem of ETA terrorism. Their agenda is facilitated by the AVT (Asociación Víctimas del Terrorismo), the largest national victims of terrorism association, which is closely aligned with the PP and whose members are genuinely convinced that ETA was in fact behind the attack as allies of Al-Qaeda (Interview, Madrid 2011). During the 2006 commemorative act organized by the AVT, then opposition leader Rajoy (PP) called for the government “to keep working to find out who really was behind the attacks” (El País 2006). In 2007, the PP and the AVT strategically organized a mass public protest on 10 March to coincide with the 11-M anniversary, blaming the PSOE for a judicial decision to allow convicted ETA terrorist de Juana Chaos an attenuated prison sentence in order to treat him as a result of his hunger strike. In this way ETA terrorism was pushed to the fore and attention was def lected from 11-M and its unfavorable political aftermath for the PP. The political impact of the protests, which picked up on strong public opinion against the judicial decision, was somewhat mitigated by the high profile trial underway against the perpetrators of 11-M, who were linked to Islamic fundamentalism. Those victims of 11-M who felt that the trial was legitimate and important felt deeply angry about the continual shifting of emphasis away from the actual perpetrators and felt that this undermined the process against them. A permanent monument to the victims was built in Atocha after an international competition for proposals issued by the City of Madrid and the Ministry of Public Works (Fomento) was adjudicated by a jury consisting of representatives of the administration, distinguished representatives of culture and professional colleges of engineers and architects, technical engineers in charge of the remodeling of the Recoletos-Prado axis, from the Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, the Faculty of Fine Arts, the Association of Victims of Terrorism and sculptors of recognized prestige [(Press memo, City of Madrid, 17 November 2005)]. In striking contrast to the development of the 9/11 memorial, the families of the victims and representatives of the major victims’ associations are notable by their absence. The monument was fiercely criticized by victims and others for its poor design, flawed building and very low profile (it is difficult to recognize as a monument from the outside and even harder to locate from within Atocha station, where only a small sign indicates its whereabouts and there is no sign at the entrance). The invisibility of the monument is actually an excellent reflection of victims’ broader invisibility throughout the commemorative process. If the 9/11 memorial can be said to have “made absence present” (Délano and Nienass, this volume), then the Atocha monument makes absence absent. Even the victims’ names were absent from the design and today only appear as a plaque at the entrance to the monument itself (Flesher Fominaya and Barberet 2012). However, the inauguration of the permanent 11-M monument in Atocha gave the official commemorative act of 2007 a higher profile than the year before. The king and queen presided over the 15-minute act, in which they laid a Spanish f lag draped wreath at the monument followed by three minutes of silence and a cello recital. Government and political leaders, ambassadors of 23 countries, and some 1,500 people attended. Yet even a commemoration designed for solemnity was marked by confrontation: members of the public had posters reading, “Acebes, prison for negligence. Aznar, trial at 417

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the International Court of Justice.”4 Others wore stickers reading, “No to the war in Iraq” or “11 M—we want to know the truth.” The stickers and posters were constant reminders of continuing political conf licts over the origins of the attack, def lecting attention from the actual victims who died or were injured. In 2008, national elections once again coincided with anniversary events, shifting attention away from the victims and toward partisan disputes. That year the anniversary of 11-M fell just two days after the general elections, won again by the PSOE. Post-electoral tension marked the commemorative acts and completely overshadowed the memory of the victims themselves. The official ceremony at the 11-M monument lasted barely ten minutes and consisted of a choral recital. A11MAT President Manjón did not attend this event. In the Forest of Memory only three f loral bouquets were laid and no commemorative act took place. In 2009, there was no official national commemorative act. President Zapatero opened his speech in Congress with: “In the name of the government I want to offer our support and remembrance of the victims and their families for this terrible tragedy resulting from a terrorist attack.”5 Commemorative acts organized by the PP at the Autonomous Community and City Government level were boycotted by the PSOE in protest over a corruption scandal involving the PP. Once again the victims of 11-M were “sacrificed” to the ongoing political bickering between the major national parties. At the event at the Atocha monument, attended by the Minister of Public Works (Fomento) and the Mayor of Madrid, victims’ families were asked to wait outside until the ceremony was over. A11MAT President Manjón summed up the importance of the timing and the context of the attack in this way in an interview on TV3 on 6 March 2009: We had the misfortune to have a terrorist attack on the 11th of March, followed by the fact that election day was on the 14th of March, added to which was the misfortune that the perpetrators were not ETA. If they had been ETA, maybe we would not have had to suffer everything we have been made to suffer [(see also Cadena SER 2004)].

Divisions between the victims’ associations Crumbaugh (2007) shows that the political instrumentalization of victims of terrorism, especially ETA victims, is a key feature of the Spanish political landscape. The commemoration of 11-M was also affected by this political history. Political division extends beyond the two main political parties to the two principal terrorist victims’ associations representing 11-M victims. The association representing the majority of the victims, A11MAT, claims to be non-partisan and has harshly criticized both the PP and the PSOE for their lack of support but has been particularly critical of the PP. The other major association, the AVT, predates 11-M and represents relatively few families of 11-M victims. However, this organization represents a large number of families of ETA victims. The AVT actively seeks to gain recognition and commemoration for some 850 ETA victims killed over the past 30 years who have no national monument or particular day for commemoration, but their close ties to the PP mean that their struggle is entwined with harsh criticism of the PSOE in the form of mass protests (see for example, El Mundo 2005). In the contest over commemoration, the AVT has struggled for 11-M to be a day of commemoration for all victims of terrorism. The AVT has also actively pushed the ETA conspiracy thesis both in the media and through their legal representation in the trial against the surviving perpetrators of 11-M, a tactic that infuriates the members of the A11MAT. A third association, the Asociación de Ayuda a las Víctimas del 11-M (AAV11M, Association of Help to Victims of 11-M) is independent of the AVT but follows a similar line, 418

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and unlike AVT, was formed specifically to help victims of 11-M by an 11-M survivor, Eloy Morán. In 2006, during the trial against the surviving perpetrators of the attacks, A11MAT wrote a letter to the Audiencia Nacional (The High Court): In the two legal motions presented by the AVT … they attribute authorship of the attacks to ETA … ask that Morocco be declared an enemy, and for mosques to be closed and searched.… The A11MAT, has not and does not share [the position of ] the AVT … the differences between our organizations are absolutely irreconcilable and for this reason we request separate legal representation [(A11MAT 2006)]. Political divisions have also affected victims’ associations’ demands regarding commemoration. Preempting the possibility that commemorative speeches are used as political propaganda, the A11MAT had one key demand from the beginning: that commemorations be characterized by silence. Their wishes have been respected at the official national acts presided by the king and queen and/or the president. No speeches are made and no names are read. The AVT organizes its own act each year, attended by the PP but not by the PSOE, immediately following the official act. It reads manifestos for all victims of terrorism. In 2006, AVT’s president explained that the act was an “homage to the 1204 people assassinated in Spain” because “the 11th of March is not just a day to commemorate what happened on that date” (ABC 2006).

The role of the media Media coverage in Spain is tightly linked to partisan politics, and the major papers and television channels are aligned with major parties. In 2006, certain sectors of the PP aggressively pushed the ETA conspiracy thesis, a strategy that outraged many victims and their families, the A11MAT, and members of the public. Journalists at Telemadrid, controlled by the PP, which governs in the Autonomous Community of Madrid, refused to be credited in the documentary The Shadows of 11 M, which raised doubts about the “real” perpetrators of 11-M. Journalist unions and journalist associations signed a manifesto declaring the documentary to be “an unprecedented institutional act of irresponsibility … lacking any basis in fact or evidence” (El País 2006: 51). An angry viewer wrote to El País: “Can anyone imagine a news report calling into question ETA’s authorship of the Hipercor bombing?6 Don’t victims of Islamic terrorism deserve the same respect?” (2006: 14). A11MAT President Manjón expressed her anger about the manipulation of the victims for political purposes and stressed the victims’ ongoing needs for medical, psychological, and economic support (Rivas 2006; Ximénez de Sandoval and Junquera 2006). Other victims’ families also reflected their rage at the ETA conspiracy theory: “If the Popular Party had any dignity towards the victims or themselves they would stop this manipulation” (López 2006). Beyond specific editorial orientations that seek to represent the event and its commemoration in certain ways, anniversary coverage was dominated by the “frame” of political divisions, a fact that pushed commemoration of the victims themselves to the background. A brief look at some of the anniversary headlines over the years highlights how much political divisions overshadow the memory of the victims themselves: King Highlights Divisions That Weaken the Fight Against Terrorism (ABC, 11 March 2005). 419

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Divisions between Political Parties and Victims Associations Were Perceptible in the Commemorations (El País, 12 March 2005). Institutions Pay Separate Homage to the Victims of the Massacre (ABC, 10 March 2006). Political Division Confronts Family Members in the Commemoration of the Victims of 11 M (ABC, 12 March 2007). Icy Encounter between Zapatero and Rajoy after the Elections at the 11 M Commemoration (El País, 12 March 2008). On each anniversary partisan divisions shift attention away from the victims of 11-M on the one day that is set aside to remember them. Ironically, the decision of the European Parliament to declare 11 March European Remembrance of Victims of Terrorism Day also works to weaken the symbolic meaning of that date to commemorate the actual victims of the Madrid bombings because it extends the symbolic meaning of the date to commemoration of all victims. The subsequent decision of the Spanish parliament to choose a different date (27 June) further complicates commemoration, as I discuss below.

Victim narratives on institutional marginalization and active forgetting In news media and interviews, victims repeatedly expressed their sense of exclusion and marginalization from the commemorative process. This feeling began very early on in the commemorative process, as Pilar Manjón explains in a speech before parliament: As has become usual in the many acts in which we have been protagonists no one has asked us if we have wished to receive [these tributes]. Has anyone from any institution asked us when they use our loved ones’ names or photographs? There are those who sincerely feel recognized [by these commemorations]. But for others they represent a fresh heart wrenching exposure. We are not questioning whether or not these tributes are beneficial or not, we don’t doubt that they come from a desire to express the maximum support and solidarity. What we are denouncing is that we are not consulted, that what is right or wrong is assumed, that monuments are built and we are not allowed to make them ours. That gesture should be the final product of a long path of speaking, of knowing, of making our voice reach people…. We have a voice and we want that voice to be heard. There were moments in which perhaps the pain kept us in our houses. Now we want to be heard. We have a voice and we have reason. And we want the commemorations to not be cold stones in any corner of the city that no one remembers after a few months, but that they have life. The life that blossoms when things are born through processes of dialogue and participation. Listen to us [(2004:20)]. Eloy Morán, President of the AAV11M, agrees with Manjón about the lack of consultation about commemoration but is somewhat ambiguous: on the one hand he feels they should be consulted, but on the other, he is not bothered by it: EM: “Yes I think that yes we should be consulted if we think it’s okay if we think it’s bad.” CFF: “But was that the case? In this case?” EM: “No. In the case of the Atocha monument we were not consulted, we were not asked if we thought what they were going to do was a good idea or not, and well I guess 420

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the City Council awarded the contract of that monument, I guess, to an architect’s studio that they thought was good, and well we think that it was done with the best will and well that’s good enough. Really, that’s good enough. Because now there a lot of people in the Community of Madrid7 and even outside the community that say, in a village, decide that they’re going to make garden or a rotunda, and put up a monument or put up, well you know, a tribute ‘in memory of the victims of 11 M.’ Well, I mean they don’t consult us to ask us what we think of what they’re going to put up, this or that monument or memorial. Later on they invite us to the inauguration, and when we can we go. And we go with pleasure because we feel it’s important, not because I believe that I deserve any kind of tribute because I wasn’t there because … I’m no hero—let me see if I can explain this, I was just one of the ones who happened to be there and hey what do you know it happened to me, but that doesn’t turn me into a hero, it turns me into a victim, much to my regret.” (Interview, 12 July 2011) Manjón’s narratives about the need for consultation with victims about commemoration contrasts more clearly with the view of AVT President Ángeles Pedraza, who stressed the need for consultation around justice and legal issues related to terrorism but not commemoration: CFF: “Do you think you should be consulted about commemoration?” AP: “No, I don’t think so, because I… Although people think that we are very political I would like to distance myself from that. I don’t want to be political, if I had wanted to be a politician I would’ve gone into politics and gotten a salary as a politician. I think I’m here to offer suggestions but they don’t have to consult me about everything of course. No, because for that there are people who are getting a salary. The problem is that sometimes those people do things so badly that we have to go on the streets to protest because they’ve really done a bad job. But no, I don’t think that in every area they would have to call the associations to consult because otherwise, what are they there for?” (Interview, 6 July 2011) Her words belie the repeated struggles of her association to have the commemorations of 11-M include all victims of terrorism in Spain and not just those who died on that day. Perhaps her association’s success in modifying the commemorations, in this sense, made her feel less the need to demand consultation or perhaps as she herself states, she would like to depoliticize the reputation of her association. Despite the declarations of Morán and Pedraza, both of their associations refused to attend 11-M commemorations held on the 27 June on political grounds. The parliament took the decision to change the date in 2010. Both associations attended the commemorations on the first year the date was changed but later changed their positions and boycotted the ceremony in 2011. In addition to objecting to the entrance of the Bildu Party into parliament (a party some felt should be made illegal because of its support for the radical independent Basque left and therefore the ETA circle of support), the AVT also objected to the lack of inclusion of victims in the ceremony. For its part the AAV11M also boycotted the event, in its case due to the refusal of parliament to respond to an accusation that the Minister of the Interior was not allowing all the facts in the case of 11-M to come to light. It is worth noting that during this period, newspapers on the right and far right of the political spectrum debated the change of date, some alleging that the date change formed part of a concerted strategy of “forgetting” 11-M, this time ostensibly due to the PSOE government’s desire to downplay the supposed 421

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“ETA connection” during the high-profile trial. Given the usual high-profile criticisms of Manjón to institutional mechanisms of commemoration and treatment of the victims in general, some journalists were surprised to see her arriving in parliament for the commemoration and asked her why she was there. However, Manjón declared to the press that her association “could find no reason not to attend the ceremony” and that they felt it was their obligation to attend parliament on the Spanish Day of Victims of Terrorism. She did, however, also say that she thought it was a shame that there was no official commemorative act held on the European Remembrance of Victims of Terrorism Day (which is 11 March) (RTVE 2011). All three associations have declared that they would like there to be some form of parliamentary commemoration on 11-M as well as on 27 June. Spokespeople from both sides of the political divide between associations argue strongly that institutional actors have a vested interest in actively forgetting or “erasing” 11-M. In 2011, Manjón highlighted in an interview how the monument of Atocha and other official commemorations had failed to fulfill victims’ expectations and had at times been deliberately exclusionary of the very victims they were meant to commemorate. She contrasts her feelings about these monuments with how she feels about the memorial her association managed to have built in El Pozo after many years of struggle but also highlights active forgetting by political elites: PM: “The Atocha monument will never be my monument, nobody consulted me and we still don’t know how much it cost eh? But many millions! On the other hand the El Pozo monument [built by her association] will always be our monument because we built it stone by stone, through … the trickery, the arguments…the insults, we’ve been through it all everything up until the last day when we finally saw it f lower and even on the inaugural day they tried to screw us over, but they didn’t manage it.” CFF: “Because they don’t want you to build your own monuments?” PM: “The ‘11’s and the ‘M’s must be erased—when they make a monument it must be to all victims of terrorism and then they don’t invite us, and when we try to make our own, they try to stop us. These are the kinds of things that come from the fact that three days after the attacks people went to vote. From those waters comes this mud.” (Interview, 5 July 2011) Eloy Morán, President of the AAV11M, also asserts that many people would prefer to forget 11-M, although for different reasons. Morán strongly believes ETA was involved in 11-M: EM: “Well specifically in Spain what I’m talking about is that what’s happened to us is that here it seems that the public institutions are doing everything possible to—well I do not know if to forget or to make others forget 11-M. We think it’s necessary for people to remember that day, but for what reason? Well, so that it never happens again. I’m going to give you a fact: the European Parliament decided to make the 11th of March every year the European Remembrance of Victims of Terrorism Day, well, so in Spain when it’s decided to also make a day of memory the logical thing would be for it to also be the 11th of March … I mean gosh, in Spain there has been a very long history of over 40 years of terrorist attacks by ETA … Nevertheless, none of those attacks, however painful or terrible they have been, have had the repercussion or the scope or the number of victims as 11-M. None of them. We feel that 11-M is a date that everybody should remember, but surprise! It isn’t convenient to remember 11-M. So instead it’s decided that a better day would be 27 June because on that day in 1960 a baby of only two or three months 422

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died in San Sebastian at a railway station, [explains the case at length, stressing that ETA at that time was not even formed and did not claim responsibility for the attacks]. It wasn’t until eight years later in 1968 that ETA actually claimed its first victim. Eight years later! And despite this, this is the date they chose. Why? Well, because 11-M causes a lot of people a lot of harm and many people would prefer that it didn’t exist and there will come a day that in the same way that people deny the Holocaust, they will deny that 11-M ever happened. Just like the Holocaust.” CFF: “But why? Why do you believe this?” EM: “Well you’d have to ask that to the people who support this idea. I can’t understand it. I think that people feel guilty. I think that they feel guilty that that attack— there’s no doubt about that—that attack has political connotations, that it was done for a reason, and the reason was none other than to change the history of Spain, to change the government that we had and with that the history of Spain. And that’s what happened, and there are those who don’t want to remember that fact and would prefer to argue that if there was a change of government it was because the opposition was doing a very good job and the government was doing a very bad job. That political change happened because of that and not because the attack had any repercussion on the political change and I think that that’s where [this desire to change the dates comes from] but you’d have to ask those people who did not want to choose 11-M as the date to remember the victims of 11-M in Spain.” (Interview, 12 July, 2011) Morán’s narrative also supports an overall feeling of abandonment on the part of victims across the political cleavages that continue to plague the commemoration of 11-M. As the President of the Foundation for the Victims of Terrorism, a private public partnership to support all victims of terrorism in Spain, regardless of origin, put it so poetically and diplomatically, the commemoration of 11-M is so difficult because “[w]e carry the dead weight of our own ghosts of this imperfect past that the political management of 11-M left behind” (Interview, 8 July 2013).

Institutional versus grassroots commemoration If the institutional failure to commemorate the victims of 11-M in a satisfactory manner for the victims is a feeling shared across victims’ associations, then they also contrast institutional amnesia with the profound warmth and solidarity they have felt from “the public” or “society” as a whole. A11MAT President Manjón draws this contrast: Places of memory and remembering are needed but maybe we are the ones who can least complain right? If Madrid, Spain and part of the world showed anything that day they showed great solidarity. So when we talk about the administration and the institutions that’s one thing eh? But the warm embrace of the whole society who lived that sorrow with us, who cried with us, we could never complain about that. We have a great society, beautiful in its convictions, that has later been manipulated, but the first days after the attack the embrace we received from society was wonderful. The places of the tragedy became true sanctuaries of memory from a tiny piece of paper that read ‘I am also Madrid’ to f lowers, it lasted months, well I never actually went down to the stations and I still don’t but people told me about it, it lasted months! [(Interview, 5 July 2013)] 423

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Conclusion: understanding a flawed commemorative process For the first five years after the attacks, commemoration of the actual victims of 11-M was inextricably bound with the timing of the attack and the link to the elections. For the PP, remembering and commemorating the victims of 11-M, as opposed to victims of ETA or all victims of terrorism, raises questions about their integrity and memories of a bitter electoral defeat. In a context in which the PP claims that the PSOE’s victory was due to its manipulation of post-traumatic stress rather than public mandate, the PSOE also may prefer to forget. But the PSOE decision not to mark the fifth anniversary with any official state ceremony at all, after winning a second general election under normal circumstances, is more difficult to understand. Both victims’ associations have repeatedly asked that the memory of the dead not be used in partisan ways. Indeed, the instrumentalization of 11-M victims emerges as the master frame that dominates discourse of the commemoration of 11-M, with virtually every interlocutor mentioning this as a key motif from the king, the political parties, all three major victims’ associations, journalists and the general public. The failure to commemorate the victims carries additional costs, because without commemoration, the ongoing needs of survivors will be more easily forgotten, as happens so often with veterans of war.8 This is certainly not the fault of the victims but is another cost they must bear in the political contest over commemoration. If the purpose of commemoration of terrorist attacks and other national traumas is to provide a repairing of the ruptured social fabric caused by the trauma event (Neal 2005), then Spain represents a f lawed collective memory process. Neither the event nor, more importantly, its victims have been remembered in such a way as to provide a unifying or healing “laying to rest” of the trauma. Instead, the commemorative process has been marked by fierce partisan battles that in a neo-corporatist national framework have affected not only the political parties involved, but also the victims’ associations and the media, causing added pain and suffering to the attack victims, both survivors and grieving families. Even if we shift our focus away from the victims to the interests of the nation-state, which Edkins (2003a, 2003b) argues was served by the commemoration of 9/11, the 11-M commemoration comes up short, as the lack of consensus around the nature and meaning of the event prevented any sustained coherent unity developing around the nation-state project. On the contrary, the trauma event revealed the Spanish state’s contested and fragmented nature, and threw up numerous political and territorial disputes (through the continued focus on the ETA conspiracy theory) despite being a transnational attack. This highlights the crucial impact that national political contexts can have on the commemorative process of trauma events. The case of 11-M’s f lawed commemorative process also encourages us to modify overly constructivist accounts of national traumas, showing that, while public commemoration is always a contested and constructed process (Alexander 2004; Doss 2002), factors such as the timing of the attacks can be crucial in shaping the definition of the trauma and the way it is remembered. Short-term political decisions can also have crucial long-term implications for commemoration. While both major parties have instrumentalized and marginalized the victims of 11-M, the PP’s decision to insist on attributing responsibility for the attack on ETA, even after compelling evidence to the contrary was made available within 48 hours of the attack, and for some sectors of the party to continue to insist on it much later through an exhaustive investigative and trial process, was the single most important aspect of the case that triggered most of the subsequent problems around commemoration for the victims of this attack. Victims who believed these allegations were re-victimized by the denial of what they felt to be “real justice” based on “the truth,” and so were those victims who did 424

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not believe the allegations and felt that these “conspiracy theories” contributed to a denial of the truth of what had happened, with the corresponding negative implications for the remembering of the event. The initial attribution of responsibility to ETA by the PP was at odds with a broader framing of the bombings as an “attack on the nation,” an immediate dominant narrative in the case of 9/11 and even in 7/7 (see Brown, Allen and Reavey, this volume), where the case for “home-grown terrorism” could be made more compellingly than for 11-M. The ensuing polemics pitted victims groups against each other, some of whom consciously or unwittingly participated in using the victims to further particular partisan agendas, causing great distress to many of the families of the victims of 11-M. Yet it was long-standing political cleavages that fuelled partisan agendas, facilitated by affiliated media and supported in some cases by some victims’ associations, that actively contributed to the victims feeling manipulated, excluded, marginalized and forgotten. If no commemorative process of national traumas can ever truly satisfy or represent the range of victims involved (a reality many victims are fully aware of ), then 11-M is a case of a failed or deeply f lawed commemoration. For not only did the official commemorative process, through its combination of contested remembering and active forgetting on the part of both major parties, fail to repair the social fabric or to satisfy the victims, but it also exposed them to repeated victimization and increased their pain and suffering, long after the dust of the bomb blasts had settled and every trace of the wreckage had been cleared away.

Notes   1  Many thanks to Rosemary Barberet for her helpful criticisms and her collaboration over the course of this research, which forms part of a larger comparative research project on commemorative processes following 9/11 and 3/11 (11-M). Thanks also to Antonio Montañés Jiménez for research assistance. This research was funded in part by the British Academy, for whose support I am very grateful. All translations are by the author. All quotations are from interviews conducted by the author in Madrid 2011 unless otherwise noted.   2  Of the 27 people who can be empirically related and legally implicated in the preparation or execution of the bombings, all were native Moroccans, save three Algerians, an Egyptian and Tunisian and a Lebanese national. According to the court sentence, all convicted were “members of terrorist cells and groups of jihadist types” (Reinares 2010). According to Reinares (2010), two of the four small clusters of the cell perpetrating the bombings evolved from the remnants of a dismantled Al-Qaeda cell established in Spain in the mid-1990s. Reinares presents compelling evidence, including the voluminous court documents, linking them to international Al-Qaeda networks and affiliates. A Spanish national supplied the explosives and was convicted of cooperating with the terrorists by providing the material necessary for them to carry out their attack.   3  These interviews provide insight into the diverse array of victim narratives that play out in the public sphere as they represent all the major associations in Spain. I am deeply grateful to all the interviewees for their time and consideration and for, above all, their willingness to speak to me on such an emotionally difficult and politically charged subject. Their position as spokesperson for their association in no way lessens the ethical and emotional and political considerations of these interviews. Access was undoubtedly assisted by my sincere desire to respect their narratives and bring them to light and by my established position as an academic researcher. Although as a scholar I do not necessarily interpret the evidence in the same way as the victims do, I do have profound respect for their narratives and for the meaning they have for them.   4  Acebes (PP) was Minister for the Interior at the time of the attack.   5  Available online at http://es.reuters.com/article/topNews/idESMAE52A08I20090311.   6  The Hipercor supermarket bombing on 19 June 1987, was the bloodiest attack in ETA’s history, killing 21 people and injuring 45.   7  This refers to the Autonomous Community of Madrid. 425

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  8  Official commemorative acts provide a forum in which victims can speak about their ongoing needs and present proposals to parliament and political leaders. This is a strategy used by victims’ associations in Spain.

References A11MAT (2006) Acusación Popular Asociación Afectados 11-M, Herramientas para el Debate. Available online at http://herramientas.blogsome.com/2006/05/25/acusacion-popular-11-m-afectados-de-terrorismo (accessed 25 October 2013). ABC (2005) “Pilar Manjón denuncia amenazas,” 7 April. Available online at www.abc.es/hemeroteca/ historico-07-04-2005/abc/Ultima/pilar-manjon-denuncia-amenazas-y-peces-barba-cree-que-se-debentomar-en-serio_201684786474.html (accessed 16 May 2013). ABC (2006) “Segundo aniversario del 11-M homenaje a las víctimas,” 3 December. Alexander, J. C. (2004) “Towards a theory of cultural trauma” in J. C. Alexander, R. Eyerman, B. Giesen, N. J. Smelser and P. Sztompka (eds.) Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 1–30. América Económica (2004) “La realidad entra en el Parlamento español,” 17 December. Available online at www.americaeconomica.com/numeros4/296/reportajes/2Carolina296.htm (accessed 28 October 2013). Cadena SER (2004) Pilar Manjón (portavoz de víctimas del 11-M): “Nos dijeron que nos metiéramos nuestros muertos por el culo.” Radio interview available online at www.cadenaser.com/espana/ audios/pilar-manjon-portavoz-victimas-11-m-nos-dijeron-nos-metieramos-muertos-culo/csrcsrpor/ 20041202csrcsrnac_8/Aes (accessed 16 May 2013). Crumbaugh, Justin. (2007) “Are We All (Still) Miguel Ángel Blanco? Victimhood, the Media Afterlife, and the Challenge for Historical Memory.” Hispanic Review, 75: 365–384. Doss, E. (2002) “Death, Art and Memory in the Public Sphere: the Visual and Material Culture of Grief in Contemporary America,” Mortality, 7(1): 63–82. Edkins, J. (2003a) Trauma and the Memory of Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Edkins, J. (2003b) “The Rush to Memory and the Rhetoric of War,” Journal of Political and Military Sociology, 31(2): 231–250. El Mundo (2005) “Masiva manifestación en Madrid en contra del diálogo con ETA,” 7 June. Available online at www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2005/06/04/espana/1117893771.html (accessed 28 October 2013). El País (2006) “Rajoy insiste en aclarar la autoría del 11-M durante un homenaje a las víctimas,” 11 March. Available online at http://elpais.com/elpais/2006/03/11/actualidad/1142068622_850215.html (accessed 28 October 2013). Flesher Fominaya, C. (2011) “The Madrid bombings and popular protest: misinformation, counterinformation, mobilisation and elections after ‘11-M’,” Contemporary Social Science 6, (3): 1–19. Flesher Fominaya, C. and Barberet, R. (2012) “Defining the victims of terrorism: competing frames around victim compensation and commemoration post 9/11 New York City and 3/11, Madrid” in Karatzogianni, A. (ed.) Violence and War in the Media. London: Routledge, pp. 113–130. López, V. (2006) “Heridas Abiertas,” El País, 11 March. Available online at http://elpais.com/ elpais/2006/03/11/actualidad/1142068619_850215.html (accessed 28 October 2013). Manjón, P. (2004) Ponencia de Pilar Manjón ante el Congreso de los Diputados (15/12/2004) en la Comisión de Investigación sobre el 11-M. (Page 20). Available online at www.asociacion11m.org/ documentacion/20041215declaracioncomisioninvestigacion.pdf Manjón, P. (2009) “Entrevista: Quinto Aniversario Del 11-M,” El País, 11 March. Available online at http:// elpais.com/diario/2009/03/11/espana/1236726018_850215.html (accessed 28 October 2013). Moreno, Luis. (2005) “The Madrid bombings in the domestic and regional politics of Spain,” Irish Studies in International Affairs, 16: 65–72. Neal, A. (2005) National Trauma and Collective Memory: Extraordinary Events in the American Experience. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Olmeda, José A. (2005) “Fear or Falsehood? Framing the 3/11 attacks in Madrid and Electoral Accountability,” Working paper, 24, Real Instituto Elcano. Radio Cable (2007) “Pido que no me manden más fotos del cadáver de mi hijo destrozado.” Available online at www.radiocable.com/alacarta0038.html (accessed 28 October 2013). Reinares, Fernando. (2010) “The Madrid bombings and global jihadism,” Survival, 52 (2): 83–104. 426

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Rivas, M. (2006) “La Vileza,” El País, 11 March. Available online at http://elpais.com/diario/2006/03/11/ ultima/1142031602_850215.html (accessed 28 October 2013). RTVE (2011) “Bono pide ‘firmeza’ con los que ‘vitorean’ a ETA en un homenaje a víctimas con ausencias,” 27 June. Available online at www.rtve.es/noticias/20110627/zapatero-ira-homenaje-victimasdel-terrorismo-no-iran-asociaciones/443947.shtml (accessed 28 October 2013). Simpson, D. (2006) 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press. Smelser, N. J. (2004a) “Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma” in J. C. Alexander, R. Eyerman, B. Giesen, N. J. Smelser and P. Sztompka (eds.) Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 31–59. Smelser, N. J. (2004b) “Epilogue: September 11th as Cultural Trauma” in J. C. Alexander, R. Eyerman, B. Giesen, N. J. Smelser and P. Sztompka (eds.) Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 264–282. Torcal, M. and Rico, G. (2004) “The 2004 Spanish general election: under the shadow of Al-Qaeda?” South European Society and Politics, 9: 107–121. Tota, A. L. (2004) “Ethnographying public memory: The commemorative genre for the victims of terrorism in Italy,” Qualitative Research, 4(2): 131–159. Van Biezen, Ingrid. (2005) “Terrorism and democratic legitimacy: conflicting interpretations of the Spanish elections,” Mediterranean Politics, 10 (1): 99–108. Ximénez de Sandoval, P. and Junquera, N. (2006) “Entrevista: Pilar Manjón,” El País, 11 March. Available online at http://elpais.com/diario/2006/03/11/espana/1142031619_850215.html (accessed 28 October 2013).

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33 Remembering 7/7 The collective shaping of survivors’ personal memories of the 2005 London bombing Steven D. Brown, Matthew Allen and Paula Reavey

Introduction On 7th July 2005, four explosive devices exploded in central London, killing 52 people and injuring hundreds of others. The devices were carried in rucksacks onto the London Underground train network by four young British men (Mohammad Sidique Khan, Shehzad Tanweer, Germaine Lindsay and Hasib Hussain). All four were also killed during the blasts. Three of the devices were detonated within a minute of each other on trains in tunnels between underground stations around 08.50. The fourth was set off an hour later by Hussain on a bus in Tavistock Square; he had apparently been forced to change his plans due to train delays. The bombings had an immediate impact, with nonstop news coverage and images of the scenes being immediately relayed as the nature of the events gradually emerged over the course of the day (see Lorenzo-Dus & Bryan 2011). In the following weeks of heightened security and anxiety, there was a second round of bombings on 21st July and a police shooting at Stockwell Underground Station, in which Brazilian national Jean Charles de Menezes died. Plain-clothed police had misidentified him as one of the 21/7 bombers. The 7/7 Bombings were one of the worst terrorist incidents in post-war UK. The bombings took place the day after the announcement of the awarding of the Olympic Games to London.1 They followed the 2004 Madrid train bombings and were widely seen as part of a long-expected backlash for the UK’s involvement in the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In the months following the bombings, public debate was centred on the significance of ‘homegrown terror’, since the bombers were UK citizens (and with the exception of Lindsay, British-born), and around the ‘radicalisation’ of young Muslims. This debate intensified with a Government-led push to extend the pre-charge detention period for ‘terror suspects’ to 90 days under revised anti-terrorism laws2 and an increase in the use of ‘control orders,’ restricting the rights and liberties of those suspected of involvement in planning terrorist acts. The 7/7 Bombings also came to be a key moment in how the international policies of Tony Blair’s Government were publically viewed during the period of so-called War on Terror between 2001 and 2008. The place of the 7/7 Bombings in contemporary British history is now well established, particularly following the public inquest that reported in 2011. It was also clear 428

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in the immediate aftermath that 7/7 was an event that required public commemoration. The national f lag was f lown at half-mast on public buildings on 8th July, a two-minute silence was observed across Europe on 14th July3 (repeated on 7th July 2006) and a memorial service was held at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London on 1st November. In successive years, there have been public events marking the anniversary of the bombings and a permanent memorial has been installed in Hyde Park. The process of constituting 7/7 into an object of collective memory began very rapidly, and it continues to this day. Commemoration of events that are within ‘living memory’ (that is to say, the span of three generations that Jan Assmann and Aleida Assmann refer to as ‘communicative memory’ [Assmann, J. 2011; Assmann, A. 2011]) typically takes a different form to those that are more remote to contemporary participants. The testimony and experiences of those who witnessed the events commemorated (or of their relatives who pass on the story – see Hirsch 1997) is a crucial element in shaping the commemorative object. With 7/7, there were numerous survivors of all four bombings who were able to offer accounts of their direct experiences, and there was a large number of photographic images, some taken at the scene by survivors using camera phones, others from broadcast media coverage (see Reading 2011). These accounts and images have been recruited into the narratives of 7/7 and underpin the way it is commemorated. In this chapter we will explore the relationship between individual survivor experiences and public or official commemorative narratives. As with the 9/11 attacks on the United States in 2001, the 7/7 Bombings were immediately framed as an ideologically motivated attack on the UK, with many newspaper reports explicitly attributing the incident to Al-Qa’eda. Images of injured survivors, most notably John Tulloch and Davinia Douglass, were extensively used to represent the indiscriminate violence of the bombings. In the following days and months, survivors and relatives of the deceased were encouraged to ‘tell their stories’, which were typically framed as courage in the face of political terror. The most notorious example of this was a bloodied image of John Tulloch on the front cover of the tabloid newspaper The Sun in November with an article supporting the call for the 90-day terror suspect detention law, using the strapline ‘Tell Tony he’s right’. But as has become clear in the intervening years, the stories that survivors and relatives want to tell about 7/7 do not necessarily support the commemorative narrative of national resilience in the face of political terror. Indeed, in some cases the stories diverge completely, with John Tulloch taking precisely the opposite stance on anti-terrorist laws to the one his image was used by The Sun to support. However, as we will describe it, the issue here is not simply a tension between a ‘collective’ and a ‘personal’ memory of events. Nor is it the distance between direct and ‘mediated’ experience. Finally it does not turn around the seizing of private experiences for public purposes. It concerns instead the distributed and contingent nature of the commemorative work that has been enacted around 7/7 and spaces this has offered for very different accounts of the events themselves.

Distributed remembering Before turning to the stories from survivors and relatives themselves, we will first say a little more about our reticence in using some of the well-known distinctions within (Cultural) Memory Studies to approach commemoration of the 7/7 Bombings. A great deal of intellectual effort has gone into teasing apart the notions of collective and individual memory, and, indeed whether there is any meaning at all to the use of the term ‘memory’ for anything other than personal recollections. Often such debates turn on establishing what major figures, such 429

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as Maurice Halbwachs or Pierre Nora, ‘really mean’ in their writings. Whilst definitional debates are nearly always stimulating to follow, if only for the rhetorical flourishes of the rival interlocutors, they tend often to end up in precisely the same conceptual stalemate they intended to unlock. A more effective strategy, we feel, is to reinvent classic work through readings that whilst they are sympathetic to the organisation of the source material, nevertheless attempt to use it as the building blocks of an argument that would be unfamiliar to the original author precisely because the reception of their work has given rise to the problematic the new argument seeks to address. For example, Middleton and Brown (2005) sought to overturn the received wisdom that Halbwachs’ work was in opposition to the ‘psychological’ version of memory conceptualised by his former mentor Henri Bergson. They argue, drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze, that Bergson effectively deconstructs the opposition between the individual and the social in memory and if this deconstruction is allowed to unfold through Halbwachs’ texts, then ‘personal memory (Sutton et al., 2010; Sulton 2008)’ can be seen to emerge as a consequence of ‘collective memory’ rather than the other way round. Here we follow a version of that argument by demonstrating that the personal memories of 7/7 survivors are shaped and reformulated by their efforts to tell their stories publically. Personal memory is then, in part, a product of a collective work of sense-making. This line of thought can be extended to suspend another classic distinction between the kind of unmediated or ‘raw’ experience that drives testimony and oral history and the mediated, repackaged version of experience that ends up as the texts that circulate in news media, cinema, museums and ‘official history’. Following Nora, the usual tendency is to celebrate the former and decry its corruption by the base impulses of the latter. On the contrary, we show in our analysis that engaging with external materials and tools is critical to the mnemonic work that survivors do. In some sense their memories include or envelop these external materials. Our understanding of these processes is partly indebted to the fascinating work that John Sutton and his colleagues have done in developing notions of ‘distributed’ and ‘extended’ memory (Sutton et al. 2010; Sutton 2008). The basis of their approach is to argue that remembering draws upon a broad range of equivalent resources, some of which are located within the person (i.e. sensation, cognitive capacities), others of which are external (i.e. diaries, electronic devices), and some that transcend this distinction entirely (i.e. language and communicative practices, the memories of others). A variant of the unmediated/mediated distinction is to posit a dualism between ‘experience-near’ forms of memory that come from being physically present at the recollected events and ‘distal’ forms of memory that are based on hearing stories or vicarious experience. At one pole we have ‘memory’ in the strictest, narrowest sense and at the other ‘cultural memory’ or perhaps – dare we say it – ‘history’. In what follows we attempt to bypass that debate by working instead with a concept of ‘embodied connections’ in which survivors use sensations and shared corporeal experiences as the basis for building collective narratives. However, in order to articulate and propagate these embodied connections, survivors need to draw upon collective communicative practices, some of which result in putative ethical dilemmas. The material that forms the basis for this chapter arises from the study, ‘Conf licts of Memory: Commemorating and Mediating the 2005 London Bombings’ in which the first two authors collaborated. The study attempts to explore the link between memories of 7/7 itself and the media framings of the event that unfolded in its aftermath (see Allen & Brown 2011; Lorenzo-Dus & Bryan 2011; Hoskins 2011). As part of the study, the second author conducted a series of interviews with persons who were directly affected by the 430

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bombings (see Allen, 2015). Here we discuss material that comes from three of those interviews, all of which were with survivors of the blasts. Rachel North and Susan Harrison were both travelling on the Jubilee line train on which Germaine Lindsay detonated his bomb. Rachel became well-known for running a blog about her experiences on the BBC website; she set up the support group Kings Cross United and wrote a book, Out of the Tunnel, in which she describes her recovery. Susan overcame losing a leg in the blast to do promotional work for a number of charities. John Tulloch was travelling on the Circle line train and was seated next to Mohammad Sidique Khan when he triggered his bomb. John is an academic known for his work on media and politics. He has made many media appearances and written One Day in July, a book ref lecting on his experiences. In what follows we will discuss material from interviews with Rachel, Susan and John to analyse the mnemonic work that all three have engaged in to make sense of their experiences. As we will show, this work overspills the kinds of distinctions typically made in (Cultural) Memory Studies. It involves shaping their own stories in relation to those of others, making use of external tools and resources as framing devices, and an ongoing ref lection on sensory and felt connections to the event.

‘Telling your story’ The events of 7/7 dominated news coverage in the UK for many of the successive weeks. Almost as soon as they had left the underground train tunnels, survivors were immediately placed in the situation of having to tell ‘their story’. Journalists from national newspapers ‘doorstepped’ the private homes of survivors and relatives, particularly those whose images had be prominently featured in the media, such as Davinia Douglass. Survivors who had suffered lesser physical injuries were very rapidly recruited into the unfolding media coverage of the events. Rachel North, for example, was asked to write a blog for the BBC news website after a journalist saw her posts on a London based message board (Urban75): I did feel incredibly responsible. I was writing the BBC blog in a way that I knew was kind of, erm … I was writing stuff that I thought would help people. I was writing the sort of stuff that I wanted to read that would have helped me if I hadn’t been me, so I was doing that, I was very much writing for a kind of audience and trying to put out messages about, you know, keep calm, carry on [(256–260)].4 Here Rachel describes her blog as an attempt to ‘put out messages’ that sought to ‘help people’ by calming the general anxiety, fear and anger that was present across London in the wake of the bombings. She imagined her audience to be fellow Londoners who might themselves have been caught up in the blasts or who could easily have been. She was in effect telling her story for an ‘imagined self ’ – ‘I was writing the sort of stuff that I wanted to read that would have helped me if I hadn’t been me’. From the very beginning, Rachel’s story was not entirely her own. It was a narrative of her experiences that was deliberately and consciously fitted to the task of ‘normalising’ the extraordinary events of 7/7 and providing a framework that emphasised resilience and a measured response. The treatment Susan Harrison received for her severe injuries and her subsequent rehabilitation kept her away from the media for several weeks following 7/7. She decided, however, to maintain a commitment to participate in a charity event – the Oxfam ‘Big Run’ – that she made before she lost her leg in the bombings. This resulted in an ongoing relationship with 431

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several charities, and she made media appearances as a survivor in order to promote the work of the charities. She sought to use her story as a means of supporting charitable work: I’ve always done it for the right reasons, you know, I’ve always done it, I’m quite tough really and I’ve always done it for the right reasons and, you know, I don’t do sensationalistic stuff, I don’t do it for the fame, I don’t do it to get my face on the front of a newspaper, I do it so that that the charity that I’m getting there gets their website on that bit of paper [(219–222)]. The distinction here between telling the story for ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ reasons implies that no personal narrative of 7/7 is ever entirely neutral. Susan here rejects motives, such as seeking fame or financial reward, for her media work (although note that the self-description of ‘I’m quite tough really’ suggests that she understands the obvious temptation of such rewards). As she frames it, the ‘right reasons’ are ones in which her telling her experiences is instrumental to the charities she works with getting ‘their website on that bit of paper’. Placing her story in the service of charity work in this way does come with some cost. Susan was aware that having a media presence as a survivor would also likely result in her personal life being investigated by tabloid newspapers in search of a story demonstrating some contradiction between her past life and her current charity work: ‘So before I did anything I was thinking, have I got any skeletons in my closet, is there anything that I shouldn’t, no, OK, I’m fine’ (Susan Harrison 308–309). For survivors, recollecting what happened to them on 7/7 meant becoming part of the media frames that broadcast and print media placed around the event. Within these frames, they were required to offer a story that emphasised their victimhood. Susan’s momentary anxiety about possible ‘skeletons in my closet’ was well-founded, because the media logic of ‘victimhood’ is founded in a one-dimensional representation of the survivor as being entirely faultless in all their attributes. Any personal details that cannot be subsumed within this simplistic image are taken to undermine the credibility of the victim. Stories of surviving 7/7 also have to be formulated to acknowledge the 52 people who did not survive. John Tulloch, for example, tells of a media appearance he made on the BBC prime-time television programme The One Show. At this point in his recovery, John had resumed work as a Professor in Media Studies and had begun to write a book about his experiences that was subsequently published as One Day in July. When he was initially contacted to appear on The One Show, the theme that was proposed for the segment in which an interview with John would feature was ‘moving on’. John agreed on the condition that he would speak about how, for him, developing an argument around the political use of the bombing by the UK media and government was enabling him to ‘move on’. However, the television interviewer chose to focus on other issues, and none of the ‘political’ material was featured in the heavily edited interview that was eventually broadcast. Despite his dissatisfaction with this process, John describes his realisation, upon viewing the programme, of how inappropriate that narrative of his recovery would have been: [C]os the other two people in that One Show, er, interview, their stories, both of them, tragic loss, one his wife, one of, er soul mate sister, were so, so moving, there’s no way I would have wanted to be giving a kind of confident move forward into the politics of the world’s images, no way … I still think, still thought at the time I saw it, still think that, that the quality of what they did in that thing was so powerful in a way it was a privilege for me to be even in it [(233–239)]. 432

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John’s academic work afforded him a familiarity with the media practices of editing and producing broadcast work. In this way, any media coverage of 7/7 is likely to be shaped by the format of the programming in which it appears (in this case a popular magazine-type, primetime show). But the juxtaposition of the politicised version of events John intended to tell with the stories from bereaved relatives would have disrupted the emotional tone established in the other interviews and ultimately undermined the overall power of the segment. Many of the survivors who participated in the study spoke of the difficulty of engaging in commemorative activities alongside bereaved relatives (see Allen, forthcoming). Survivors tend to focus on how they have found a variety of meanings in their experiences, as they come to terms with 7/7 as part of their personal biography. But for the bereaved relatives, sudden loss remains the dominant theme of their recollections. Hence, many survivors consider formal commemorative activities, such as the Hyde Park memorial, to be for the relatives of the dead rather than for themselves. In The One Show example, John’s story was depoliticised to accommodate the stories of others. However, the converse may also be the case. Media reporting has sometimes sought to recruit survivors into a discourse around national and international politics. Susan Harrison speaks of this as part of the ‘angle’ that journalists seek to bring to their reporting: They’re trying to, there’s always, you know, initially obviously they’re reporting and because it’s an interesting story and people are interested in … and there does seem to be a sympathy thing, but they always want an angle and it’s usually are you moaning about compensation, or do you want a public enquiry, did you feel you got the best out of the government, you know, there’s always something … let’s get a juicy story on this and actually there is no juicy story for me, there is nothing [(359–364)]. The ‘juicy story’ here is one in which Susan’s recollections and experiences are fitted into a narrative of government failing in its duty of care towards those affected by 7/7. Here Susan is represented as someone who is ‘doubly victimised’, first by the actions of the terrorists and secondly by an uncaring public administration. But other ‘angles’ are possible in these kinds of media stories: I absolutely would hate to, for a view of mine to be put in a paper and like that, and I would hate to … I absolutely would hate to, for a view of mine to be put in a paper and misconstrued and actually suddenly I’m a racist, you know, or suddenly I hate all Muslims, or suddenly I hate, you know, Tony Blair or … it’s just not me and I do have views, but they’re personal [(Susan Harrison 369–371)]. Susan here draws equivalence between these very different perspectives on 7/7. To be represented as ‘hating Muslims’ is, for her, no different in kind from ‘hating Tony Blair’. Both are media frames that attempt to subsume survivors’ stories into the crudest form of political discourse in a sensationalist manner. John Tulloch describes the well-known case of his image being used in tabloid newspapers as a series of appropriations: I began to notice during the first few months, I was being used like a political football and you would know The Sun issue in November 2005 when, you know, I was my … supersaturated colour, in supersaturated colour there I was on the full front page of The Sun, supporting legislation, anti-terrorism legislation, which I didn’t support, and where words were put next to my mouth as though it came from me. And then you’ll get 433

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the Daily Mail a few months later having an attack on Blair after so some so-called independent inquiry and there was a cross-party inquiry, and this time I’m used against Blair, so, erm, the whole ethics of that, erm, the whole experience of living with that [( John Tulloch 111–118)]. The fact that John’s image and story could be used on different occasions by different tabloid newspapers to support entirely different positions, both pro- and anti-Blair, indicates that his experiences can be re-assembled into collectivised narratives of 7/7 that are remote from his own personal perspectives on the bombings. And yet this appropriation of what John went through became itself part of his story. John engaged with the media re-framing of his experience at the same time that he was attempting to come to terms with the physical and psychological effects of the blast: ‘I’m faced with Rupert Murdoch’s mob and others, er, just using me, constructing me, reconstructing me, at the very same time I’m trying to reconstruct myself ’ ( John Tulloch 133–135). We may summarise these issues that survivors confronted in ‘telling their story’ by proposing that the personal or individual recollections of the bombings are not clearly distinct from the collective narratives of the event, which rapidly emerged in media and political discussion. The experiences of survivors were more or less immediately recruited into these broader, shared narratives. As a consequence, survivors made sense of their own experiences through their participation in media frames. Or to put things slightly differently, the personal meaning and significance of surviving the bombings emerged through the collective work of framing 7/7.

Mediating memory The personal memories of survivors of the bombings are, of course, ‘individual’ in the sense that they are bounded by their own unique spatial and temporal perspective on the events. However, what is striking is the extent to which the participants in our study discussed using tools and external resources to reframe their experience. Take, for example, Rachel North’s description of using the Urban75 message board once she had returned home following the bombings: I posted to my account and it was just one of loads, of about 900 people advising and contributing to one thread that day, erm, and as soon as I wrote it I felt a bit better, cos I … I’d managed to get the memories out of my head and onto … onto a screen and which kind of calmed me down, I was, as you can imagine, very adrenalized by what had gone on that day [(37–41)]. The key statement here is ‘I’d managed to get the memories out of my head and onto a screen’. Rachel offers this description of the activity of telling her story to the other users of the service. She did this by making a series of posts, responding to other posts and answering queries. The activity generated a narrative organisation for her recent distressing experiences. This framework was collaboratively developed in so far as it emerged from the interaction among the users of Urban75. But we might observe that the ordering of the recent past in the contributions to the message board differed in kind to the memories ‘in her head’. The effort to communicate her experiences in this collaborative electronic setting resulted in a reframing of personal memory. As a tool for memory, the Urban75 messages extended and translated Rachel’s experiences and became in themselves part of ‘her memory’ of the events. 434

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Susan Harrison engaged with the media coverage of 7/7 later, following her immediate recovery. One image in particular attracted her: They released a picture of inside my train and that, I was actually fascinated with that picture, I’ve a copy of it, because I was trying to work out where I was in that train, er, and trying to … to figure our, you know, memories, trying to install some memories and were the things I was thinking real and … clearly it didn’t come from the picture [(122–126)]. Following the blast, Susan had been trapped in the wreckage of the Jubilee line underground train. During this time, she had assessed her own injuries, and using her medical training had made a tourniquet for her severely injured leg. During the 2010 inquest into the bombings, Susan described reassuring a fellow passenger, Shelly Mather, who was trapped beneath her and unfortunately later died from her injuries. Such intense and distressing experiences in the dark of the tunnel would be clearly disorienting. Susan used the picture as a way of organising her experiences. She comments on looking at the photograph in order to place her experiences spatially – ‘work out where I was on the train’. The layout of the wrecked train in the image serves as a device to establish the chronology of what happened: here is where she sat, there is where the bomber must have been, that piece of floor is where she was thrown and then trapped, over there is where the paramedics entered the train and ultimately found her. The image does a particular kind of mnemonic work for Susan. On the one hand, it works as a piece of evidence against which she can ‘test’ what she remembers – ‘were the things I was thinking real’. This was a particular concern of Susan’s because in her initial interviews with police officers investigating the bombings, Susan had provided a description of the bomber as an ‘Asian chap carrying a rucksack’ (136), who was actually a fellow passenger (Germaine Lindsay was Afro-Caribbean). On the other hand, the image provides a way for Susan to rehearse and reorganise what she recalls, using the train layout as a map in which she can ‘install some memories’. As with Rachel North, the process of ‘externalising’ memory, of placing experience in a framework that emerges from an outside source (i.e. the Urban75 message board, an image published by news media), appears important in making sense of what happened. This process was also performed collectively by groups of survivors. Rachel North co-founded a support group, Kings Cross United, which brought together survivors of the Jubilee line bombing.5 During their meetings, they used a drawn image of the train as tool to support their exchange of stories: We had a book, which I drew a kind of crap diagram of the train, layout in it, so people wrote their names where they remembered themselves as having been, which, and we kept taking the book back to every meeting so people would kind of plot themselves and then that way they would be able to work out clusters of where they are, so there were, sometimes people would come in and you’d get these incredibly emotional, oh my God, you’re the woman who da, da, da, you know, you’re the one who said you were going to a job interview and we all said, oh you should go, you’ll get the sympathy vote [(Rachel North 137–143)]. The diagram of the train served as a tool to co-ordinate the different stories told by the survivors. By writing themselves into the diagram, the group members were able to build collective narratives of the bombing, such as the one Rachel tells above of the woman who 435

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was travelling to a job interview. The tool provided a means for the otherwise disconnected individual experiences to be fitted together to assemble cohesive stories. In both of the previous examples, the spatial layout of the train provided a framework around which recollections could coalesce and be stabilised. For John Tulloch, a similar mnemonic work was performed by three pieces of luggage. John was travelling on the westbound Circle line train towards Paddington when Mohammad Sidique Khan, who was seated next to him, detonated his device as the train pulled out of Edgware Road station. The three large cases that John was carrying absorbed the blast sufficiently to protect him from major injury. These cases have become central to his narrative of the event, acting almost as talismans of his good fortune in surviving despite being so close to the bomb. However, he describes an episode that occurred at a memorial event at Edgware Road on the one-year anniversary. A fellow survivor approached him, having recognised John from his media appearances. The survivor told him that he had attempted to help some of the injured in the carriage, in particular a seriously injured man who had lost his lower limbs in the blast. But he was unable to reach the man because John’s cases blocked his way – ‘He said, erm, “I didn’t see you” and he said “I know I saw what I now know to have been your bloody cases”’ (1193). This comment turned around the significance of the cases: Ok, so my bags had always been part of a really positive narrative, a part of my good luck story, in my book, everywhere. Ok, now what this guy said was I now know to have been your bloody bags, and it was worse than that, because, and he wasn’t being unpleasant, er … what had happened, he’d found a man, grievously injured, he’d had the bottom half of his body blown off, erm … he couldn’t get at him properly because of my bags, that’s how he said it … so now my bags were in this horror story, because the people who were trying to help him couldn’t help him as much [( John Tulloch 1210–1221)]. The passenger who told this story had seen John on television giving his ‘really positive narrative’ about his bags. He had then realised that these same ‘bloody bags’ had formed an obstacle in the carriage. The two narratives – one positive, the other a ‘horror story’ – intersect around the bags that simultaneously feature in both. John is then confronted with a very different version of events that he is obligated to engage with in his recollections of 7/7. The three objects that we have discussed – the photograph, the diagram and the cases – play significant meditational roles in the recollections of the survivors. They act initially as forms of evidence, material features of the event that assist in the effort to recall what happened. But they also provide an external spatial framework in which to develop narrative coherence around confusing and distressing experiences, accompanied by recollections of intense and disorienting sensations in the near darkness of the tunnels. Finally, they act as communicative tools that hold together different narratives – sometimes neatly, and sometimes, as with the story of John’s cases, in tension – and make it possible to build collective accounts of surviving the bombs.

Embodied connections Clearly all experience, and therefore recollected experience, is in some sense embodied, meaning that it is imbued with complex sensory and affective components. However, these embodied aspects of memory can be minimised or fall out of narratives of past events, particularly when these stories are tied to broader historical accounts. For the 7/7 survivors, the opposite appears to be the case. Bodies are central to their recollections. For Susan Harrison, 436

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the loss of her leg serves as a permanent marker of the bombings. But even for those who have not been left with life-changing physical injuries, the body acts as a particular locus of remembering. Here John Tulloch recalls an episode that occurred several months after 7/7: I came out of the first few days of that, doing that, into my garden about, in Australia, about 5 in the evening, and it was drought, it was hot and I’d bought a little native tree and I was going to put it in the ground and the spade wouldn’t even get into the soil and I thought what am I doing, what am I doing? I mean, this is ridiculous. But then I looked down at the foot and it’s on the blade of the spade, and I say, hey, I’ve got legs [(173–177)]. Legs and feet have a particular significance for John because of his memories of seeing the severely injured passenger who lost his lower limbs on the Circle line train carriage. Here, the sudden realisation that his injuries could have been far worse interrupts a moment in the garden. The futility of his efforts to plant the tree in the hard, water-starved soil is overtaken by the overwhelming sensation of having a whole body. In this recollection, the body acts as an anchor to memory. The physical organisation of limbs and torso provide a synecdochal link to the bombings. John moves in his recollection from the presence of his foot to the broken bodies of some of his fellow passengers and the carnage of the blast itself. The body is here a living conduit of memory. The 7/7 Bombings mark the bodies of survivors, literally (in Susan’s case), symbolically (in the presence/absence of feet in John’s recollection) and affectively. We can see the latter in a passage from Rachel North’s book, Out of the Tunnel, in which she describes the moments after the explosion in the following way: Sharp grit in my mouth. Choking, lung-filling dust. It was no longer air that I breathed but tiny shards of glass, and thick heavy dust and smoke. Like changing a vacuum cleaner bag and pushing your face into the open dust bag and taking deep breaths. It made my tongue swell and crack and dry out like leather. I never covered my mouth because I had nothing to cover it with, and there didn’t seem any point.… There was an acrid smell of chemicals and burning rubber and burning hair. It filled my nose. It took over the memory of every smell I remembered and wiped it out [(North 2007: 38)]. The smell and taste of the explosion left many survivors with an indelible sensory impression of the immediate damage caused by the bomb. It also left a strong legitimate suspicion that breathing the toxic fumes could have resulted in further ‘hidden’ effects on their health. These concerns were shared in exchanges of electronic messages between survivors: Somebody would write how’s everybody doing today, I’m feeling a bit freaked out, I don’t like Thursdays, anybody else having this, and someone goes yeah I feel weirder on Thursdays too, and someone else I’ve got a cough, anyone else got a cough … yes, I’m smoking loads at the moment but I wonder if it’s related to the smoke that we breathed in the tunnel, Oh God, that’s really worried me [(Rachel North 68–72)]. In this description, the survivors appear to be in a state of hyper-vigilance, monitoring feelings and sensations. Each ‘weird’ feeling is referenced directly to the bombing, taken as a sign that links back to 7/7. For example, physical sensations, such as developing a cough or feeling the need to smoke more, are seized upon as possible symptoms of an undiagnosed illness caused by inhaling smoke in the tunnel. The body here is marked both visibly and invisibly by 437

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the bombings. Survivors carry forward an embodied connection to 7/7 in the affective work they do with one another, such as discussing their anxieties about particular sensations. The body is the means through which they collectively constitute their ongoing, shared relationship to the bombings. This is apparent in the discussion of the effects of noisy celebrations: Lots of people noticed that fireworks, and in London, you get fireworks like a whole week, because you get, you know, Diwali and Hindu festivals, then you get the kids who’ll buy the fireworks and then let them off in the parks for a laugh, there is a constant bang, bang, bang, erm … and that really got people psyched up, as did the Buncefield disaster, the people, some people lived in Hemel Hempstead and they really didn’t like that all, when there was a big bang and the cloud of smoke went up … and everybody … the great charm of it was everybody went aha, I know exactly what you mean [(Rachel North 187–193)]. We tend to think of sensation as a private, personal event that is subjectively experienced in a unique way by each individual. Here, sensation operates in a very different way. The sound of fireworks immediately reminds survivors of the blast. They physically respond to the noise in a way that places them back in the moments following the explosion, which leaves them distressed or ‘psyched up’. But this reaction also serves as a point of mutual recognition. As Rachel describes it, the ‘great charm’ of the exchange of messages was in allowing s­urvivors to immediately recognise and accredit the physical sensations reported by others – ‘I know exactly what you mean’. Relationships between survivors are built here through a felt sense of shared ongoing experience along with a running commentary on feelings and sensations. This is a web of collectively shared embodied experiences that connects survivors to one another. There is a further ethical dimension to these embodied connections. As noted earlier, a division between survivors and relatives of the 52 deceased victims emerged in the course of commemorative activities in the months and years after 2005. In the same way that John Tulloch described an accommodation between his story and those of relatives, so Susan Harrison comments on feeling the need to not speak publically of some details of what happened in the tunnel: If someone asks me to describe something in particular about the tube and I would say that, you know, it was messy and it was nasty, but I wouldn’t say oh, and this person’s arm was hanging off as they were hanging half out of the tube, it’s just not necessary and that person’s got a family, you know, whoever they are, or potentially whatever, do you know what I mean? So … and I don’t think we need to necessarily … people need to know it was horrific and people need to know, but unless you were there I don’t think you can experience and I that that’s [(511–517)]. Susan has given public accounts of what happened on the Jubilee line train. She also gave testimony in the 2010 inquest, where she spoke of her conversations with Shelly Mather whilst both were trapped, and she was commended by the presiding judge, Lady Justice Hallett, for offering ‘great comfort’ to the relatives by telling of how she sought to reassure Shelly and how neither were in any pain. But Susan here reflects on the potential negative effects of speaking about the horrors inside the carriage. She prefers to use the somewhat abstract language of ‘messiness’ and ‘nastiness’ rather than provide graphic details on the grounds that relatives would then be forced to dwell on these images in their commemorative efforts 438

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at reconstructing what happened – ‘that person’s got a family, you know, whoever they are’. There is then a tension between providing a veridical account of the results of the bombers’ actions (which is what Susan feels is often demanded of her by the media) and giving relatives access to details that would be extremely distressing and difficult to manage. If bodies connect together survivors, they can also connect together relatives with the dead. But whilst the connection amongst survivors is productive, because of their shared experience, it would not be so for relatives, who would be thrust into the position of helpless witness to the suffering of their loved ones. The embodied aspects of memory work at numerous different levels. They give survivors an intense personal connection to the event that is effectively ‘written’ across their body. This ‘writing’ is partly legible and partly illegible, such as with the signs like the coughing that provoke such anxiety. It is also a kind of writing that can be shared and that can serve as the basis for making connections with others who share the experience. The power these embodied connections to 7/7 may potentially have on others creates ethical dilemmas. Talking about everything that was seen on the carriages may accentuate rather than ameliorate the distress of relatives.

The end of the story The stories that survivors tell of 7/7 demonstrate powerfully that memories of significant public events are never entirely personal. Over time, personal memories become collectively shaped as they accommodate and respond to both the memories of others and to broader narrative frameworks. The memories become populated and engraved with things – images, diagrams, objects. They are woven around intense embodied connections, in which survivors connect with one another and the event itself through sensations and feelings. This does not, of course, make these stories any less credible. On the contrary, the shaping of the stories and the blurring of the personal/collective distinction is precisely what makes these stories such valuable testimonies to the ongoing commemorative work around the 7/7 Bombings. But does such work ever come to an end? Is it really possible for any of the survivors to escape the long shadow that 7/7 casts on their life after they exited the tunnels? Will any of them be allowed to fully disconnect themselves from the formal, national narratives that have attempted to recruit their experiences? It is still, perhaps, too soon to say. But all three survivors have ref lected on and envisaged what form that ‘end’ to their storytelling might take. Susan Harrison offers the following: I think you get to the point, like I said, where you’re quite bored by your own story (laughs) and erm, maybe there comes a time in that point when you think, do you know what, actually this is getting boring [(760–762)]. Susan here highlights the element of repetition that has crept into telling her story: there are only so many times you can tell your story before you become ‘bored’ by it. She projects forward to a time in which, despite the ‘good reasons’ she has for recounting her experiences in her charity work, she may simply have grown tired of doing so. For John Tulloch, the way out has been to refuse a straightforward story of victimhood: I’ve tried to draw Mohammad Sidique Khan into my story and I actually say in one of the better interviews that in terms of representation, there’s not so much difference 439

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between the way the newspapers, certain newspapers, er, represent me and him, even though one’s a good guy and one’s a bad guy, there were both locked into this kind of, one dimensional, he is a victim, he is, er … crazed killer [(194–197)]. The dominant media frame for 7/7 is one in which misguided young men become radicalised by extremist ideology and commit a horrific act of indiscriminate terror. But John has attempted to tell a different story. If he is a more than just a simple victim, if 7/7 does not define him as a person, then so too there must be more to Mohammad Sidique Khan than being a ‘crazed killer’. John conducted a televised interview with young people in Beeston, Leeds, where Khan had worked as a school classroom assistant. He discovered what, for him, was a different story of Khan, one that was more complex and nuanced than the dominant narrative. However, he also notes that it was Khan himself who facilitated a ‘one-dimensional’ story through his actions on 7/7. Drawing Khan into his own story is then a means for John to escape his own limited definition by the media and to begin to escape the commemorative pull of the bombings. Rachel North similarly has found a way out in rejecting the narrative of extremism and victimhood: You know, 9/11 became a carte blanche for the Republican administration to go where the hell they liked, just by waving themselves, you know, wrapping them round f lags, you know, I think that’s really quite distasteful and I would be happier if … if 7/7 became like the Kings Cross fire disaster, you know, it was, you know, a tragic event that people who were directly involved feel sad and sorry about and, erm … that becomes part of the fabric of the city. You know, people don’t remember the IRA bombings, or … I just missed the, erm … the bombings at the, erm, Admiral Duncan by about 3 minutes, erm … so when I know it’s the anniversary I always feel that, you know erm … I spare a thought for everybody, but then I just go about my day … and I think, I hope that eventually 7/7 will become like that as well, I hope so [(553–561)]. Rachel lists here a series of tragedies that occurred in recent times in London (a fire at Kings Cross underground station; the bombing of the bar, The Admiral Duncan, at the centre of London’s gay community by a neo-Nazi militant; the bombing campaigns by the Provisional Irish Republican Army in the 1970s and 1990s, which together injured and killed more people than on 7/7). For her, the way to disconnect 7/7 from the ‘War on Terror’ is to place it alongside these other events, to remove its special significance. She talks of wanting 7/7 to ‘become part of the fabric of the city’. It ought to become part of the rich, and at times tragic, history of London, an object of memory for ‘people who were directly involved’ but no more than one piece in the social and historical landscape. By extension, we have to imagine that Rachel envisages a similar future for herself. Very rarely is the work of commemoration performed on an entirely individual basis. It is a mnemonic labour that is divided up and distributed across communities. As such, to participate, either through choice or not, in this labour is to find that one’s memories are never fully one’s own. Personal experiences become collected and connected to those of others, through ties of bodies, words, images and objects. Lives become shaped by the living conduit they supply to the object of memory. And whilst we can understand the personal and collective importance of keeping that connection going, we can also fully empathise with the desire for it to gradually unhook and disappear, for the sake of the living.

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Notes  1  There is evidence to suggest that the bombings were in fact planned for 6th July, when they would have coincided directly with the planned announcement.  2  This Government-led proposal was defeated, with an increase to 28 days introduced, although this was reduced back to 14 days in 2011.  3  The two minutes of silence is significant. This number of minutes (rather than one or three) is associated with the annual Remembrance Day 11th November commemoration of the First and Second World Wars. A two-minute silence is, therefore, usually a ‘war silence’ (see Brown 2012).  4  The numbers at the end of each quotation refer to the line numbers in the original transcription of each interview.  5  The use of Kings Cross rather than Russell Square – the two underground stations that the southbound Jubilee train was travelling between when the blast happened – is important. Due to the position of the bomb in the lead carriage of the train and the subsequent wreckage, many of the less severely injured exited the train at Kings Cross, whilst those with major injuries (including Susan Harrison) were taken through the tunnels to Russell Square. The two stations, therefore, have very different memorial significance for these two groups of survivors.

References Allen, M. (2015) The labour of memory: memorial culture and 7/7. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Allen, M. & Brown, S. D. (2011) Embodiment and living memorials: The affective labour of remembering the 2005 London bombings. Memory Studies, 4(3), 312–327. Assmann, A. (2011) Cultural memory and western civilization: functions, media, archives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Assmann, J. (2011) Cultural memory and early civilization: writing, remembrance and political imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, S. D. (2012) Two minutes of silence: Social technologies of public commemoration. Theory & Psychology, 22(2), 234–252. Hirsch, M. (1997) Family frames: photography, narrative and postmemory. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Hoskins, A. (2011) 7/7 and connective memory: Interactional trajectories of remembering in post-scarcity culture. Memory Studies, 4(3), 269–280. Lorenzo-Dus, N. & Bryan, A. (2011) Dynamics of memory: Commemorating the 2005 London bombings in British television news. Memory Studies, 4(3), 281–297. Middleton, D. & Brown, S. D. (2005) The social psychology of experience: studies in remembering and forgetting. London: Sage. North, R. (2007) Out of the tunnel. London: The Friday Project. Reading, A. (2011) The London bombings: Mobile witnessing, mortal bodies and globital time. Memory Studies, 4(3), 298–311. Sutton, J. (2008) Between individual and collective memory: Coordination, interaction, distribution. Social Research 75(1), 23–48. Sutton, J., Harris, C. B., Keil, P. G. & Barnier, A. J. (2010) The psychology of memory, extended cognition and socially distributed remembering. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 9(4), 521–560.

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Part VI

Body and ecosystems

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34 When memory goes awry Maria I. Medved and Jens Brockmeier

Memory is overrated. This might not be the most plausible claim with which to begin a chapter in a handbook of memory. But we hope it will become more plausible as our argument develops, namely: that we can significantly enhance our understanding of memory and remembering if we explore what happens when people have troubles remembering. We want to point out that many people, though suffering from so-called memory disorders, are amazingly resilient and inventive in coping with their predicament. Even if their memory goes awry, humans remain agentive and meaning-making subjects. We first present a broad overview of the field of memory disorders, a field that seems to be without limits. We heed particular attention to the conceptions of memory that underlie many definitions and descriptions of such disorders. These conceptions are rarely explicitly examined, let alone problematized. Yet problematized they should be because, as we point out, they can essentially distort and narrow our understanding and treatment of the disorders at stake. In our discussion we concentrate on autobiographical memories since they are traditionally considered to be central for people’s sense of self and identity. It is this view, however, that we want to question. To explain why we think it important to conceive of humans’ agency and identity in a broader frame than that of autobiographical memory, we look at three studies in the last part of this essay that investigate different strategies of how individuals with neurological changes strive to come to terms with their memory loss. These studies undergird our claim that if we want to understand individuals whose memory has gone awry it is central to get a sense of their agency, their being in the world as active and interactive subjects, rather than viewing them as cases of generically defined “memory disorders.” Differently put, the approach we suggest does not primarily focus on an isolated individual and his or her neurophysiological identified memory disorder but tries to understand the person and his or her strategies to give meaning to one’s being in the world, even and particularly under challenging circumstances. What is privileged in this way are not the problems but the strengths and strategies of the person dealing with them.

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Memory and its troubles Everybody seems to have a precise idea of what memory is. Moreover, everybody seems to have an idea of what kinds of problems might result from memory difficulties. Professionals, whether clinical or academic, and laypersons alike refer to memory, memories, and remembering processes – all terms that are used more or less interchangeably – as if they were self-evident concepts: concepts, that is to say, that relate to naturally given entities, capacities, or neuronal systems with clearly defined functions and, by extension, dysfunctions. Furthermore, at least initially, it appears obvious what sorts of memories or “memory systems” are affected (for example, due to an accident, a stroke, or a disease) and how this might relate to problems in everyday life. Many of these definitions and depictions, however, imply a more fundamental idea of memory and memory disorders that, on closer scrutiny, proves to be highly problematic. We want to start by outlining why traditional constructions of memory disorders are questionable, especially in light of a different, alternative understanding of memory. The essence of this alternative understanding is, as already indicated, that it does not concentrate on isolated neurological or psychological operations, functions, processes, or systems (and their “disorders”) but draws attention to human beings, their actions, lives, and subjectivity. In doing so it builds on a tradition of research and clinical practice that has developed at a critical distance from the mainstream and includes such figures as Alexander Luria, Kurt Goldstein, and Oliver Sacks. What is foregrounded in this tradition are not neurological disorders and impairments but people as agentive social and cultural subjects, as individuals who remember and forget. Traditionally, memory is comprised of an infinite assortment of fragmented subdivisions and subsections, mainly arranged according to assumed “memory systems” that are seen as combining neuronal and cognitive processes. Over the last three decades, the number of such systems, and the fragmentation that has come in tandem with them, has constantly increased. This has reached a point at which even established researchers of memory have become puzzled: “Are there 256 types of memory?” Tulving (2007) asked ironically. One objective of these categorical distinctions (and related experimental efforts) is to isolate “pure” cognitive or neuronal processes located in the individual brain. Despite the skepticism of Tulving and others, the systems approach has become the uncontested model of neurocognitive memory research, a model which patently does not leave any space for the remembering and forgetting of the person, with or without a memory disorder. Nor does it allow for any ideas of memory and remembering that go beyond the individual brain, let alone the individual. To elucidate this approach and its limitations, let us consider some types of memory problems or “symptoms” and the way they are commonly categorized. People can have trouble remembering all kinds of things. This might be a face (prosopagnosia), the location of an object (spatial memory), one’s mirror image (depersonalization), object recognition based on touch (astereognosis), general material like where one is born (semantic memory), and specific events one has experienced (episodic memory). What is more, individuals can have memories for events of which they are not conscious (implicit or unconscious memory), remember events that never happened (confabulation), attribute memories to wrong sources (misattribution), fail to remember to do things in the future like post a letter (prospective memory), lose memories of events occurring prior to a physical or psychological trauma (retrograde amnesia), and fail to remember new events after a trauma (anterograde amnesia). And although memory disorders are typically seen as entailing trouble remembering, people can also have difficulty forgetting, namely, they seem to have too strong a memory (hypermnesia). 446

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In contrast to depictions in film and literature – take, for example, the character Leonard Shelby in Christopher Nolan’s f ilm Memento who suffers from total amnesia – it is exceedingly rare that a person suddenly loses all of his or her capacity to remember prior autobiographical memories and form new ones (we discuss one such case in the last part of this chapter). These exceptional individuals are also often the topic of research articles, chapters, and academic books. More typically, however, loss of prior memories and the inability to remember new experiences occurs along a continuum, with individuals retaining some memories and remembering capacities, losing others. Of course, this does not rule out that remembering can progressively deteriorate over time, as in people suffering from dementia. Typically memory functions and mnemonic processes are subdivided along the lines of putatively neurocognitively or biologically given entities or systems, as if “memory” presented itself as a natural kind, fragmented into a multitude of categories and subcategories. This has led to one thread of criticism regarding the status of these memory distinctions, because they seem to be only observable or identifiable within the context of specific research settings and agendas, including experimental laboratory conditions and the use of technologies like functional magnetic resonance imaging or positron emission tomography. From a clinical point of view it is in fact extraordinarily uncommon that an individual has just one singular memory problem. It rather is almost always the case that multiple cognitive capacities are compromised at the same time (e.g., executive functioning abilities such as organizing, planning, and language use). On top of this, conceptual and theoretical memory differentiations and the experimental settings to nail them down are rarely developed from the study of real-life individuals with memory troubles, specifically people who live in everyday social and cultural environments in which they of course would use language and other forms of interaction to talk about and deal with their problems. Genuine sociocultural memory environments are, however, per definition, not part of the “pure memory” of memory research; nor are “variables” such as language, social interaction, agency, and emotion.

The neuroscience turn What are called memory disorders and dysfunctions are traditionally separated according to their presumed etiology, whether the etiology draws on biological/neurological or psychiatric/ mental findings. In the first case, these can be neurodegenerative diseases, acquired brain injuries, or developmental disabilities; in the latter case, these are conceived of as dissociative identity disorders or post-traumatic stress disorders among others. This separation reflects academic discipline boundaries (within medicine, e.g., between neurology and psychiatry) that emerged for historical and institutional reasons, rather than from contemporary clinical concerns or the comprehensive study of memory or memory practices (Hacking, 1995). Even if this split might initially look as if it mirrors differing medical specialties, today the dominant way memory disorders are conceptualized, researched, and clinically understood across both fields is almost exclusively founded on biology – ref lecting, for better or for worse, an erosion of the separation of mind and brain. The brain focus is rigorously ref lected in the 2013 release by the American Psychiatric Association of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5), often referred to as the bible of psychiatric disorders in North America. The main goal of the DSM-5 is to ref lect “advances in neuroscience,” even though it is generally accepted that biological markers cannot reliably substantiate diagnostic or symptomatic criteria or categories of memory dysfunction or, for that matter, other disorders. 447

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According to a DSM-guided approach, if a somewhat atypical behavior is identified, there will be a search for a biological marker. In her recent book, Margaret Lock (2013) forcefully argues that this orientation has derailed progress in research on Alzheimer’s disease, neglecting persons and the environments in which they live. She draws on studies demonstrating that even if a certain biological marker is found, it is not necessarily predictive of behavior associated with Alzheimer’s disease; and, what is more, individuals without biological markers can demonstrate symptoms of the disease as well. An additional aspect to keep in mind here is that the identification of confirmatory physical signs or assumed evidence of biological causation is not value-free; rather it ref lects normative social and cultural expectations regarding memory and “memory values” (Danziger, 2008). The same holds true for psychological functioning and the underlying academic and societal value system that defines them. There are a number of well-investigated historical examples of memory problems or symptoms that people were susceptible to developing or, at least, were often diagnosed with within a certain period that clearly echo the cultural assumptions and values of that period. In latenineteenth-century France, there was a rapid surge in the incidence of men reportedly suffering from “mad travelling,” a sort of fugue. As described by Hacking (1998), symptoms of this syndrome involved compulsive walking, sometimes over distances as far as from Paris to Moscow, and inability to recall one’s former life. “Mad travelers” would suddenly wake up as if from a dream, astonished to find themselves hundreds of kilometers from home with no memory of their travels unless, amazingly enough, they were hypnotized. At the time – the golden age of hypnotism – the medical community was happy to recognize mad travelling. The diagnosis had a high professional status. Today, as clinical and public acceptance of hypnosis is rather low, cases of mad travelling are not diagnosed anymore; in fact, they would only be acceptable if neurobiological markers would be found to substantiate them as cases of “real” memory disorders. In psychology, the move from the mental mind to the physical brain has been fueled by the advent of neuroimaging and the claim that it provides direct access to the complexities of brain functioning. In psychiatry, the increasing reliance on psychotropic medications is an additional factor. The mind, in this view, has become an exclusive product – if not side-effect – of the brain, although it is not the brain but the person living in the midst of a socio-cultural world who gives meaning to his or her mind and brain, including to memories or lack thereof. This dimension of meaning-making, crucial for the understanding of human experience and agency, has been completely lost in the neurobiological turn (see also Brockmeier, 2014; Medved & Brockmeier, 2010; Roger & Medved, 2010). The proliferating tendency towards biological molecularization in the “memory sciences” and the professions whose task it is to work directly with individuals with memory problems and their families, friends, and communities runs counter to new movements that are taking place in other disciplines. These movements have opened to more dynamic, post-archival visions of remembering as well as enacted, embodied, and social memory practices. But only very little of this steadily expanding field of collective and cultural memory studies (illustrated, not least, by this handbook) has made its way into the clinical and academic field of “memory disorders,” a field that has remained obdurately resistant to other possibilities of understanding remembering and forgetting – with the exception of the alternative tradition that we have mentioned.

The eternal sinner Memory problems seem to be ubiquitous. It is difficult to think of a psychiatric or neurological problem that comes without them: everything from depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic 448

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stress disorder to epilepsy, migraines, and sleep apnea has them. This also goes for illnesses that are not considered neurological or psychiatric in nature, such as coronary heart disease, pulmonary lung disease, or any disease, injury, and disorder involving the experience of pain. There are also many medical interventions that cause impaired memory functioning, whether short-term (e.g., due to medication side-effects) or long-term (e.g., due to radiation and chemotherapies). Many specific stages and states of life are associated with memory problems. Already Freud attributed what he called infantile amnesia to infancy. Likewise, pregnancy, menopause, and “normal” aging have been linked to changes – that is, problems – in memory. The list goes on, extending to the full spectrum of “healthy” remembering. For Schacter (2001), memory regularly violates the rules according to which it is supposed to operate. It continuously commits “sins,” as Schacter puts it. The results are distorted, blocked, transient, misattributed, biased, and otherwise inaccurate and inconsistent memories (Schacter). What is more, with the emergence of social, collective, and cultural memory studies, categories of individual disorders have been applied to communities and entire societies, reappearing in terms like repression, falsification, and “cultural amnesia” ( James, 2007), to mention a few examples. All of the above makes it difficult, if not impossible, to draw a borderline between ordered or disordered remembering. Is this to say that all remembering tends to be tainted with memory disorders? That human memory (whatever is meant by this noun) is a misconstruction? In our work, we have come to a different conclusion. That so many neurological, psychiatric, medical frameworks and even “normal” neurocognitive research in psychology and socio-cultural memory studies revolve around memory disorders ref lects, we believe, a different and more fundamental problem – not one of remembering but of the way it is conceptualized and how this conceptualization is normatively charged. As already noted, this conceptualization is generally not problematized. Instead it is taken to represent a physically given entity, capacity, or system (or a number of systems) – a natural kind – that is localized in the individual brain. This is ref lected in the language of memory “mechanisms” underlying all forms and practices of remembering and forgetting. Widespread in the community of memory researchers, it seems to be immune to criticism. What then is the criticism? One strand, for example, contends that the concept of mechanism, implemented from the semantics of physical mechanics to that of memory research, reduces, in equal measure, the complex biological, psychological, and socio-cultural realities of remembering and forgetting. Another line of criticism points out that the focus on dysfunctional remembering first of all ref lects the great importance placed on smooth memory “performance” in Western cultures. Unproblematic and efficient remembering usually means accurate and “truthful” recollection of information. Danziger (2008) has argued that with the rise of Western industrialism, economy, and bureaucracy this particular function has been excessively overvalued both in public life and scientific research. This, we suggest, appears especially true in the health sciences and professions. While accurate and truthful recollection of material may be important in some specific functional areas of life (from passwords to criminal courts), it represents only one form and function of remembering – one among many functions. And even this function is far too narrowly captured by the metaphor of memory as an archive, a personal storage where information is “encoded” and “stored” and from where it is again “retrieved” or “recalled” – although it is precisely this archival idea that has for long shaped the way we have imagined human memory (cf. Brockmeier, 2015). The idea of memory as a storage of the past is also ref lected in one of the earliest and most resilient findings of the neuroscience of memory, that of the engram (cf. Rose, 2010). The engram has been considered to be a discrete, well-defined long-term memory trace 449

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in the brain. Similarly, one of the earliest modern mind theorists, Freud, hypothesized that distressing autobiographical memories are pushed into unconsciousness, where they then reside waiting to be brought back into consciousness. Freud’s idea of psychoanalysis was inf luenced by the idea of an archeological digging that unearthed hidden objects from deep layers of one’s unconsciousness. The storage hypothesis was put on trial in the 1980s, with a number of high profile cases involving allegations of childhood sexual abuse that made their way through the courts and the media. These allegations were based on so-called recovered memories that allegedly arose during the course of therapy. One important insight brought to the fore by the discussions on “false memory syndrome” was that there is no such thing as an accurate memory that, like a photographic snapshot, captures an original event laying in waiting somewhere in an inner storeroom (i.e., neurobiologically identifiable in an neuronal engram). One consequence suggested by these studies is to break with the archival tradition of thought and understand remembering and forgetting as a fundamentally constructive, interpretive, and creative process. Although this suggestion has been supported by many other memory studies in the natural and social sciences and the humanities, much neuroscientific research and clinical work continues to be based on the assumption that memory at its heart is – or at least is supposed to be – an accurate and reliable machine operated by underlying mechanisms whose content, true memories, can be distilled in their pure cognitive state, if only the experimental (and conceptual) setting is good enough. This setting also makes sure that things like interpretation, emotion, evaluation, and humans’ social nature do not contaminate the purity of memories – or, perhaps more precisely, of memory categories. According to this rationale, ultimately it is the experimental setting that helps memory resist the eternal temptation to sin. A further implication is that if the main function of human remembering is the (re-)production of clear, accurate, and authentic memories that are stored in a durable archive of past experience, then hypermnesia, the inability to forget, should represent the peak of memory functioning. And perhaps it is, at least on the terms specified. However, living a life without remembering’s nemesis, forgetting, is a life robbed of meaning. In his book, The Mnemonist, Luria (1987) describes how his patient Solomon Shereskevshy struggled with his hypermnesia, endlessly wrestling with his interminable stream of memories. Memories that all seem equally meaningful are, in the end, equally meaningless. Although Shereskevshy continuously attempts to sift and organize his memories, he remains without an orientation in life and, often enough, his hyper-efficient memory drives him to existential despair. Nonetheless, the focus on autonomous, accurate, voluminous recollection continues to shape the way memory is clinically measured and diagnosed. Consider the Wechsler Memory Scale, one of the most commonly used instruments for the (clinical and experimental) assessment of memory. In this pencil and paper test, individuals are asked to remember word pairs, objects, faces, picture scenes, geometric drawings, and so forth. The proportion of material accurately recalled over the short- (immediate) and long- (about 20 minutes) term, as well as recognition in certain subtests, is then calculated to get someone’s “MQ,” his or her memory quotient, which is a construct analogous to the IQ, the intelligence quotient. The content of the material one is asked to remember in this and other tests has no connection to one’s life; it is intentionally kept meaningless. This approach ref lects the experimental tradition of Ebbinghaus, the “father” of modern psychological memory experimentation, which aims to isolate and quantitatively measure pure memory. This tradition has dominated memory psychology, and so has the conviction that using such material is the best way to isolate pure “memory capacities.” It is true that an instrument like the Autobiographical Memory 450

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Questionnaire (or its updated version the Survey of Autobiographical Memory) – which is, however, less used than the Wechsler Memory Scale – has people report on memories from different periods of their life; it thus seems more grounded in a person’s life reality, because it uses, for example, memories from childhood, adolescence, and so forth. Yet even though the content may be more relevant, the actual activity of recollection is not because individuals are asked to recollect autobiographical memories out of thin air, without any real-life context, and then tell the story without any participation from the listener/assessor. In this way memory is again reduced to an abstract individualist operation or faculty. It excludes what Luria (1976) has called a person’s “lived reality”: the meaningful psychological, social, and cultural embeddedness of remembering practices. Harking back to William Stern’s (1938) critique of diagnostic tests as providing only an unreliable “momentary snapshot of the performance capabilities of the examinee,” Sabat (2010) has pointed out that neuropsychological test profiles are created under highly artificial conditions that do not have much in common with people’s agentive nature and their everyday abilities to interact, think, and plan. They typically focus on recalling information that is isolated, decontextualized from the buzz – and the complexity – of a person’s life world. Moreover, being confronted with a clinical testing situation whose outcome can have serious consequences for one’s life is, for many people, downright anxiety provoking which, as has often been shown, in and of itself diminishes one’s remembering performance. Isolating people and curtailing conversational interaction and acts of co-narrating to fit clinical assessment requirements – that is, positioning human beings as clinical objects – unavoidably highlights (and, in fact, even contributes to) impairment and disorder, not only of memory.

Living a life without memories Autobiographical memory holds a special place in Western cultures. As a conceptual construct, it originated with the belief that autobiographical memories are needed for individuals to establish their identity as self-conscious, unitary, and continuous in time, a view first paradigmatically formulated by John Locke. Later, with the emergence of scientific and clinical memory disciplines, it became one their basic assumptions. Dieguez and Annoni (2013) point out that literary fiction and non-fiction are saturated with stories of amnesia, reflecting a basic fear about losing our identity and, as a consequence, being at the mercy of others. This cultural background helps us understand the tremendous emphasis placed on investigating remembering and memory functioning. Autobiographical remembering in modern times, and even more in late or post-modern times, is identity labor. It allows us – but also expects from us and, in fact, compels us – to anchor ourselves in a differentiated life history and, by using established models of autobiographical narrative, bind ourselves into the cultural worlds in which we live. This might explain why modern societies are especially harsh towards individuals suspected of having autobiographical memory troubles, arguably harsher than towards people simply forgetting things in terms of semantic or impersonal episodic memory.1 Persons who have their autobiographical memories assessed to be “fragmented,” “vague,” “inconsistent,” or even “confabulatory” or “false” not only have their recollections and viewpoints dismissed, but also their right to self-presentation and moral self-positioning. The underlying assumption here is that individuals who have difficulty remembering their own past are unable to define a sense of self or be agentic subjects. Therefore, as critically observed by Lindemann (2014), they do not need to (or even cannot) be given the right to full personhood, including the right to decide what they may or may not do. 451

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The argument that we advance does not share this assumption. On the contrary, it deemphasizes the crucial identity-constitutive role ascribed to autobiographical memory by suggesting a view of self and identity that draws on resources of agency and meaning construction that reach beyond the autobiographical perspective (Brockmeier, 2014). By the same token, it deemphasizes the identity-threatening significance traditionally associated with serious memory impairments. We suggest a wider and more differentiated understanding of autobiographical remembering. Remembering one’s past experiences, as we see it, is a psychological and social practice that cannot be reduced to just one function, that of autobiographical identity construction. Nor cannot it be reduced to the accurate and truthful recall of past events, as already noted. The autobiographical process, in fact, serves a number of communicative purposes. It is a “multi-purpose” form of life present in many social contexts. Just consider the role of autobiographical narratives in many discursive interactions where the reference to past experiences is in the service of present acts of self-positioning and positioning of others (Bamberg, 2003; Harré, 2010). The social space in which one’s memories and stories are told, interpreted, and commented is particularly important for individuals with memory problems. It is within this space where the gaps and empty spaces caused by impairments, diseases, or injuries are bridged and smoothed; it is here where people’s sense of self is manifested in social exchanges and where it is subjectively, including bodily, experienced – irrespective of restricted or impaired capabilities of recollection. To elaborate on the intimate relationship between people’s sense of self and their sense of agency we want to take a look at three case studies that involve individuals with memory trouble primarily caused by neurological changes. We have selected these studies because, first, they present different ways of exploring how people actively try to deal with their memory problems. Second, they show that the autobiographical process realizes multiple functions: mnemonic, interpretative, communicative, and evaluative functions, and that it also serves what we call emotional bonding. Finally, they ref lect attempts to locate memories and the process of remembering beyond the confines of the individual brain and its archival conceptualization.

Three studies in personal agency under challenging conditions The first study uses an informal interview approach. It examines how individuals one year after a brain injury talk about their efforts to live a life even if they have only few autobiographical memories to draw on. One central question of this investigation is of particular interest for our understanding of narrative identity: what stories can one tell about oneself without memories from one’s past? We believe that the most straightforward way to explore these questions is to simply ask people themselves, and listen to what they say about their lives in their own terms (Medved, 2007; Medved & Brockmeier, 2008). We therefore engaged in a series of informal conversations including narrative sequences with people from a major Canadian city who suffered from a moderate level of anterograde amnesia (which left them, however, with some memory and learning abilities) focusing on their stories of their experiences since their neurotrauma. As we expected, some of the autobiographical stories we were told seemed odd or disjointed or even unintelligible. More surprisingly, however, was that our participants found ways to accommodate their memory loss by conversing about experiences and events even if they could not really remember them; they had developed strategies to discursively circumnavigate their missing memories. One strategy, for example, was to insert an event 452

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into their post-trauma narrative that occurred prior the onset of their memory problems. They described events predicating their injury using present perfect verbs, which made it appear as if the events occurred in the recent past or present. One young man spoke about how stressful his exams were, even though he had not returned to university since his brain injury. Every now and then individuals would suddenly shift verb tenses from past to present, often mid-sentence, which often escaped the attention of the listener (we only noticed it in working through the transcripts). As it is well known, we listen and read for meaning, thus overlooking seemingly minor inconsistencies if the big picture makes sense. At other times, tellers would present another person’s memories as their own. They would not only repeat the memories without indicating that they were those of others, but would appropriate them using first-person pronouns such as “I” – that is, telling them from a first-person perspective – in reporting them. These linguistic techniques are not unique. They are options readily available to and used by all speakers of the English language (and other languages) – in fact, only very few of the stories we tell are originally and entirely composed by ourselves. Nevertheless our participants surely employed them more often and more liberally than typical. These findings are also confirmed by research in the psychology of memory. After hearing a family member’s memory often enough, for instance, individuals’ “memory” accounts tend to mirror it, as Hirst, Manier, and Apetroaia (1997) showed. Why have our participants been “borrowing,” “appropriating,” “importing,” or even, as some might put it, “stealing” memories of others, presenting them as their own? Analyzing their stories of memories – paying particular attention to the way they were told in order to position their tellers within our conversations – we found that they were brought up not because of their content. Nor were they narrated with the claim they were “true” or “authentic.” They rather were to demonstrate in actuality that the narrator is fundamentally the same kind of person as the listener or any other “normal” individual; that he or she is able to connect and actively engage in a conversation about the present and the past, despite having a “really, really bad memory.” Even if there might have been, in other respects, a willfully admitted break between a pre-morbid and a post-morbid self, this was apparently not relevant with respect to sense of self and self-continuity, as the ostensibly taken-for-granted handling of “impossible” autobiographical memories made clear. Of course, this does not deny the seriousness of the impairment. Nor does it soften the blow of no longer being able to autobiographically envision one’s life and self in time. What we suggest is only that obviously these individuals’ sense of self and identity does not exclusively depend on their capability to autobiographically remember. The second case study brings into relief another aspect of this amazing sense of personal agency. Using an ethnographic approach, it explores how two Swedish women with Alzheimer’s disease try to figure out how to do the right thing in a situation that appears mysterious to them. More precisely, their problem is: What can you do if you cannot remember where you are? In individuals with dementia, this problem – disorientation – is quite common. And it typically does not come on its own. Whereas individuals with a neurotrauma, like those we just considered, retain some memory ability and are able for the most part to continue with at least basic routines of daily living independently (although with the people we discussed, they were no longer able to go to school or work), things are different in the life of people with moderate or severe Alzheimer’s disease. For them, even recollecting the location, the very place where they are, becomes a challenge. This is all the more likely to arise if affected people find themselves in places that are unfamiliar to them, which of course is true for all old age homes or care institutions. Örulv (2014) 453

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conducted a videotaped observation of how two elderly women, whom she calls Martha and Catherine, with moderate Alzheimer’s disease attempt to orient themselves in a situation that, although it seems banal, can be experienced as most threatening. Here, it is the situation of being offered coffee at their day placement center for people with dementia. As is obvious from their conversation, this seemingly comforting ritual leads to much distress as it implies they need to, first, infer where they are and, second, figure out what is expected of them. On the one hand, they conclude, they are in a homelike environment, so maybe this means that one of them is the hostess and should prepare the coffee. But how should she do this? On the other hand, they wonder, why would there be so many strangers wandering through their home? Maybe that means they are in fact in a café? But if they are in a café, the exchange goes on, they would need money to pay for the coffee, which neither of them has; so this leaves them in a conundrum. At the same time, another resident gets upset because she believes she is paying for everybody’s coffee and of course, that is not fair. Without contextualizing these discourses within the specific interactions and concerns of these protagonists, they appear as what traditionally is diagnosed as confabulation. As Örulv and Hydén (2006) have argued, “confabulation” and the like is the result of social situations, rather than an isolated cognitive event. When taken out of the context of everyday life, many utterances and stories of people suffering from dementia inevitably appear as incoherent, nonsensical, and confabulatory. But this impression changes when they are understood as part of a dynamic of action and interaction that is not only the result of disease limitations, but also of the attempts to actively cope with them. Interwoven with this is Catherine and Martha’s concern with adhering to the social framework of their care home and thus they take part in the coffee ritual, which they also take to be a moral framework. They are both, therefore, worried about how to do the right thing, how to fit in as a proper hostess, guest or, for that matter, customer. That individuals with Alzheimer’s disease try to maintain their (and others) moral values and outlooks on life even as the disease evolves has also been observed by other researchers (e.g., Westius, Kallenberg, & Norberg, 2010). Honor, social status, and reputation remain precious to a person with dementia in much the same way as everyone else (Sabat & Harré, 1992). In fact, people with severe memory problems have to work harder to inquire and position themselves within the changing moral landscapes of everyday life. As Catherine and Martha make clear – explicitly in their conversations and stories and implicitly in their other activities – nothing about positioning is self-evident. Every situation appears ambiguous. Every social action requires interpretative ref lection. Each cup of coffee calls for exhausting meaning-making. In closing this chapter, we would like to take our argument one step further, using the third case study to consider one of the most devastating cases of both anterograde and retrograde amnesia ever recorded. In his mid-forties, Clive Wearing, a distinguished British musician and musicologist, was struck by herpes encephalitis – an infection that affects parts of the brain concerned with remembering. Clive Wearing’s troubles are much discussed in the neurological and neuropsychological literature. A particularly detailed and empathetic account has been given by Oliver Sacks (2007) that comes close to a life history approach. Clive’s memory span was limited to just a few seconds. In addition, he developed an unusually radical retrograde amnesia, which meant that virtually his entire past was deleted. While he could not retain any autobiographical memories, he nevertheless retained some capacities of remembering general information. Most strikingly, his musical ability also remained intact. It is this amazing fact to which Sacks allots much attention. Although many other aspects of Clive’s experience are worthy of exploring, we single out only one that, we believe, sheds light on our main point, people’s 454

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astounding – and sometimes weird – capability of coping and remaining agentive even under dramatic conditions. On their first meeting, about 20 years after Clive’s infection, Sacks reports he is surprised by his animation and garrulousness, which is in stark contrast to the haunted and agonized man he remembers being depicted in the 1986 documentary Prisoner of Consciousness. For a period of almost 15 years – most of it spent in a psychiatric institution and a residence for people with brain injuries – Clive tried to use logical reasoning and drew on various other resources to figure out what was going on; in a sense, his was an effort akin to that of Catherine and Martha who could not recollect where they were and what they were supposed to do. Clive came to the conclusion he was dead. At the time of Sacks’ visit, however, Clive “could talk the hind legs off a donkey,” as Clive’s wife puts it. Apparently something had changed. Could it be that through conversation, even if sticking to scripted themes, Clive had managed “to secure a sort of continuity, to hold the thread of consciousness and attention intact,” as Sacks (2007: 201) surmises? Yet at the same time, this thread was a precarious construct, because what held the thoughts together was, on the whole, just associations, endless but superficial talk. It is not really the overcoming of forgetfulness, “the remembrance of things past, the ‘once’ that Clive yearns for, or can ever achieve,” remarks Sacks; and he goes on to say, “it is the claiming, the filling, of the present, the now, and this is only possible when he is totally immersed in the successive moments of an act. It is the ‘now’ that bridges the abyss” (Sacks, 2007: 213). This refers primarily to Clive when he performs music, but of course at stake is more than just playing the piano. It is a mode of being, at least to those who know Clive, in which he seems just as complete and himself as he was before his illness – a mode that seemingly remains untouched by his amnesia. But could Clive’s non-stop telling of stories, jokes, and phrases serve a similar function as his piano playing? The performance of telling much like the performance of music seems to immerse Clive in the here and now; it focuses his attention and, albeit only in limited sense, allows him to connect to others. What is more, it provides a structure, a continuity, a continuous act of self-presentation – perhaps even of self-making – without any memory. It also is a way to position himself as a social, warm-hearted, and humorous person, which was pretty much as he was in his earlier life. Are we wrong in assuming that Clive, with all his troubles and struggles, ultimately has found a way to live and to develop a sense of being with his amnesia? Even if it took 15 years and even if this sense of continuity might be constantly under threat.

Symptoms are answers In this chapter we have argued that an important way to improve our understanding of memory and remembering is to explore what happens when people have troubles remembering. At the same time, however, we have pointed out that this challenges the traditional focus on memory (and ever more fine-grained memory types, systems, and memory mechanisms), as well as on a myriad of so-called memory disorders. The importance of this focus appears to have increased with the development of brain imaging technologies giving researchers the impression of substantializing memory and its malfunctions. Instead, we have suggested shifting the attention to human individuals, to persons and their lives, life worlds, and life stories. Often, what are considered “symptoms” of brain wounds ref lect the persons’ attempts to cope with altered cognitive and affective capacities. We draw here on Goldstein’s (1995) notion that symptoms are answers, given by affected persons to the questions raised by their brain changes. They are tentative solutions to completely new problems. On this view, what 455

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takes center stage are the strategies and strengths people demonstrate in order to come to terms with their altered brains. The studies and findings we have discussed demonstrate that the single-minded view on memory disorders may actually lead us astray in our efforts both to understand memory and improve the life of individuals with memory troubles. What also becomes evident is that remembering – and especially autobiographical remembering – cannot be reduced to the function of accurately recalling past events and experiences. As we have shown, remembering serves quite a number of diverse functions – interpretative, communicative, and evaluative functions – that might take on even greater significance under conditions of memory change.

Note  1  As a side note, the concepts of autobiographical memory and of episodic and semantic memory have come from different research traditions, but have considerable overlap. Within psychology, the term autobiographical memory comes from the developmental and social-personality literature and denotes memories relevant to one’s self and the formation of one’s identity. The term episodic memory originally derived from the cognitive literature and refers to vivid, detailed memories of discrete past episodes, in contrast with semantic memories that are more generic and knowledge-based. The separation between episodic and semantic memory has been challenged as of limited relevance for people’s everyday lives (e.g., Medved & Hirst, 2006), and is, as we argue, meaningless in autobiographical memory.

References American Psychiatric Association. (2013) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.), Washington, DC. Bamberg, M. (2003) ‘Positioning with Davie Hogan–Stories, tellings, and identities’, in C. Daiute and C. Lightfoot (Eds.) Narrative Analysis: Studying the Development of Individuals in Society, London: Sage. Brockmeier, J. (2010) Beyond the Archive: Memory, Narrative, and the Autobiographical Process, New York: Oxford University Press. Brockmeier, J. (2014) ‘Questions of meaning: Memory, dementia, and the post-autobiographical perspective’, in L.-C. Hydén, H. Lindemann, and J. Brockmeier (Eds.) Beyond Loss: Dementia, Identity, Personhood, Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. Danziger, K. (2008) Marking the Mind: A History of Memory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dieguez, S, and Annoni, J. M. (2013) ‘Stranger than fiction: Literary and clinical amnesia’, in J. Bogousslavksy and S. Dieguez (Eds.) Literary Medicine: Brain Disease and Doctors in Novels, Theater, and Film. Frontiers of Neurology and Neuroscience, Vol. 31 (J. Bougousslavsky, Ed.), Basel: Karger. Goldstein, K. (1995) The Organism: A Holistic Approach to Biology Derived from Pathological Data in Man, (originally published 1934), New York: Zone Books. Hacking, I. (1995) Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. —— (1998) Mad Travelers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illnesses, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Harré, R. (2010) ‘Positioning as a metagrammar for discursive story lines’, in D. Schiffrin, A. De Fina, and A. Nylund (Eds.) Telling Stories: Language, Narrative, and Social Life, Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Hirst, W., Manier, D., and Apetroaia, I. (1997) ‘The social construction of the remembered self: Family recountings’, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 818: 163–88. James, C. (2007) Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts, New York: Norton & Company. Lindemann, H. (2014) Holding and Letting Go: The Social Practice of Personal Identities, New York: Oxford University Press. Lock, M. (2013) The Alzheimer Conundrum: Entanglements of Dementia and Aging, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Luria, A. R. (1976) Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Luria, A. R. (1987) The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory (reprint edition), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Medved, M. I. (2007) ‘Remembering without a past: A study of anterograde memory impairment in individuals after neurotrauma’, Psychology, Health and Medicine, 12: 603–16. Medved, M. I. and Hirst, W. (2006) ‘Islands of memory: Remembering in amnestics’, Memory, 14: 276–88. Medved, M. I. and Brockmeier, J. (2008) ‘Continuity amidst chaos: Neurotrauma, loss of memory and sense of self’, Qualitative Health Research, 18: 469–79. Medved, M. I. and Brockmeier, J. (2010) ‘Weird stories: Brain, mind, and self’, in M. Hyvarinen, L.-C. Hydén, and M. Tamboukou (Eds.) Beyond Narrative Coherence, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Örulv, L. (2014) ‘The subjectivity of disorientation: Moral stakes and concerns’, in L.-C. Hydén, H. Lindemann, and J. Brockmeier (Eds.) Beyond Loss: Dementia, Identity, Personhood, New York: Oxford. Örulv, L. and Hydén, L.-C. (2006) ‘Confabulation: Sense-making, self-making and world-making in dementia’, Discourse Studies, 8: 647–73. Roger, K. and Medved, M. I. (2010) ‘Living with Parkinson’s disease – managing identity together’, International Journal of Qualitative Studies on Health and Well-Being, 5: 5129, DOI: 10.3402/qhw.v5i2.5129. Rose, S. (2010) ‘Memories are made of this’, in S. Radstone and B. Schwarz (Eds.) Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates, New York: Fordham University Press. Sabat, S. R. (2010) ‘Stern words on the mind-brain problem: Keeping the whole person in mind’, New Ideas in Psychology, 28: 168–74. Sabat, S. R. and Harré, R. (1992) ‘The construction and deconstruction of self in Alzheimer’s disease’, Ageing and Society, 12: 443–61. Sacks, O. (2007) Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, New York: Vintage. Schacter, D. L. (2001) The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers. Boston: Houghton Mifflin; New York: Oxford University Press. Stern, W. (1938) General Psychology from the Personalistic Standpoint, Howard Davis Spoerl (Trans.), New York: Macmillan. Tulving, E. (2007) ‘Are there 256 different kinds of memory?’, in J. S. Nairne (Ed.) The Foundations of Remembering, New York: Psychology Press. Westius, A., Kallenberg, K., and Norberg, A. (2010) ‘Views of life and sense of identity in people with Alzheimer’s disease’, Ageing and Society, 30: 1257–78.

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35 Dancing the present Body memory and quantum field theory Anna Lisa Tota

The body is the only means I have to go to the heart of things. Merleau-Ponty (1968)

Introduction This chapter argues that not only the human mind is capable of remembering but also the human body, and often they are interrelated. In the first section, I illustrate some examples of body memories. The second section shows how and to what extent Descartes’ dualism between body and mind operates as a basic, taken-for-granted assumption. As can be noted in the above epigraph, the third section compares three different conceptions of the body in the work of Steiner, Gurdjieff and Merleau-Ponty, arguing that more complex conceptions of the body are essential to better understandings of body memory processes. In the fourth section, it is suggested to rethink the common idea of space and, particularly, the definition of “boundaries” between the body and its environment. Following Capra, the implications of quantum field theory are compared with Eastern religious and philosophical beliefs (such as esho-funi theory by Nichiren Daishonin). It is argued that the notion of a separation between the individual and the environment should be superseded. In the fifth section, I argue that these different conceptions of body and space also require a different notion of time. An alternative concept is proposed: the “space-time of the body”, which implies a different experience of time, where past, present and future are linked together. Through several techniques (such as dance therapy, “sacred movements”, meditation) it is possible to enter this other modus of time experience called the “immanency”. However, also in this case “boundaries through time” have to be reconsidered. Schützenberger (1998) argues that the memory embodied in an individual has not only to do with the biography of that individual, but also with the biographies of all his or her ancestors. Their past is embodied in the present of the individual, especially in the case of traumatic pasts. The sixth section introduces the empirical part of the chapter. It is mainly related to the emergence of traumatic memories stored for decades in a subject’s body1. All examples refer to cases of subjects who, through a specific technique, probably entered the “space-time of the body”, where 458

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past, present and future are condensed and, therefore, where meaningful transformations and changes are possible. But to what extent is the body capable of remembering? Under what conditions can amnesia concerning traumatic pasts be transformed? While the chapter is largely theoretical, I offer an empirical ref lection based on data collected through participant observation. From 2008 to 2014 I attended six week-long and more than twenty weekend seminars on diverse topics (from art-therapy to sacred dances, from family constellations to mindfulness, from shamanism to sensitive dance). The chapter’s main empirical focus draws on data collected in two cases: a) Sensitive Dance, which originated in 1990 from Claude Coldy’s meeting with two osteopaths, Marie Guyon and Jean Louis Dupuy. Its aim is to achieve movement awareness through specific sets of movements performed in living contact with nature’s elements (the sand of the seaside, the water and the waves of the sea, olive trees, the trees of the forest, the sand of the desert). During the seminars, which are held in natural surroundings, each dancer starts to dance his or her past. The creative movements of the dance seem to free the memories stored in the dancers’ bodies, first the traumatic ones and then the more positive ones. b) Gurdjieff’s movements. In this case, as the group dances the sacred movements, it draws a picture of itself, of its past and present experiences. The movements seem to create a mirror of the group’s level of awareness.

Can the body remember? As a field, Memory Studies has long tended to focus primarily on individual memory as an activity of the mind. For many decades the hypothesis that the body can remember has been underestimated and somewhat neglected. Renewed interest in this topic has recently emerged among memory scholars (Hahn, 2010; Haag, 2013). In this section, I illustrate several examples of body memory to propose the hypothesis that not only the human mind, but also the human body can remember, and in the processes of remembering and forgetting, body and mind are often interconnected. Since the 1980s and the work of the neurologist Oliver Sacks (1985), a large amount of evidence has accumulated on the body’s capacity to remember and its intelligence. Sacks described the cases of several patients suffering from “phantom limb syndrome”: an amputated leg was still remembered by the body, and the patient could still feel pain in that leg for many years after the amputation. Sacks commented by arguing that this capacity of the body to remember its leg can be very useful for the subsequent implantation of the prosthetic limb. Another well-known case described by Sacks (1985) concerned a woman named Christina, whose body had entirely lost the ability to perceive itself. Her body could no longer coordinate its own parts, so that Christina could move a hand or a foot only when she was looking at it. Christina described herself as a “disembodied woman”, and this situation caused her a great deal of suffering. Her case documents that the body can not only remember, but also forget. By the process of forgetting, the body seems to be independent and autonomous from the mind. Christina could see her limbs with her eyes, and she could speak about them, but her body could no longer recognize them. Another example of body memories relates to traumatic pasts and repressed memories (such as memories of sexual abuse retained in the body or other kinds of violence experienced during childhood and long stored in the individual’s unconscious). There are several case 459

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studies in psychology on the re-emergence of such traumatic memories at the conscious level after many decades of amnesia. However, not only in pathologies but also in everyday life there is evidence of the body’s capacity to remember. Let us consider the ability of the body to remember specific sets of movements. For example, if someone tries to play a tune on the piano for the first time in ten years, at the very beginning they will experience some difficulties, and if they try to “remember” at any cost, it will probably be impossible. But if they just let their fingers move on the keyboard, a sort of miracle will happen, and they suddenly remember how to play the tune. The hands and fingers just “do it by themselves”, somehow independently of conscious thought. This is the conclusion Sudnow reaches in Ways of the Hand (1978), his book on playing jazz, where he reports that the feeling he had after having acquired sufficient skill was that his hands knew what sounds they were producing and that his mind didn’t have to do anything except observe them. In fact, it was only when his hands could play jazz “in their own way”, without having to be mentally trained, that the music came out best. In this case it seems that the fingers can remember better than the mind. The same may be said in relation to sports activities. In many cases we have the experience of being able to perform sets of movements that we seem not to remember with our mind. Where has this memory been stored? Is it possible that the body can remember what the mind forgets? In the last few years several scholars in the field have started to investigate the possibility that the body can remember and forget. One approach is to study how the body can ref lect the social past, for example by analysing the consequences of war on body practices in everyday life (Koloma Beck, 2013) or by investigating how bodies are portrayed in artistic practices (Kanter, 2013). The body’s memory has also been analysed in relation to ballet training (Merit Müller, 2013). In another study the ballet itself has been conceived as a mirror in which to view crystallized parts of a common past (Hollister Mathis Masury, 2013). The main issue addressed by these studies has been the interface and the intertwining between social conditioning and individual identity in the construction and shaping of bodily memory.

“Clever bodies” and the mind-body dualism Where are our memories stored: in the mind, in the body or in both of them 2 ? In this section it is shown how and to what extent Descartes’ dualism between body and mind operates as a basic assumption that is taken for granted. Several scholars have pointed out the importance of body knowledge (Keller and Meuser, 2011). The concept of body knowledge follows from the idea of multiple intelligence (Gardner, 1983). If the body’s intelligence can be acknowledged, can it be also proved that the body itself contributes to the process of remembering? There are several experiences in everyday life that seem to show that the body indeed has this ability. As already mentioned, by remembering sets of movements, we can easily verify that our mind has forgotten what our body can easily remember, but only if we agree to stop “thinking about it”. This is particularly the case of Gurdjieff ’s sacred movements. One can follow the set of movements in a dancers’ group only if one stops thinking about “what will come next”. The only way to dance these movements is to follow the f low of communications among the dancers’ bodies in the group. In the sacred movements, I experience the inability of my mind to do what my body can do. The mind is always too late and it cannot follow the activities of the bodies. The dancers’ bodies seem to talk to each other and to understand each other 460

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perfectly. It is a unique experience that subverts the usual relationship between mind and body. The mind is often considered to be the intelligent master and the body to be the stupid servant. Here the opposite is the case: the mind surrenders to the intelligence of the body. The mind relies on the body and suddenly discovers its “wisdom”. Another issue to consider is what kind of body we have in mind. Usually our idea of body is taken for granted. We envisage a physical body and also a specific relation between body and mind. The mind has control over the body. We tend to speak of the mind as an entity separate from the body. This distinction is closely associated with René Descartes and the so-called “mind-body problem”: cogito ergo sum. The mind-body dualism refers to a particular way of thinking about the relationship between the mind and the body, and it originated in the theory that Descartes developed in Meditations on First Philosophy in 1641. Leder (1990) suggested that Descartes’ philosophy on the mind-body problem was strongly shaped by his early experience of being severely ill. This painful experience had provoked a desire to escape his body. According to Descartes, mind and body are distinct, and the mind can exist without the body. “I think therefore I am”: this idea is often linked with the ascendance of the disembodied rationalist view, which is still current today. It has also been argued that this separation between mind and body within modern capitalist societies has led to a sharp division between physical and mental labour (Petersen, 2007). The idea that the mind controls the body is viewed very differently when we consider gender and ethnicity. For example, feminist scholars have directed attention to the fact that women’s bodies and minds are seen as different and differently related. They are also conceived as inferior to men’s bodies and minds (Lloyd, 1984). For women, the mind and body are more closely related than they are for men. Women are more in touch with their bodies and prone to their unruliness (for example, during menstruation or childbirth). Hence there are implications if we consider the gendered construction of the mind-body relationship. However, the idea of mind-body dualism is very widespread, and the ability of the mind to control the body is still not questioned, except in very specific circumstances. When we fall down, are sick, or suddenly do something in breach of the social rules on exhibiting the body in public, we seem brief ly to lose control over our bodies. In these situations we are obliged to recognize that control over our bodies is only an illusion. It does not work in reality. Our bodies can be independent from our f lows of thoughts and even from the ideas that we have about them. When we have a protracted and grave disease, we experience the state of being subjected to our bodies. Another conception of body and another definition of the relation between body and mind is necessary to understand this kind of situation better. I suggest that this definition is a key to unlocking dimensions of the body’s memory.

Towards a different conception of the body Taking this definition in hand, it is clear that we must overcome the usual reduction of the body to its physical part and adopt a more robust conception of the body. Three different conceptions of the body are compared: Steiner’s, Gurdjieff ’s and Merleau-Ponty’s ones. The importance of bodily language has been recognized by several scholars: for example, Alexander Lowen (1958) has strongly criticized traditional psychoanalytic methods for neglecting the body’s central role in any process of change. However, although Lowen’s study was pioneering, it did not sufficiently challenge the usual conception of the body. Indeed, the physical conception of the body is usually taken for granted as the only one possible, but there are millions of people in the world who do not share this limited conception. For example, Chinese medicine views the body in a different way: the energy f low is conceived 461

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as playing a central role in keeping the body healthy. In Indian Ayurvedic medicine, the role of the chakras is central to every healing process. Similar conceptions can be found in Europe.

Rudolf Steiner and Georges Ivanovic Gurdjieff According to Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy (1894) there is a fourfold articulation of the body: a) the physical body, as a physical-material structure possessed in common with the mineral world; b) the life or etheric body, the source of life and growth, possessed in common with the plant world; c) consciousness, or the astral body, possessed in common with the animal world; d) the ego, or the faculty of self-awareness, which is unique to humanity. The anthroposophical conception of the body argues that it cannot be simply reduced to its physical part. If the body that we have in mind is not only physical but also etheric and astral, can we imagine that these different bodies contribute in very different ways to the process of remembering? A similar but slightly different conception of the body can be found in Gurdjieff ’s work. In his analogy of the horse and carriage, Gurdjieff (1964: 382) argues thus: A man as a whole … is almost exactly comparable to that organization for conveying a passenger, which consists of a carriage, a horse, and a coachman.… The body of a man with all its motor ref lex manifestations corresponds simply to the carriage itself; all the functioning and manifestations of feeling of a man correspond to the horse harnessed to the carriage and drawing it; the coachman sitting on the box and directing the horse corresponds to that in a man which people call “consciousness” or mentation; and finally, the passenger seated in the carriage and commanding the coachman is that which is called “I.” The fundamental evil among contemporary people is chief ly that, owing to the rooted and widespread abnormal methods of education of the rising generation, this fourth personality which should be present in everybody on reaching responsible age is entirely missing in them; and almost all of them consist only of the three enumerated parts, which parts, moreover, are formed arbitrarily of themselves and anyhow. In other words, almost every contemporary man of responsible age consists of nothing more nor less than simply a “hackney carriage,” and one moreover, composed as follows: a brokendown carriage “which has long ago seen its day,” a crock of a horse, and, on the box, a tatterdemalion, half-sleepy, half-drunken coachman whose time designated by Mother Nature for self-perfection passes while he waits on a corner, fantastically daydreaming, for any old chance passenger. The first passenger who happens along hires him and dismisses him just as he pleases, and not only him but also all the parts subordinate to him. Gurdjieff ’s metaphor goes beyond the perspective of the body-mind dualism and it describes the different ways in which the passenger can communicate with the coachman, the horse and the coach. In Gurdjieff ’s theory, the emotions correspond to the etheric and astral bodies as defined by Steiner. The idea of considering the body also in relation to its flow of energies can also be conceived as a way to apply quantum field theory to the body: the wave/ particle duality explained by Max Planck and Albert Einstein. The physical body represents 462

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the particles; the etheric one corresponds to the waves. Different disciplines seem to view the same kinds of phenomena through different lenses. It is suggested here that when considering the process of remembering and forgetting at the individual level, we should jointly consider the activity of all the different bodies and not only that of the physical one, as well as the complex different ways in which they communicate and interrelate with each other. The phantom limb syndrome described by Oliver Sacks (1985) can be reinterpreted by considering what happened to the etheric and the astral limb when the physical one was amputated. The fact that the patient can still feel pain in that leg many years after its amputation can be better understood if one imagines that “only” the physical limb has been removed while, for example, its corresponding etheric or astral parts are still there. Another possibility is to ask oneself what happens to the corresponding astral and etheric parts of the body when an amputation takes place3 (Sheldrake, 2003). Another example: What does really happen in a case of rape? Even if there are no signs of physical violence on the physical body of the victim can one suppose that the effects of the rape are “visible” on the etheric and the astral bodies? If one refers to a different conception of the body, all the theories and suppositions about it must be reconsidered.

The corporeality of consciousness in the works of Merleau-Ponty A very important contribution on the conception of the body is due to Merleau-Ponty and the phenomenological approach. “Kōrper” is the name that Husserl (1931) uses to describe precisely the “body-subject” or “body-representation”: the body as it occupies a certain space and then responds to certain measures, the body as res extensa, reduced to mere measurement of certain quantities (weight, width, length, etc.). This description applies to any body, so much for the human body as well for other living beings. However, precisely because that definition applies to any body, it does not correspond to the particularity of the body that one is. The “lived body” corresponds to this experience that Husserl calls “Leib”; when one feels the own body from the inside. This experience is linked to what Husserl in the Cartesian Meditations defines as “Eigenheit”: this term refers in German to the meaning of “property” in the sense of “ownership” but also of “peculiarities”. This is the body as lived unity of perception and motion. There is a continuous movement between the lived body and the body-object. The lived body (Leib) is always on the point of being inverted in objectification (Kōrper). This process has been described by Merleau-Ponty (1979) as “reversibility” and it refers precisely to the dynamic of the imminent reversal of roles and positions between the two types of body identified by Husserl (1931). In the final phase of his thoughts, Merleau-Ponty will adopt the term “flesh of the world” to translate the term “Leib”: by doing it, he emphasizes the fact that the lived body can never be said of belonging to someone. In some way, then, the experience of the body as peculiarities of each and thus also as an “organ” of which each can exert possession and control is an experience, in the sense that it is made possible by another experience: that of being a lived body. It is the experience of the meat as inhabited by the possibility of otherness that makes the experience of “having a body” possible. Somehow, it could be argued that the lived body can be referred to the experience of being a body and to a relationship between mind and body that overcomes the dualism implied in Descartes’ theory. When the body is viewed as lived body, concepts such as control over the body and property of the own body are inadequate and obsolete. When the body is viewed merely as body-object, then, the same concepts become again central and one can stay in the illusion of “having a body” that is under the mind’s control. The concept of “Leib” 463

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overcomes the mind-body dualism. The “Leib” refers to the body together with the mind. Can we argue that there is a similarity between the phenomenological concept of “f lesh of the world” and Steiner’s concepts of etheric and astral bodies?

Body and space: liquid “boundaries” In this section I suggest to rethink the common idea of space and, particularly, the definition of “boundaries” between the body and its environment. This is made possible by following the well-known argument by Capra (1975): as he has proposed, the implications of quantum field theory are compared with those of Eastern religions. Then both of these approaches are used in this section to redefine the notion of space. In regard to the relation between Taoism and atomic physics, in 1975 Fritjof Capra published his well-known book The Tao of Physics, in which he argues and documents the continuity between atomic physics and oriental mysticism. It is here suggested that this continuity can be useful in the present analysis to reconsider the relationship between the body and the environment (which represents an additional key point for understanding memory and forgetting processes). This relationship can be viewed in light of esho-funi, the oneness of life and its environment. Esho-funi means that the inside is equal to the outside. It was first conceived by Nichiren Daishonin, a thirteenth-century Japanese Buddhist monk, who inspired a specific school of Buddhism called Nichiren Buddhism. According to this principle, although life and its environment are two seemingly distinct phenomena, they are two integral phases of a single reality. This principle removes the distinction between outside and inside, between the body and the environment4. This spiritual law converges on certain consequences of the scientific law of waves/­ particles duality. If one considers the relation between the body and the environment in terms of particles, the idea of a boundary between the body and its environment makes sense. If one considers the same relation in terms of waves, there is no longer a division between the actor and the environment. The reason is because they are viewed in terms of energies. In Steiner’s terms, one no longer considers only physical bodies but etheric ones as well. If the body is viewed as an energy system, the scale of measurement of the distance between “me” and “outside” can no longer be a discrete one (see also Wagner-Pacifici in this volume). It has to be a continuum, and in a continuum the distinction between inside and outside becomes very complex. The boundaries of the body, those of the mind and those of the identity seem to transform themselves deeply. In fact, the sharp boundaries of the body depend on the conception of the body as matter composed of particles. These boundaries can no longer be discrete if one considers bodies to be condensed shapes of energies. What Nichiren Daishonin discovered during his meditations in the thirteenth century was theorized by Max Planck some centuries later. Nowadays it can be reconsidered also from the perspective of the social sciences (see Wagner-Pacifici and her call for a quantum sociology of events, in this volume). Moreover to be recalled is that, according to Capra (1975), the reality of atomic physics, like that of the mystics, extends beyond the limited schema of the oppositional poles. Because the particles are a distribution of probabilities, they tend to exist simultaneously in different spaces, and they possess a specific physical reality that lies between existence and non-existence. Atomic phenomena can only be described in terms of probabilities. The waves associated with the particles are not “real” like those associated with water or sounds. They are “probability waves”, they describe the probability of finding the particles in certain 464

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points and with certain properties (Capra, 1975). This is the paradox of particles, because we can never say that a particle is in one place, or conversely that it is not in that place. Because particles are probabilities, they tend to exist in a way that transcends the traditional duality of existence and non-existence. Capra (1975: 176–7) compares Oppenheimer’s theory to the Upanishad in two very significant passages: For example, to the question whether the position of the electron remains the same, we must answer “no”; to the question of whether the electron’s position changes over time, we must answer “no”; to the question of whether it is stationary we must answer “no”; to the question whether it is in motion we must answer “no”. (Oppenheimer, 1954: 146, quoted in Capra 1975: 176) He moves. He does not move. He is far away. He is near. He is within all of this. He is also outside of all this. (Isa-Upanishad, 5, quoted in Capra 1975: 177) The conception of space in atomic physics and in oriental mysticism transcends the limited idea of opposition. Shakespeare’s famous question “To be or not to be?” becomes in this case “to be and not to be”. It is argued here that the notion of a separation between the individual (his/her body and his/her mind) and the environment should be superseded. Instead of considering the individual and his/her body as “discretely” distinguished from the environment, it is here maintained that this relation is better represented as a continuum where the inside (the body) and the outside (the environment) are reciprocally inf luenced and shaped. In architecture, this new conceptualization has given rise to new notions of space where the boundaries between the home and its environment are not clearly defined. There are in-between spaces not clearly recognizable as “inside” or “outside” the home. Examples in this regard are the “ville-en-plein-air” projects by the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban or the BE-FUN Design projects such as the Shinagawa House. The implications of quantum field theory can be recognized also in the social sciences. Are our bodies either matter or energies? Or are they both of them? 5 And if they are also energies, can we still conceive the inside/outside distinction as a “discrete variable”, or does it make sense to substitute it with a “continuous variable”? To what extent does this reconceptualization of the body/environment boundaries require reconsideration also of remembering and forgetting processes at the individual level?

The past as bodily present: the “space-time” of the body In this section it is argued that these different conceptions of body and space imply a rethinking of time. The concept of “space-time of the body” here proposed points out a different experience of time and a different state of consciousness, called “immanency”. It is also suggested that through different techniques (such as meditation or breathing exercises) it is possible to enter this different state of consciousness, where deep transformations are possible and where linear time seems to some extent to become “reversible”. In regard to body memory, I propose a reconsideration of the linear conception of time. On this point modern physics can be helpful. For many centuries it was believed that time and space were intrinsic parts of reality. Several research studies on memory seem to assume that the linearity of time is intrinsic to the nature of events themselves. However, contemporary 465

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atomic physics (but also phenomenology and social constructivism) has documented that the concepts to which we refer in order to understand and describe reality are not aspects of reality itself but are dependent on our cognitive processes. They are created by our mind: they are part of the map, they are not the territory (Korzybski, 1933: 58; Bateson, 1972, 1979). Oriental philosophy, contrary to that of ancient Greece, has always maintained that space and time are constructions of the mind. The Eastern mystics related space and time to special states of consciousness that they were able to overcome through meditation. They thus discovered that those concepts are not intrinsically “true” but represent only states of human perception (Capra, 1975: 188–9). The theory of relativity in modern physics came to the same conclusions. The temporal order of an event is not independent from the observer of the event itself. According to Einstein, also the temporal determination depends on the observer. In fact, light needs a certain period of time to reach an observer, so that there is an interval of time between the event that happens and the ability of the observer to see it. The duration of this interval depends on the speed of light. For example, we see the sun as it was eight minutes before, not as it is exactly while we are observing it. If we consider different observers moving at different speeds, it can happen that they arrange the sequence of the same events in a different order. If the speeds are ordinary, these differences are so marginal that they are almost invisible. But in atomic physics, where events are interactions among particles, the speeds of the particles can be close to that of light. These differences can therefore become important. The Newtonian notion of space must be abandoned, and so must the traditional conception of time. This is exactly the contention of the Eastern mystics, who maintained that time and space are only “labels”, not ontological ­realities. They are terms that originate from the language of the observer, and they depend on his/her specific mode of cognition (Hacking, 1999; Franck, 2003). Even if from a different perspective, phenomenologists (Husserl, 1905) and several sociologists of time (Bergmann, 1992) agree on this point: they consider the conception of linear time as “a social construction” or as “a construction of the mind”. On applying these considerations to the body’s memory, the linear conception of time seems to be adequate for conscious memory (the memory of the mind). The mind can only relate to events that have already happened, as stated by Rollin McCraty (this volume). There is however another kind of knowledge related to the body (Rollin McCraty calls it “knowledge of the heart”) that seems able to participate in the creation of the reality while it is happening. Body memory seems to correspond to the unconscious part of our memory – that part of it which is incorporated or stored in the body6. It is here suggested that the bodily memory requires another concept of time and precisely the one employed by atomic physics. It is proposed here to call it “space-time of the body”. From this perspective, linear time is a social construction and also a scientific construction of Newtonian physics. It cannot be viewed as the “sole modus of experience”. The body introduces another experience of time where past, present and future are linked together. There are several techniques with which to enter this other modus of time experience, such as yoga exercises, family constellations, dance therapy, “sacred movements”, sensitive dance, breathing practices, water meditation, walking meditation, vipassana meditation and many others. In many of the practices mentioned, the body represents a door through which to enter a condition where time is suspended, where the past is the present and the future. It has been called “immanency” and it is a state close to us and not impossible to reach. Buddhist monks called it “eternal present” as they described it as absolutely still. They achieved this 466

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state of consciousness through meditative practices. In fact, meditation is a way to change the relation between mind and body, to suspend the mind’s usual control over the body so that we can listen to that silent body talk within us. From the perspective of immanency, the past can be viewed as bodily present, as incorporated in the present state of the body: a sort of tacit knowledge or passive modus that affects what we feel, what we think, how we react to events, what we remember and what we forget. From the perspective of immanency that linear conception of time usually taken for granted in everyday life seems to become partially “reversible”. The past embodied in the present can be transformed, and it seems to share some of the characteristics as particles: it has more to do with the distribution of probabilities than with solid events. This past seems to exist as present and it seems that it can be transformed. Following this argument, the change of the past into the present can change the past itself and its future. From the quantum physics perspective, what has just been stated can be translated into scientific language. This specific experience of the body (which can be reached, for example, through meditation) can suspend the experience of linear time. It is useful also to recall that in everyday life we live only one part of our existence in linear time. When we fall asleep, for example, we enter another reality where linear time is suspended. Here it has been argued that the body’s memory has to do with two different modalities of time: the linear and the immanent ones, the so-called eternal present. As we will see in the next part of the chapter, the data collected in the empirical study are very closely related to this notion of the body’s “space-time”.

Space-time of the body in the family system As for space, it is important to rethink the idea of “boundaries through time” within takenfor-granted notions of time. In this section, following Schützenberger (1998), it is argued that the memory embodied in an individual has not only to do with the biography of that individual but also with the biographies of all his or her ancestors. Here the question to consider is whether body memory has to do only with the biography of the individual. Also in this case, it is probably important to reconsider the usual belief in this regard. We can observe also social dimensions at work in the body’s memory. Anne Ancelin Schützenberger (1998), the French psychoanalyst, argues that the memory embodied in the individual has to do not only with the biography of that individual but also with the biographies of all his/her ancestors. Their past is embodied in the present of the individual. Especially in the case of traumatic pasts, the trauma is still alive, and its effects shape and affect the present of the descendants in the family system. Schützenberger (1998) recalls the cases of patients suffering from the “anniversary syndrome”. This syndrome consists in the fact that an individual has a very serious accident or disease on exactly the anniversary of when the same incident occurred to one of his/her ancestors. The number of surprising and unexpected coincidences found by Schützenberger is so high that it is difficult to consider them as purely random, as only “coincidences”. According to the French psychoanalyst, there must be some forces at work whereby the individual implicitly remembers the crucial dates of his/her ancestors’ lives and which let him/her reproduce them by re-experiencing the same traumas exactly on the same dates. The most interesting aspect of this syndrome is that the patients considered by the author are entirely unaware of these anniversaries. If asked, they know nothing about these past traumas, which are discovered during therapeutic sessions through detailed analysis of their family histories. They experience disasters or dangerous diseases on the same dates as their ancestors without knowing anything about those events. Where is this 467

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memory stored? And what kind of memory is it? Schützenberger (1998) maintains that when these dates are revealed to the family system, these repetitive dynamics vanish. Where are these invisible memories stored if not in the patients’ minds? Are they stored in their bodies? And how are these memories transmitted across generations if no one speaks about them? Certainly not through family conversations, as they have long remained tacit and invisible.

Body memory and the dance of the present This section illustrates the empirical part of the chapter and refers to the emergence of traumatic memories stored for decades on a subject’s body. All the examples that will be proposed refer to cases of subjects who, through a specific technique, probably entered the “space-time of the body”, that is the specific state of consciousness called “immanency”, introduced and explained in the fifth section. An individual’s memory can be distinguished between the conscious part (what the subject recalls and is stored in the mind) and the unconscious part (what the subject has experienced as important but does not recall because, for example, it was too painful – s/he was a child, it was an act of abuse – and for some reason s/he did not at that time have the resources to cope with it). The unconscious memories are probably stored in the body. The emotions that s/he could not live are probably conserved in the body waiting for an opportunity to emerge again and be transformed. As soon as something similar happens outside, the individual seems to reactivate the same “old” pain, but usually without being aware of it. Since the past is not recognized with all its suffering and pain, the individual seems to be imprisoned by the past. Creativity in everyday life appears to be very limited, and the individual tends mainly to reproduce old schemata in every area of his/her life: when something happens, s/he does not respond to it in the present but goes back to the past. S/he responds to the present act with projection of the past (the memory of which has remained unconscious for several decades and stored in a part of the body). It can accordingly be said that the past is bodily present, and if the individual has, for example, suffered sexual abuse as a child, and if this memory has remained unconscious over time, s/he will develop a series of psychological disorders (depression, panic attacks, etc.) and will probably overreact to all situations that for him/her have a link with that latent memory. This trauma will probably operate as a tacit modus that profoundly affects and shapes the etheric and the astral body of the abused individual. What happens when this unstable equilibrium is challenged by a bodily practice? It is not the intention here to reduce body memory to this repressed part of the memory alone. As said, just as in many sport activities, in dancing, in playing music, so in several bodily practices there are various routines at work. Body memory has also to do with the remembering and forgetting of routines and sets of movements that are not necessarily linked to traumatic experiences. The following empirical part of this chapter, however, will relate mainly to results concerning the emergence of traumatic memories stored for decades on the subject’s body.

Dancing the past Over the past six years I have attended six week-long seminars and more than twenty weekend seminars on different topics (sensitive dance, Gurdjieff ’s sacred movements, mindfulness, meditation in water, family constellations, psychomagic, shamanism) where I conducted participant observation. 468

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During these experiences I had many opportunities to witness what might appear to be “prodigious” events. All these seminars had the purpose of awakening the body’s knowledge, of teaching participants how to achieve a state of mindfulness. They involved several different body practices, such as silence for several days, breathing techniques, group meditation, meditation in water, and learning the use of a pendulum. It is here suggested that probably through these very different techniques the subjects (whose experiences will be illustrated below) were able to enter in the “space-time of the body”. In other terms, they entered, even if just for a few seconds, in that particular state of consciousness that can be called “immanency”. As it was argued in the previous sections, in that particular state the usual notions of space and time are no longer appropriate. In that state, linear time seems to disappear. Time seems to become somehow “reversible”. There is a kind of eternal present. Also the space seems to transform itself, as the boundaries between inside and outside can no more be viewed as “discrete”. In that state of consciousness deep changes become possible and the memories of an individual can be deeply transformed, especially in the case of traumatic memories. In this section several cases are presented, but they represent just a few examples among many others that could be illustrated here. During a seminar on sensitive dance, conducted in 2010 by the dancer Claude Coldy in an olive grove at Tuscania, a small village in Central Italy, various shamanic techniques were proposed to the participants. In one of these exercises, a participant – with naked arms and legs, so that the sensation of the earth on the skin could be felt more intensely – had to be fully covered with earth by a group of three other dancers. The reactions of the participants in the exercise were very different. In some cases the subject enjoyed the sensation of the earth on the skin, but some subjects suffered panic attacks. One woman, for example, was lying on the grass during this very simple exercise, and she was entirely covered with earth except for her head. It was not a large quantity of earth, but the skin’s contact with the earth was very intense. The woman suddenly began to scream. Her belly seemed to boil on contact with the earth. Large bubbles appeared and disappeared on her belly while she cried desperately. Around her, other participants were reacting to the same experience with joy, and they were entirely quiet and at peace. Some months later the woman discovered during a family constellation that she had suffered sexual abuse during childhood. The forgotten memory of this abuse had remained hidden in her body for many decades, and that exercise during the sensitive dance seminar had provided a sort of outlet for this latent memory to become visible again. In the same seminar one year later, the participants had to dance blindfolded on an olive tree (not too high, but still high enough to be dangerous), and they had to follow the instructions of another dancer in order not to fall off the tree. This simple exercise revealed their capacity to trust others; it also revealed the kind of relations that the participants’ “inner child” still had with their parents. It was impressive how some participants were overwhelmed by panic, while others could joyfully move and dance among the branches of the olive trees. After the exercise, when asked about the experience, a young man who had been unable to perform the exercise because of the fear of falling recalled the very difficult relationship with his father during childhood. During another sensitive dance seminar, held in 2011 in Maratea, a small town in South Italy on the coast, the exercise was to sit on the beach looking at the sea very early in the morning. It was a breathing exercise. A woman was performing the exercise in a quiet state of meditation when she suddenly started to cry. She was silent but her eyes were full of tears. She continued to cry in silence for several minutes. After the exercise she told the group of dancers seated in a circle on the beach about her experience: she had suddenly felt a very 469

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strong pain in the burst, like a stone. Her suffering was extreme, but then the “stone” abruptly disappeared and she felt relief. The day after, she suddenly remembered a very painful episode in her childhood, which she had totally forgotten for many decades. In 2013 during a seminar on Gurdjieff ’s sacred dances held in Centeno, a hamlet in Tuscany, Italy, there was a special session in which women and men had to dance separately. So I took part in the women’s dances in an old church. The movements proposed were very easy to perform, but for three sessions (one session of movements usually lasted two hours) a particular dancer could not do one of these very easy movements. When later reporting on her experience to the group of participants, she said that she was perfectly aware that the specific movement was very simple, but for her it had been almost impossible. On the fifth day, during the women’s dances, the woman suddenly found herself able to perform the movement properly. She felt as if something had loosened in her heart and she started to cry in silence: indeed, she seemed overwhelmed by a f lood of tears. She could explain neither why she was crying so much nor why she was suddenly able to perform the movement. In another session of Gurdjieff ’s sacred dances during the same seminar in 2013, one participant recalled that at the end of the session of movements she went out into the garden. On passing through the door, she made a gesture with her right hand to replace her scarf on her left shoulder. She told the group of participants that on making the gesture she had felt “sisterhood” with all the women who had made the same gesture over the centuries. She had felt the “immanence” of that gesture, as if all the generations of women who had performed the same action for centuries were present at exactly that moment and were making that gesture simultaneously with her. During one family constellation in Borgo Pignano, near Volterra in Tuscany, a woman suddenly re-experienced the death of her father’s sister (her aunt), who had been killed by a bus while riding a bicycle in a street of a large Egyptian city at the age of eleven. The event had been so traumatic for her father’s family that no one had ever spoken again about the aunt: she had “disappeared” from every family narrative. The woman, however, had the aunt’s name as her second name. For her it was extremely traumatic to experience this family trauma again during the family constellation. The woman suddenly told the group that she could now understand why she had been so afraid of riding a bicycle since she was very young. After some months, I met this woman again by chance, and she was riding a bicycle in the traffic of a large Italian city. I was astonished because I remembered her fear very well. When I asked her if she was no longer afraid, she replied that now her dead aunt was protecting her so that her fear had gone. On many occasions during the seminars, I witnessed a shift from dancing the past in the present to dancing the present in the past. This is the f low of transformation. Instead of being the schemata of invisible pasts reproduced in the present, once these pasts become visible they can be forgotten, or at least can be allowed to go. The subject is thus freed from the burden of the invisible past and of its hidden memories. The past and the heritage from ancestors transform themselves from a burden and a prison into a resource, into a stabilizing anchor for the person’s future life. I have mentioned only a few examples; many others could be cited. The feature shared by all these experiences is that they were felt and interpreted by the subjects to whom they occurred as moments of profound transformation of something traumatic related to their past or to the past of their ancestors. A possible interpretation is that these deep transformations were possible because they had been able to enter the “immanent present” through the techniques described above. They had entered the space-time of the body, and from there they had been able to transform their past. This hypothesis cannot be proved, but what the interviewees recalled can be experienced. 470

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Conclusion: outlining a theory of body memory This chapter is intended as a preliminary attempt to draw a theory of body memory. It has been argued that memory and forgetting processes have to do not only with the mind but also with the body. The way of thinking about the relationship between mind and body (originated by Descartes’ works) has been questioned, in so far as the conception of the body (usually taken for granted) in which it is reduced to its physical part. Three other conceptions of the body have been illustrated (Steiner’s, Gurdjieff ’s and Merleau-Ponty’s). Also, the common notions of space and linear time have been questioned. By referring to the wellknown argument by Capra, the implications of Eastern religions and of quantum field theory have been compared and applied to the notions of space and time. More specifically, the usual notion of boundaries in space has been redefined in light of the esho-funi theory and the quantum field theory. The usual notion of boundaries through time has been reconsidered by referring to the “anniversary syndrome”. Then, a different conception of space and time has been proposed: the “space-time of the body”. It has been suggested that, by entering in this particular state of consciousness (through different techniques), body memory can be transformed. Some cases of subjects, who seem to have successfully transformed their traumatic experiences by entering (even if just for a few seconds) in the “immanency”, have been illustrated. In conclusion, by trying to understand how body memory works, this chapter has proposed to abandon our common beliefs and to consider the processes of remembering and forgetting from the perspective of the particles, where the fixity and the stability of the matter seem to vanish and the waves seem to float in the eternal dance of life.

Notes  1  Although throughout the chapter I refer to the process of memory accumulation as “stored in” – as denoting spiritual/conscious/cognitive dimensions of retainment and repression – I suggest that “stored on” (the body) might aid in our understanding of the configured body in terms of movements, gestures, etc.  2  By considering this distinction, I do not wish to ignore the well-known argument raised by Norman (1988: 6) that the majority of our knowledge is not stored in our mind but resides in the world: “Much of our everyday knowledge resides in the world, not in the head…. People certainly do rely upon the placement and location of objects, upon written texts, upon the information contained within other people, upon the artifacts of society, and upon the information transmitted within and by a culture. There certainly is a lot of information out there in the world, not in the head” (1988: ix). I am just adding the distinction between body and mind.  3  The phantom image of the limb sometimes is detectable following amputation when a Kirlian photograph is taken. Kirlian photography was discovered by Semyon Kirlian in 1939, and it consists of photographic techniques used to capture the phenomenon of electrical coronal discharges.  4  An interesting comparison can be done among esho-funi theory, quantum field theory and the conception of boundary and environment in Maturana and Varela (1992).  5  The concept of “Leib” by Merleau-Ponty seems to be very useful to describe the duality of particles and waves.  6  It is very important to note that the English term “body” does not correspond to the German term “Leib”, but instead to the term “Kōrper”. In this chapter the notion of body is intended in the sense of “Leib”. Therefore, it is intended as body plus consciousness.

Bibliography Bateson, G. (1972) Steps to an Ecology of Mind, San Francisco: Chandler. Bateson, G. (1979) Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unit, New York: Dutton. Bergmann, W. (1992) The Problem of Time in Sociology. An Overview of the Literature on the State of Theory and Research on the ‘Sociology of Time’, 1900–82, Time & Society January 1992, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 81–134. 471

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Capra, F. (1975) The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism, Boston: Shambala. Franck, G. (2003) How Time Passes. On Conceiving Time as a Process. In: The Nature of Time: Geometry, Physics and Perception, ed. by R. Buccheri, M. Saniga and W. M. Stuckey, Dodrecht: Kluwer, 91–103. Online at: http://www.iemar.tuwien.ac.at/publications. Gardner, H. (1983) Frames of Mind. The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, New York: Basic Books. Gurdjieff, G. (1964) All and Everything. Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson. An Objectively Impartial Criticism of the Life of Man, Volume 1, New York: Dutton. Haag, H. (2013) Das Körpergedächtnis und die Soziologie der Sinne. Eine Perspektive aud das Gesicht als Narbe der Vergangenheit, paper presented at the conference on “Soziales Gedächtnis, Erinnern und Vergessen” in the section “Sociology of knowledge”, March 2013, Munich. Hacking, I. (1999) The Social Construction of What?, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hahn, A. (2010) Kōrper und Gedächtnis, Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Hollister Mathis Masury, E. (2013) Ballett als somatische Transmission kulterelles Gedächtnis, paper presented at the conference on “Soziales Gedächtnis, Erinnern und Vergessen” in the section “Sociology of knowledge”, March 2013, Munich. Husserl, E. (1905) Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins, ed. R. Bohm, The Hague: M. Nijhoff. Partial English translation: The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1996. Husserl, E. (1931) Mèditations cartèsiennes. Introduction à la phénomènologie, Paris: Collin. Kanter, H. (2013) Performatorische Erinnerungen? Öffentliche Bildproduktionen als ikonisch fundierte Praktiken, paper presented at the conference on “Soziales Gedächtnis, Erinnern und Vergessen” in the section “Sociology of knowledge”, March 2013, Munich. Keller, R. and M. Meuser (eds.) (2011) Kōrperwissen, Heidelberg: Vs Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Koloma Beck, T. (2013) Das Kōrpergedächtnis des Krieges, paper presented at the conference on “Soziales Gedächtnis, Erinnern und Vergessen” in the section “Sociology of knowledge”, March 2013, Munich. Korzybski, A. (1933) Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, Chicago: International Non-Aristotelian Library, Institute of General Semantics. Leder, D. (1990) The Absent Body, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Lloyd, G. (1984) The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy, London: Methuen. Lowen, A. (1958) Physical Dynamics of Character Structure (The Language of the Body), New York: Grune and Stratton. Maturana, H. and F. Varela (1992) Tree of Knowledge. The Biological Roots of Human Understanding, Boston: Shambhala. Merit Müller, S. (2013) ER-innern Wissen als kōrperliche Tätigkeit am Fall des Ballet Trainings, paper ­presented at the conference on “Soziales Gedächtnis, Erinnern und Vergessen” in the section “Sociology of knowledge”, March 2013, Munich. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968) The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press (orig. ed. 1964). Merleau-Ponty, M. (1979) Il Corpo Vissuto, Milano: Il Saggiatore. Norman, D. A. (1988) The Psychology of Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books. Oppenheimer, J. R. (1954) Science and the Common Understanding, New York: Oxford University Press. Petersen, A. (2007) The Body in Question. A Socio-Cultural Approach, London: Routledge. Sacks, O. (1985) The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, London: Picador. Schützenberger, A. A. (1998) The Ancestor Syndrome – Transgenerational Psychotherapy and the Hidden Links in the Family Tree. London: Routledge (orig. ed. 1993). Sebald, G. (2013) Emotionen und (Körper-)Gedächtnis. In: Der Körper als Gedächtnis? Potenziale und Grenzen alltags- und körpersoziologischer Zugänge zu sozialem Erinnern und Vergessen, paper presented at the conference on “Soziales Gedächtnis, Erinnern und Vergessen” in the section “Sociology of knowledge”, March 2013, Munich. Sheldrake, R. (2003) The Sense of Being Stared At, New York: Three Rivers Press. Steiner, R. (1894) The Philosophy of Freedom. A Modern Philosophy of Life Developed by Scientific Methods, ed. by H. Collison (1916), London and New York: Putnam. Sudnow, D. (1978) Ways of the Hand. The Organization of the Improvised Conduct, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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36 Implicit memory, emotional experience and self-regulation The heart’s role in raising our consciousness baseline Rollin McCraty Introduction The ability to alter one’s responses and behaviors in order to keep them aligned with personal ideals, moral values, laws and other social standards is arguably the most important key to success in life. If capacity for intelligent, self-directed regulation is powerful enough, then regardless of inclinations, past experiences, or personality traits, people can usually do the adaptive or right thing in most situations they encounter (Baumeister et al. 2006). It has been shown that the practice of making efforts to self-regulate can produce broad improvements in self-regulatory capacity similar to strengthening a muscle, making people less vulnerable to depletion of internal reserves. When internal reserves are depleted, normal inner restraints are weakened. For many people, however, their self-regulatory capacity is far less than many would consider ideal. In fact, failures of self-regulation, especially of emotions and attitudes, are central to the vast majority of personal and social problems that plague modern societies. Therefore, the most important strength that the majority of people in society need to build is the capacity to self-regulate their emotions, attitudes and behaviors. Maintaining positive social connections and effectively dealing with stress and sustaining one’s resilience primarily involves learning to recognize and self-regulate the stream of ongoing thoughts and especially emotional undercurrents (e.g., judgment, negative projection, insecurity, worry) that create incoherence and waste energy. To survive, grow and reproduce, all organisms must take in more energy than they expend, a principle of biological systems and resilience called economy of action (Schnall et al. 2010). By learning to increasingly replace these depleting types of feelings with more positive, regenerative attitudes and feelings, we can establish a new inner baseline reference, which is a type of memory maintained in the neural architecture that organizes perception, feelings and behavior (McCraty et al. 2009). As pervasive and vital as they are in human growth and experience, emotions and effective ways to self-regulate them have long remained an enigma to science. This chapter explores recent scientific advances that help clarify the important role of memory in emotional experience and effective approaches to self-regulation that involves accessing our hearts’ intuitive capacities and shifting the rhythms of the heart. 473

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Many common emotion-regulation strategies operate on the assumption that all emotions follow thought, and thus by changing one’s thoughts, one should be able to gain control over one’s emotions. However, in the last decade, research in neuroscience has made it quite clear that emotional processes operate at a much higher speed than cognitive processes and frequently bypass the mind’s linear reasoning process entirely (LeDoux 1996). In other words, emotions do not always follow thought. In many cases, in fact, emotions occur independently of the cognitive system and can significantly bias or color the cognitive process and its output or decision (LeDoux 1993; Damasio 2003). Most contemporary researchers agree that cognition and emotion are both central and distinct functions mediated by separate but interconnecting neural systems. From a neuroscience perspective, bidirectional neural connections exist between the frontal cortex and the amygdala, which permit emotion-related input from the amygdala to modulate cortical activity. They also permit cognitive input from the cortex to modulate the amygdala’s emotional information processing (Pribram and McGuinness 1975; LeDoux 1994; LeDoux 1996). The quest to understand the complex interaction between different parts of the brain and how it relates to cognition and the felt experience of emotion has also been addressed through inquiry into the nature of consciousness. While it has been defined in a variety of ways, there is a good bit of consensus that consciousness can be understood as the awareness of one’s self and of one’s environment (Damasio 1999; Ratey 2001). Emerging lines of scientific thought suggest that this consistent sense of self is maintained in the intricate internal communication and interactions within nested hierarchies of neural networks and processes (Damasio 1999). A review of the nature of these patterns (implicit memory) in providing a stable reference for experience therefore becomes pertinent, as it seems they underlie a variety of processes that are central to optimal function.

The role of memory in emotional experience Recent years have seen the emergence of a new understanding of how the brain functions and how the heart and brain interact in a dynamic and complex relationship. Rather than assembling thoughts and feelings from bits of data like a digital computer, the brain is more like an analog processor that relates whole concepts or patterns to one another and looks for similarities and differences and relationships between them (Ratey 2001). Psychologists once maintained that emotions were purely mental expressions generated by the brain alone. We now know that emotions have as much to do with the body as they do with the brain. A current view widely held among neuroscientists and psycho-physiologists is that the emergence of emotional experience results from the ongoing interactions between the brain, the body and the external environment (Pribram and Melges 1969; Damasio 2003). The stage for this discussion is the model of emotion first developed by neuroscientist Karl Pribram (Pribram and Melges 1969). In Pribram’s theory, the brain is viewed as a complex pattern storage, identification and matching system. Simply said, past experience builds within us a set of familiar patterns or memories that are established and maintained in nested feedback loops in the neural architecture. The low-frequency oscillations generated by the heart and body in the form of afferent neural, hormonal and electrical patterns are the carriers of emotional information, while the higher frequency oscillations found in the EEG, ref lect the conscious perception and labeling of feelings and emotions. Inputs to the brain from both the external and internal environments contribute to the maintenance of these patterns. Many processes within the body provide constant rhythmic inputs with which the brain eventually becomes familiar. In other words, we establish sets 474

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of physiological and behavioral set points or default settings (baseline memories) that, once established, the brain and nervous system strive to maintain. Although more complex, it is analogous to setting the temperature to a certain setting on a thermostat which the heating system then works to maintain. The internal processes that contribute to the establishment and maintenance of these stable patterns or set points include afferent (ascending) neural input from the heart’s rhythmic activity, from digestive, respiratory and hormonal rhythms, as well as patterns of muscular tension, particularly facial expressions. These inputs are monitored continuously by the brain and help organize perception, feelings and behavior. Once a stable pattern is formed and stabilized in memory, all sensory input to the brain, from both the internal and external sensory systems, is compared to these stable patterns. In other words, these memory patterns act as a set point against which all current inputs are compared. A key understanding is that when there is a pattern match between the baseline pattern and the current inputs, the brain recognizes it as familiar, and we therefore experience it as comfortable. It’s important to understand that this is true even if the established set point is one of chaos, incoherence, confusion, feelings of being overwhelmed, anxiety or other similar emotions. In order to maintain continued stability and feelings of comfort, we must be able to maintain a match between our current experience—or “reality”—and one of our neural “programs” that were established in our memory (Miller et al. 1960). Mismatches in the input (new experiences) arouse or activate us depending upon the degree of mismatch, and in most cases, motivate an action to reestablish stability. When the mismatch is of sufficient magnitude, there is a temporary discontinuity. It is this departure from the familiar that gives rise to a signaling function; it is the experience of emotion that alerts us to the current state of the mismatch. It is interesting to note that in this context, the word “emotion” derives from the Latin emovere, which means “to move out or away from.” In addition to processes that monitor the inputs and controls for maintaining stability in the here-and-now, there are also matching processes that appraise the degree of consistency or inconsistency between past events or situations and the current ones and between the current ones and the projected future. These prospective appraisals can be divided into optimistic and pessimistic (Pribram 1970). If the appraisal does not result in a projected ability to return to stability, feelings of fear and anxiety can result. This appraisal could be due to past negative experience in similar situations or a lack of experience in the projected future situation. However, as we encounter new situations and learn that we are able to maintain stability, we can apply that experience to similar future situations without fear as we have a previously established program (memory) associated with success in dealing with the situation. Although inputs originating from many different bodily organs and systems are involved in the processes that ultimately determine our internal set points and inf luence emotional experience, it is now abundantly clear that the heart plays a particularly important role (McCraty 2009). The heart is the primary and most consistent source of dynamic rhythmic patterns in the body. Furthermore, the afferent networks connecting the heart and cardiovascular system with the brain are far more extensive than are the afferent systems associated with other major organs (Cameron 2002). Remarkably, we now know that the heart sends more neural traffic to the brain than the brain sends to the heart. The amygdala has been the subject of intense scrutiny in recent years. This brain center plays a key role in emotional memory and emotional processing (Aggleton 1992). Several studies have shown that cardiovascular afferent input connects to the central nucleus of the amygdala and that its activity patterns are specifically synchronized to the cardiac cycle and respond to this afferent information (Zhang et al. 1986; Frysinger and Harper 1990). 475

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Additionally, the heart is particularly sensitive and responsive to changes in a number of other psychophysiological systems. For example, heart rhythm patterns are modulated continually and rapidly by changes in the activity of either branch of the autonomic nervous system (ANS). Further, the heart’s extensive intrinsic network of sensory neurons enables it to detect and respond to variations in hormonal rhythms and patterns (Armour and Ardell 1994). The heart’s extensive intrinsic nervous system is sufficiently sophisticated to qualify as a “heart brain” in its own right (Armour 1991). Its complex circuitry enables it to sense, remember (both short and long-term), self-regulate and make decisions about cardiac control independent of the central nervous system (Armour and Kember 2004). The heart’s sensory neurons translate hormonal and mechanical information into neurological impulses which are processed in the intrinsic nervous system and then sent to the brain via afferent pathways in the vagus nerve and spinal column. In addition to functioning as a sophisticated information-processing and encoding center (Armour and Kember 2004), the heart is also an endocrine gland that produces and secretes hormones and neurotransmitters, including oxytocin (Armour 2003). The heart not only pumps blood but also continually transmits dynamic patterns of neurological, hormonal, pressure and electromagnetic information to the brain and throughout the body. Therefore, the multiple inputs from the heart and cardiovascular system to the brain are major contributors in establishing the dynamics of the baseline pattern or set point against which the “now” (current input) is compared. Once established, these set points (memories) become references for evaluating current and future actions and are updated or adjusted according to ongoing emotional experiences such as successes or failures in meeting life’s demands and challenges. To maintain stability as we encounter life’s events, we must self-regulate and make adjustments that return us to the “familiar” set point. These adjustments require us to expend energy to take an “action” which can be either an outward action (i.e., control of some kind over the external environment) or an internal adjustment (i.e., self-control of our inner environment). Since our psychophysiological systems are designed to maintain stability and resist change, returning to familiar set points gives us a feeling of security, while remaining in unfamiliar territory causes unrest, anxiety, fear, etc. This is true even if the established set point is one of chaos, incoherence or confusion. This means that lasting changes in emotional response patterns or behavioral improvements cannot be accomplished without the establishment of new baseline or reference patterns, which the system then strives to maintain.

Self-regulation and stability When the current input to the brain does not match an existing program, adjustments must be made in order to maintain control and stability. One way to reestablish control is by taking an outward action. For example, we are motivated to eat if we feel hungry and take action to find a source of food, or we run away or fight if threatened, or do something to draw attention to ourselves if feeling ignored. Alternatively, we can reestablish stability and gain control by self-regulating and making internal adjustments (without any overt action). Thus, stabilization is achieved through external action on the environment or through internal self-control. These processes are referred to, respectively, as motivational control and emotional control (Pribram 1967). Ultimately, when we achieve stability through our efforts, the results are feelings of satisfaction and gratification. By contrast, when there is a failure to achieve stability or control, feelings such as frustration, anxiety, panic, annoyance, apprehension, hopelessness or depression result. 476

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Encountering new situations or obstacles requires that we develop new strategies: we either take an external action to gain control or self-manage our internal systems. Once we learn how to successfully handle a new challenge effectively and maintain stability, the strategy (complex pattern) for dealing with it becomes familiar and part of our repertoire (Pribram 1963). In essence, we mature. Through this process, we increase both our ability to selfregulate emotions and our ability to more effectively deal with new situations. Pribram and many others conducted numerous experiments providing evidence that these sorts of internal adjustments, although commonplace, represent a complex interplay between peripheral and central processes. For example, the afferent input systems and even their receptors are modulated by the central nervous system, which alters information processing in the sensory input channel (Pribram 1971). In other words, the higher brain centers that monitor and label the pattern matching process can inhibit or “gate” the information f lowing into the brain. For example, where we focus our attention has a powerful effect on modulating inputs and thus on determining what gets processed at higher levels. In a noisy room filled with many conversations, for instance, we have the ability to tune out the noise and focus on a single conversation of interest. In a like manner, we can modulate pain from a stubbed toe or headache or desensitize ourselves to sensations like tickling and self-direct our emotions.

Arousal There is ample support that arousal occurs in response to novel or unfamiliar inputs and is one of the elements of emotional experience. In classical models of arousal, the amount of neural and/or hormonal activity generated in response to a stimulus or event determines whether the experience leads to familiarization or disruption. Arousal theory states that a correlation exists between the amount of a specific hormone or the amount of neural excitation and the amount of emotional arousal. However, this is only part of the story. Arousal can at times be associated with an increase in the amount of neural activity. Arousal can also occur without any increase in neural activity. In the latter case what does change, instead, is the pattern of activity in the nervous system (for example, variations in the time intervals between sequential firings of a neuron or group of neurons or which pathways are active). Therefore, the amount of neural activity does not always indicate the level of arousal (Pribram and Melges 1969). This is important as it shifts the focus from thinking in terms of amount of activity alone to understanding the importance of the pattern of activity. This is also related to the observation that different emotions are ref lected in the patterns of the heart rhythm. For example, during an emotional state shift, the pattern of beat-to-beat heart rate variability can shift dramatically, while the amount of variability and heart rate remains exactly the same. This is not to imply that changes in the amount of neural activity or amount of heart rate variability are not also important sources of information that contribute to ongoing emotional experience. However, in the context of the model presented here, such variations can also be considered as changes in pattern relative to a familiar baseline or set point (memory). When a new stimulus (mismatch) is presented to the brain from the external or internal sensory systems, a change in activity in the central and autonomic nervous systems is ­produced. If the response is short-lived (1–3 seconds), it is called arousal or an orienting reflex. If, however, the stimulus or event is recurrent, the brain adapts, and we habituate by updating the memories that serve as the reference. People who live in a noisy city, for example, adapt to the ambient noise and eventually become unaware of it. Subsequent to this adaptation, when 477

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Figure 36.1  Emotions are reflected in heart rhythm patterns Note: The heart rhythm pattern shown in the top graph, characterized by its erratic, irregular pattern (incoherence), is typical of negative emotions such as anger or frustration. The bottom graph shows an example of the coherent heart rhythm pattern that is typically observed when an individual is experiencing sustained, modulated positive emotions, in this case appreciation. Both recordings are from the same individual only a couple of minutes apart. The amount of variability and mean heart rate are the same in both examples, illustrating how the pattern of activity contains information in the absence of changes in physiological activation.

they take a trip to the quiet countryside, the lack of noise seems strange and is quite noticeable. The mismatch between the familiar noisy background input and quiet leads to an arousal reaction that gets our attention.

Attention Conscious awareness of anything, including our emotions, is not possible until it has captured our attention. Sensory neurons in our eyes, ears, nose, mouth and body are in continuous action, day and night, whether we are awake or asleep. The brain receives a steady stream of information about all the events the sensory systems are capable of detecting. It would be bewildering if we were continuously aware of all the incoming information from both the external and internal environments. In fact, we completely ignore most of the information arriving at the brain most of the time. Yet, any input is capable of shifting and dominating our attention. In order for this process to function, there must be mechanisms and processes that direct selective attention. The attention mechanisms must continuously scan the available information and assign priority, usually based on biological importance. Large, sudden, or novel occurrences have the greatest ability to grab our attention, and emotional reactions have a profound ability to capture and focus attention. Involuntary or primary attention is provoked by certain classes of stimuli that are novel or intense and which impinge upon our awareness regardless of ongoing activity. Voluntary 478

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attention, on the other hand, describes the process whereby the individual voluntarily self-regulates and determines the contents of his/her own awareness and the duration of focus. Current evidence suggests that this self-regulatory capacity relies on a limited resource akin to energy, which is used to interrupt the stream of consciousness and behavior and alter it. When this limited energy has been depleted, the individual’s further efforts at self-regulation are less successful than usual (Baumeister 2003). Although apparently unaware of Pribram’s theory, the basic principles of his theory have recently been extended by James Coan and colleagues at the University of Virginia to social interactions and networks. Coan calls this Social Baseline Theory and suggests that the primary environments to which humans are adapted are other humans, and that the human brain implicitly assumes that it is embedded within a relatively predictable social network characterized by familiarity, joint attention, shared goals and interdependence. In other words, social proximity is a “baseline” condition, and when proximity is maintained or reestablished, the brain is less vigilant for potential threats because it is familiar with the social environment. Thus, when we are in close proximity to our familiar social environment, and we have a match with our baseline state, we expend less emotional energy. We also expend less energy self-regulating. According to social baseline theory, being alone is more effortful, because a variety of activities require more energy expenditures due to decreased load sharing and risk distribution (Beckes and Coan 2011; Beckes et al. 2013; Maresh et al. 2013).

Emotional instability The baseline memory patterns maintained in the neural architecture are modified by neural and hormonal factors that affect the “bias” or sensitivity of the system. Thus, the system is more easily affected by changes in the input patterns associated with different psychophysiological states. In this way hormones provide important influences on the brain processes involved in the experience of emotion. When the neural systems that maintain the baseline reference patterns (memories) are in an unstable state (due to stress, anxiety, chemical stimulants, etc.), sensory input from either internal or external sources that would ordinarily be processed smoothly can be perceived as a mismatch and give rise to uncomfortable feelings. Thus, the stability of neural activity in the brain can predispose the individual towards either emotional and behavioral stability or instability. The reference patterns can also be temporarily destabilized by large, sudden changes in the pattern of afferent neural activity, such as those that occur during an emotionally charged situation. If a reference pattern is destabilized, a mismatch can be perceived even in the absence of novel input.

The role of the heart There is substantial evidence that the heart plays a unique role in synchronizing the ­activity across multiple systems and levels of organization. As the most powerful and consistent generator of rhythmic information patterns in the body, the heart is in continuous communication with the brain and body through multiple pathways: neurologically (through the ANS), biochemically (through hormones), biophysically (through pressure and sound waves) and energetically (through electromagnetic field interactions). The heart is uniquely well positioned to act as the “global coordinator” in the body’s symphony of functions to bind and synchronize the system as a whole (McCraty 2004; McCraty et al. 2009; McCraty and Childre 2010). Because of the extensiveness of the heart’s influence on physiological, cognitive and 479

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emotional systems, the heart provides a central point of reference from which the dynamics of such processes can be regulated. One of the research focuses of our laboratory over the last decade has been the study of the patterns and rhythms generated in various physiological systems during the experience of different thoughts and emotions. Through experimenting with numerous physiological measures, we have found that heart rate variability (heart rhythm) patterns are consistently the most dynamic and ref lective of changes in one’s emotional state (McCraty et al. 1995; McCraty et al. 2009). It is important to note that although changes in heart rate often co-vary with emotions, our research has found that it is the pattern of the heart’s rhythm that is primarily ref lective of the emotional state, especially in the case of emotions that do not lead to large autonomic nervous system (ANS) activations or withdrawals (McCraty et al. 1995; Tiller et al. 1996; McCraty et al. 2009). These changes in rhythmic patterns can be independent of heart rate, that is, one can have a coherent or incoherent pattern at higher or lower heart rates. Thus, it is the pattern of the rhythm (the ordering of changes in rate overtime) rather than the rate (at any point in time) that is most directly related to emotional dynamics and physiological synchronization. Physiological coherence, also referred to as heart coherence, cardiac coherence, or resonance, is a functional mode measured by heart rate variability (HRV) analysis wherein a person’s heart rhythm pattern becomes more ordered and sine wave like, at a frequency of around 0.1 Hz (10 seconds) (McCraty et al. 2009). A coherent state ref lects increased synchronization and resonance in higher-level brain systems and in the activity occurring in the two branches of the ANS, as well as a shift in autonomic balance toward increased parasympathetic activity. Shifting a system into a more coherent mode requires attention and effort, especially when first becoming familiar with the state and overcoming the inertia of our well-established baseline patterns. However, there is physiological evidence that the ongoing practice of coherence-building techniques facilitates a repatterning process in the neural architecture where coherence becomes established as a new, stable baseline reference memory (Bradley et al. 2010). Self-regulation of emotions and stress responses then becomes increasingly familiar and, eventually, automatic (McCraty et al. 2009; McCraty and Childre 2004). This makes it easier for individuals to maintain their “center” and increase their mental and emotional f lexibility and capacity to remain in charge of themselves, which is the essence of resiliency. An important implication of this work in relation to the ideas developed in this chapter is that the rhythmic patterns generated by the heart are not only reflective of emotions but actually play a key role in influencing moment-to-moment emotional perception and experience. In short, through its extensive interactions with the brain and body, the heart emerges as a critical component of the emotional system. The pattern of the heart rhythm conveys messages from the heart to the brain. Accordingly, an individual who has developed a robust resiliency and self-regulatory capacity will respond differently to internal and external stimuli in terms of the heart rhythm pattern that is generated. As discussed above, monitoring the alterations in the rates, rhythms and patterns of afferent traffic is a key function of the subcortical and cortical systems in the brain and is a pivotal component of the mechanism of self-regulation. At the brain stem level, the current patterns are compared to set points that control blood pressure, affect respiration rate and gate the f low of activity in the descending branches of the autonomic system. From there, these signals cascade up to a number of subcortical centers such as the thalamus, hypothalamus and amygdala, which are involved in the processing 480

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Afferent Pathways Cerebral Cortex • Body perception • Pain perception • Hunger perception • Arousal (sleep/waking)

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Figure 36.2  D  iagram of the known afferent pathways by which information from the heart and cardiovascular system modulates brain activity Note: Note the direct connections from the NTS to the amygdala, hypothalamus and thalamus. Although not shown, there is also evidence emerging of a pathway from the dorsal vagal complex that travels directly to the frontal cortex.

of emotion. For example, when we sense a mismatch between our actual heart rate and the habituated heart rate, we generate a feeling (e.g., excitement or anxiety if heart rate is accelerated). The specific feeling experienced may ref lect the nature of the mismatch. Importantly, a mismatch may be registered not only due to changes in heart rate but also due to changes in the pattern of the afferent traffic. Coherent rhythms are familiar to a “healthy” system as they have occurred spontaneously many times during sustained positive emotional states. In many individuals, however, a coherent pattern is rare and relatively unfamiliar to the brain. Several aspects of the emotional process are affected by intentionally activating a positive emotion while breathing at a 10-second rhythm, which physiologically shifts the pattern of afferent cardiovascular input to the brain. First, a positive emotion which is associated with more coherent rhythms stabilizes the neural systems that maintain the baseline or reference patterns against which incoming information is compared. In healthy systems, the more coherent pattern is recognized and results in more uplifting feelings, security and comfort. However, if the brain has not developed a reference for positive emotions, the shift to coherence can at first feel uncomfortable. 481

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With consistent practice though, these more coherent patterns become increasingly familiar to the brain, thus allowing a more accurate response that does not label the input as a deviation from the familiar. It is in this way that the heart-focused self-regulation techniques described below facilitate the repatterning process, whereby the maladaptive patterns are progressively replaced by healthier physiological, emotional, cognitive and behavioral patterns as the “automatic” or familiar way of being (McCraty 2003; McCraty and Childre 2004).

Uncovering conversations between the heart and brain While cardiovascular afferent pathways were identified during the early years of autonomic research (Neundörfer and Hilz 1998), their study was not emphasized until much later. Some of the seminal work on the relationship between heart-brain interactions was conducted by John and Beatrice Lacey, who were the first to postulate a causal role of afferent cardiovascular input in modulating perceptual and sensory-motor performance (Lacey 1967; Lacey and Lacey 1970; Lacey and Lacey 1974). The Laceys’ observations directly challenged the “arousal” or “activation” theory proposed by Cannon. In essence, Cannon believed that all of the physiological indicators underlying emotion moved predictably in concert with the brain’s response to a given stimulus. Presumably, autonomic responses all increased together when we were aroused and decreased in unison when we were at rest and the brain was entirely in control of both these processes (Cannon 1929). The Laceys showed that physiological responses did not always move together and that the heart in particular seemed to have its own peculiar logic that frequently diverged from the direction of other ANS responses. The selectivity of the heart’s response indicated that it was not merely mechanically responding to an arousal signal from the brain; rather, it seemed to behave as if it had a mind of its own (Lacey 1959; Lacey et al. 1963; Lacey 1967; Lacey and Lacey 1970; Lacey and Lacey 1974; Lacey and Lacey 1978). They showed that the cardiovascular system modulates cortical functions via afferent input from the baroreceptors in the heart, aortic arch and carotid arteries (Lacey 1967; Ostir et al. 2001). The primary focus of their research was on the activity occurring within a single cardiac cycle, and although they were able to confirm that the heart’s activity modulated cognitive performance, later studies produced inconsistent results. The inconsistency was resolved by Wölk and Velden, at the University of Osnabrück in Germany, who showed that cognitive performance actually f luctuated across the entire cardiac cycle at a rhythm around 10 Hz. They updated the hypothesis by showing that the inf luence on cortical function was mediated via a synchronizing effect on the neurons in the thalamus, which in turn synchronizes global cortical activity (Lacey 1967; Lacey and Lacey 1970; Lacey and Lacey 1974; Velden and Wölk 1987; Wölk and Velden 1987; Wölk and Velden 1989). They also found that it is the pattern and stability (the rhythm) of the afferent input within the cardiac cycle, rather than the number of neural bursts, that are important (Armour and Kember 2004). Further research in neurocardiology has established that the interactions between the heart and brain are much more complex than previously thought and that patterns of afferent activity occur over time scales ranging from milliseconds to minutes and not just within a single cardiac cycle (Wölk and Velden 1987). One finding is that the heart’s intrinsic nervous system has both a short-term and a long-term memory capacity, which affects afferent rhythms related to both mechanical factors (pressure, HR and rate of change) occurring over milliseconds (single cycle) and activity related to hormonal and mechanical factors that operate over seconds to minutes (Armour and Kember 2004; Armour 2003; Ardell et al. 2009). 482

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This led our research team to postulate that the organization of the heart’s rhythmic activity over time scales longer than the cardiac cycle also have a direct effect on cognitive processes. We called this the Heart Rhythm Coherence Hypothesis (McCraty et al. 2009). It postulates that the pattern and stability of beat-to-beat changes in heart rate encode information over macroscopic time scales which can inf luence cognitive performance and emotional experience. Several studies have since indicated that heart rhythm coherence over a period of time is indeed associated with significant improvements in cognitive performance (McCraty et al. 2009; Ginsberg et al. 2010; Lloyd et al. 2010).

Heartbeat evoked potentials A valuable technique for the study of how and where information flows to and through the brain is evoked potential analysis. Evoked potentials are obtained using signal averaging, a procedure for separating a known repetitive signal from other signals. When the heart’s afferent signals are being studied, the ECG R-wave is used as the timing source for the signal averaging and the resulting waveforms are called heartbeat evoked potentials (HBEPs) (Montoya et al. 1993). Experiments by Rainer Schandry and others have provided direct evidence that afferent information from the heart evokes cortical responses analogous to “classical” sensory event-related potentials (Montoya et al. 1993; Montoya 1994; Schandry and Montoya 1996; McCraty 2009; Mackinnon et al. 2013). This processing of cardiovascular afferent information is most pronounced at the frontocortical areas, a brain region known to be particularly involved in executive functions. It has been shown that a reduced amplitude of the HBEP is significantly correlated with reduced awareness of body sensations (Schandry and Leopold 1997). Furthermore, psychological factors such as motivation, attention to the area of the heart, emotional state and general perceptual sensitivity, have been found to alter HBEPs in the brain (Montoya et al. 1993; Schandry and Montoya 1996). These findings are in agreement with our findings that focusing attention in the area of the heart and generating a positive emotion alters HBEPs, indicating a modulation of cortical processing (McCraty 2009; Mackinnon et al. 2013).

The intuitive heart Given the central role of the heart in creating coherence and its association with heartfelt positive emotions, it is not surprising that one of the strongest common threads uniting the views of diverse cultures, religious and spiritual traditions throughout human history has been the universal regard for the human heart as the source of love, wisdom, intuition and courage. Everyone is familiar with such expressions as “put your heart into it,” “learn it by heart,” “speak from your heart” and “sing with all your heart”—all of which suggest an implicit knowledge that the heart is more than just a physical pump that sustains life. What such expressions reflect is something that is often called the “intuitive heart” or “spiritual heart.” Throughout history, people have turned to the intuitive heart, sometimes referred to as their “inner voice,” “soul,” or “higher power,” as a source of wisdom and guidance. Interestingly, polls conducted by the Pew Research Center found that 95 percent of Americans believe in some form of a higher power as does 85 percent of the world’s population. The surveys also showed that scientists are roughly half as likely to believe in a universal spirit or higher power. There is compelling evidence to suggest that the physical heart is coupled to a field of information that is not bound by the classical limits of time and space (McCraty et al. 2004a; 483

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McCraty et al. 2004b). This evidence comes from a rigorous experimental study that demonstrated that the heart receives and processes information about a future event before the event actually happens (McCraty et al. 2004a; McCraty et al. 2004b). The study’s results provide surprising data showing that both the heart and brain receive and respond to pre-stimulus information about a future event before the event occurs. Even more tantalizing are clear indications that the heart receives intuitive information before the brain and that the heart sends a different pattern of afferent signals to the brain prior to an adverse future event which modulates the frontal cortex, as assessed with heartbeat evoked potential analysis. In addition, when study participants were in a coherent state prior to the experimental protocols, they were significantly more attuned to the information from the heart (McCraty et al. 2004b). This suggests that the heart is directly coupled to a source of information that interacts with the multiplicity of energetic fields in which the body is embedded. What is meant by terms such as the “intuitive heart” or “heart intelligence” is what my colleagues and I call the energetic heart, which is coupled to a deeper part of one’s self. Many call this their “higher self ” or their “higher capacities,” and this is what physicist David Bohm called our implicate order and undivided wholeness (Bohm and Hiley 1993). We use the term energetic systems to refer to the functions we cannot directly measure, touch, or see, such as our emotions, thoughts and intuitions. Although these functions have loose correlations with biological activity patterns, they nevertheless remain covert and hidden from direct observation. Several notable scientists have proposed that such functions operate primarily in the frequency domain outside of time and space and have suggested mechanisms as to how they can interact with biological processes (Pribram 1991; Schempp 1992; Marcer and Schempp 1998; Pribram and Bradley 1998; Tiller et al. 2001; Mitchell 2004; Bradley 2007; Laszlo 2008). As discussed above, the physical heart has extensive afferent connections to the brain and can modulate perception and emotional experience. Our experience suggests that the physical heart also has communication channels connecting it with the energetic heart. Therefore, heart intelligence is the f low of higher awareness and intuition we experience when the mind and emotions are brought into synchronistic alignment with the heart. When we are heartcentered and coherent, we have a tighter coupling and closer alignment with our deeper source of intuitive intelligence and are able to more intelligently self-regulate our thoughts and emotions (McCraty et al. 2004b). There is an increased f low of intuitive information, which is communicated via the emotional energetic system to the mind and brain systems, resulting in a stronger connection with our deeper “inner voice.” Practicing shifting to a more coherent state increases intuitive awareness and leads to the establishment of new baseline reference patterns and sustained shifts in perception and world views from which better informed and more intelligent decisions can be discriminated. This process elevates consciousness and our awareness of self and connections with others.

Positive emotion: refocusing tools and techniques The research on heart-brain interactions and intuition has informed the development of a set of self-regulation techniques, known as the HeartMath System (Childre 1994; Childre and Martin 1999; Childre and Cryer 2000; Childre and Rozman 2002; Childre and Rozman 2005). The HeartMath process offers individuals a systematic and reliable means to intentionally self-regulate and shift out of a state of emotional unease or stress into a “new” positive state of emotional calm and stability. This occurs as a result of a process in which the individual intentionally activates a positive or calm emotional state as a future target and activates 484

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a shift in patterns of the heart’s activity to a more coherent state that enables the individual to achieve and maintain stability and emotional composure. Studies conducted across diverse populations in laboratory, organizational, educational and clinical settings have demonstrated that the HeartMath coherence-building techniques are effective in producing both immediate and sustained reductions in stress and its associated disruptive and dysfunctional emotions, together with improvements in many dimensions of psychosocial well-being (McCraty et al. 1995; Tiller et al. 1996; McCraty et al. 1998; McCraty et al. 1999; McCraty et al. 2003). Collectively, results indicate that such techniques are easily learned and employed, produce rapid improvements, have a high rate of compliance, can be sustained over time and are readily adaptable to a wide range of ages and demographic groups. The techniques are designed to enable people to intervene in the moment when negative and disruptive emotions are triggered, thus interrupting the body’s normal stress response and initiating a shift toward increased coherence. This shift facilitates higher cognitive functioning, intuitive access and increased emotional regulation, all of which normally are compromised during stress and negative emotional states. This shift in the pattern of the heart’s input to the brain thus serves to reinforce the selfgenerated positive emotional shift making it easier to sustain. Through consistent use of HeartMath tools, the coupling between the psychophysiological coherence mode and positive emotions is further reinforced.

Conclusion Through considering Pribram’s premise of cortical control of afferent input and monitoring and labeling of a departure from stable, familiar patterns, it becomes clear that both the brain and the entire body are involved in the full experience and expression of emotions. With this understanding in mind, we can view the experience of emotion as emerging from an intricate array of interactions occurring within a complex system. Broadly speaking, its main components include the brain, heart, nervous system, hormonal system, and body. The heart is given particular relevance in the emotional system due to its unique degree of afferent input and its consistent generation of dynamic rhythmic patterns that are closely coupled with changes in emotional state. From a generalized perspective, one of the ways an emotion is generated is through the comparison of information received from the external sensory systems, (e.g., sights, sounds, and smells) against preexisting memories. This processing occurs at unconscious levels, unless attention is captured, and results in changes in the patterns of descending autonomic activity flowing to the body. This leads to a wide variety of specific changes in biochemical outputs and biophysical states, such as alterations in patterns of muscle tension (especially in the face), adrenal secretions, vascular resistance, cardiac output, and heart rhythms. These alterations, in turn, result in changes in the afferent inputs from the body back to the brain, which are then compared to a set of preexisting reference patterns. This ascending bodily input is crucial to the felt experience of an emotion and may or may not reinforce the cognitive-level appraisal and labeling of the feeling. The process continues as the system makes external and internal adjustments in order to maintain stability and, depending upon the outcome, can further color and add textures to the emotional experience. Of course, this is only one example, as the process can also be initiated by changes in the internal systems alone, such as input from the energetic systems, as well as through many combinations of the internal and external sensory systems’ interactions with the reference patterns and memories. Therefore, keys to effective 485

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self-regulation include increased awareness of one’s emotional state and making self-directed efforts to shift one’s heart rhythms into a more coherent state while activating a positive or calm emotion, which increases access to one’s intuitive capacities. Most people know what it feels like to be in a harmonious state, the place where our hearts, minds and bodies are united in a feeling of wholeness. When we are in this state, we feel intuitively connected not only to our deepest selves, but also to others. This state has also come to be referred to as higher consciousness, a state that is widely thought as central to improving social and global well-being. Scientific implications of deciphering the complex interactions between physical heart, brain, memory and our energetic heart potentially lead us to gaining mastery over a state in which personal, social and global affairs may be handled with wisdom, compassion and positive innovation. We call this state of internal and external connectedness “coherence.” Increased personal coherence can be achieved as people learn to more consistently self-regulate their emotions from a more intuitive, intelligent and balanced inner reference. When more individuals in families, workplaces, and communities increase and stabilize their coherence baselines, it can lead to increased social and global coherence.

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37 Cell memory of an ancestral state Going backward across our life span to resume self-healing abilities Carlo Ventura

Cellular rhythm and the emergence of cell memory: a clue from embryo development Early after birth, a consistent number of mechanisms that have played a major role in embryo development continue to act in order to maintain the structural/functional identity of cells and tissues throughout the entire life span. It is now evident that most of these mechanisms are orchestrated by adult stem cells that have been found virtually in all organs of the human body. In any tissue, populations of adult stem cells progressively orchestrate their interaction with the recipient organ, embedding themselves within a specialized architecture or microenvironment: the niche. Therefore, in vivo, stem cells reside within such a highly dynamic microenvironment, where they receive complex physical stimuli, occurring as time-scaled, as well as synchronous, events. Within the niche, the extracellular environment is fashioned as a real matrix (extracellular matrix) displaying extremely fine hierarchical topographies (nanotopographies) which make the stem cell population cross-talking with other nonstem elements (1). In this multifaceted domain, multiple signals self-assemble as oscillatory patterns, undergoing synchronization and phase coherent organization which associate with remarkable structural and functional changes. In fact, it is now clear that not only is our macroscopic life organized throughout a seeming network of rhythms, but also rhythm is an unavoidable manifestation of life itself at the single cell level and even at the molecular level. To this end, it turns out that the energetic metabolism of the cell (2), as well as the intracellular homeostasis of signaling ions, like Ca 2+ and H+ (3), are all fashioned through precise oscillatory patterns and that rhythm synchronization is an inherent feature in the ability of these signaling molecules to drive cellular homeostasis and fate in a wide variety of contexts, including lineage commitment in stem cells, and the specification of developmental patterning in the embryo. Embryo development relies on the timely proliferation of progenitor cells and their subsequent differentiation into multiple lineages. Modulation and orchestration of the timing of cell differentiation, and cell fate choice are key issues for making organs of the right size, shape, and cell composition. All these steps involve rhythmic changes in the expression of 489

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multiple genes and proteins, the synchronization of these rhythmic events, and the extreme precision in recalling antecedent rhythms that are continuously decanted and combined into newly emerging oscillation of transcripts and signaling molecules. This dynamic recalling throughout space and time is at the basis of cell memory development. In the entire organism, cell proliferation and differentiation are antagonistically regulated by multiple basic helixloop-helix (bHLH) activator and repressor genes. In particular, the Hes bHLH repressor genes control essential developmental pathways by maintaining self-renewal of progenitor cells and regulating binary cell fate decisions (4). In the developing nervous system, stem cells proliferate and sequentially give rise to different cell types by modulating their differentiation potential. Without Hes genes such as Hes1, stem cells prematurely differentiate into certain types of neurons only, and are depleted before they have proliferated sufficiently to provide all neuronal and glial cell types. This results in small and deformed brain structures. Hes genes also function as biological clocks, measuring time in developmental events, such as somite segmentation. It has been shown that the expression of Hes1 and Hes7 oscillates with a periodicity of 2 hours. Hes1 regulates the timing of biological events in many cell types, such as fibroblasts, whereas Hes7 functions as the segmentation clock. Hes1 oscillation is cell-autonomous and relies on negative autoregulation. After induction, Hes1 protein represses the expression of its own gene by directly binding to its promoter. The short-living repression, due to the short half-life of the mRNA and protein, accounts for the observed autonomously initiated oscillatory pattern. Thus, at any given time, Hes1 expression levels are variable within and between cells, which may enable a cell to mediate a different response to the same stimulus. Hes1 oscillation may regulate the timing of cellular events, such as the cell cycle, but its precise roles are unknown. Within the Hes family of genes, Hes7 is an essential component of the segmentation clock. Somites, the segmental units that later give rise to the vertebrae, ribs, skeletal muscles, and dermis, are formed by the segmentation of the anterior region of the presomitic mesoderm (5, 6). This event is repeated every 2 hours in mouse embryos. It has been suggested that this periodic event is controlled by a biological clock, called the segmentation clock. It was first reported that the expression of chairy1, a chick homolog of mouse Hes1, is periodically propagated in a wave-like fashion initiating at the posterior end and moving towards the anterior region of the presomitic mesoderm (PSM) (propagation is classified into three phases) (7). Each wave leads to the generation of a pair of somites. In the mouse PSM, Hes1, Hes5, and Hes7 are expressed in a similar fashion to each other, but Hes7 is the most important for somite segmentation. This wave-like expression of Hes7 is elicited by its oscillatory expression in each PSM cell. One of its downstream target genes is the glycosyltransferase lunatic fringe (Lfng), which regulates Notch activity by glycosylation (8, 9). Hes7 protein represses transcription from the Lfng promoter as well as from its own, and thus Lfng expression oscillates in phase with Hes7 expression (10). Lfng periodically inhibits Notch signaling and thereby generates oscillations in Notch activity (11–13), which may in turn inf luence Hes7 oscillation. It is thought that the combined effects of these coupled negativefeedback loops on Hes7 and Lfng expression are important for sustained and synchronized oscillations and for the correct timing of the biological clock. Embryo development and lineage commitment in stem cells are also associated with the emergence of lineage-specific chromosomal topologies. Recent data provide evidence that chromatin remodeling, as it occurs during the differentiation of multipotent stem cells, involves cell-specific nuclear organization, and dramatic changes in total genome order that can be modeled using the mathematical approaches of distance matrices and coupled oscillators (14). Commitment of the progenitor cells results in an initial increase in entropy at 490

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both the level of gene coregulation and chromosomal organization, which may represent a phase transition, followed by a progressive decline in entropy during differentiation. The stabilization of a highly ordered state in the differentiated cell types results in lineage-specific chromosomal topologies and is related to the emergence of coherence or self-organization between chromosomal associations and coordinate gene regulation. These data suggest that even chromatin remodeling and coupling of changes in genome structure and function during (stem) cell commitment may imply complex dynamics of entangled oscillatory patterns. Synchronization of multiple oscillators at single stem cell level involves the temporal and spatial organization of cellular ion homeostasis and electric microcurrent in wavelet/wavelike fashion. A typical example of multifaceted synchronization among multiple oscillatory patterns is provided by cardiac myocytes. In this field, there is an intense interest in differentiating embryonic stem cells to engineer biological pacemakers as an alternative to electronic pacemakers for patients with cardiac pacemaker function deficiency (15). In fact, deciphering the signaling events that lead to a timely assembly of cellular oscillators into functionally competent pacemaker cells would have obvious implications in the cell therapy of severe arrhythmias. Intriguingly, although it was long thought that synchrony and disorder were mutually exclusive steady states for a network of identical oscillators, it is now clear that, within mechanical oscillators coupled in a hierarchical network, chimeras emerge naturally from a competition between two antagonistic synchronization patterns (16). Martens and colleagues have recently implemented the simplest form of nonlocal coupling that can be achieved using a hierarchical network with two subpopulations: within each subpopulation, oscillators are coupled strongly, whereas the coupling strength between the two subpopulations is weaker (16). They placed N identical metronomes with a nominal beating frequency f on two swings, which can move freely in a plane. Oscillators within one population were coupled strongly by the motion of the swing onto which the metronomes are attached. As f is increased, more momentum is transferred to the swing, effectively leading to a stronger coupling among the metronomes. A single swing follows a phase transition from a disordered state to a synchronized state as the coupling within the population increases. In their mathematical model, the authors show that self-organization is controlled by elementary dynamical equations from mechanics that are ubiquitous in many natural and technological systems (16). These findings are of particular relevance, providing evidence that a symmetry-breaking mechanism may be a prevalent feature in systems exhibiting collective behavior, whether they are power grids, optomechanical crystals, or living cells! On the whole, a major consideration from the above reported findings is that the intrinsic rhythmic nature of any cellular event and the signaling mechanisms that drive cell homeostasis and fate are fashioned dynamically throughout space and time, with an apparent scale-free plight for recalling and re-elaborating oscillatory patterning into phase coherent rhythms. This may be the context where (stem)cell experience and memory develop, creating the building blocks of the information needed to connect multipotency (the ability to differentiate into multiple lineages) with tissue homeostasis and/or the needs for tissue repair.

The memory of embryonic mechanisms continues throughout the adult life During embryonic development, as well as in postnatal life, our cells are continuously exposed to a host of stimuli to which they adapt and respond by activating intracellular signaling pathways and modulating the expression of nuclear genes. A typical example is the adult heart. 491

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In the presence of stressful stimuli, this organ exhibits a hypertrophic response of its cardiomyocytes, which leads to a structural and functional remodeling of the entire myocardium. This reactive growth response requires de novo synthesis of contractile and structural proteins, obtained through a complex series of events culminating in gene expression reprogramming (17). GATA-4 is a zinc-finger transcription factor highly responsible for stem cell differentiation into cardiomyocytes during embryogenesis. In human hearts, GATA-4 has also been demonstrated to be a critical regulator of cardiac development, as shown by the association between GATA-4 mutations and the presence of congenital cardiac malformations (18). The specific effects of GATA-4 deletion during embryonic age have been extensively investigated in genetically modified mouse models. Mice homozygous for a GATA-4 null allele (19) or homozygous GATA-4-deficient mice (GATA-4−/−) (20) die early in development because of abnormal embryogenesis and heart tube formation. Very recently, by the aid of sophisticated molecular biology approaches, it has been possible to dissect the role of GATA-4 in cardiac remodeling of the normal heart and in response to both pathological and physiological stressors. Interestingly, gene-targeted mice with marked loss of GATA-4 protein survived into adulthood but displayed progressive cardiac enlargement and dysfunction that was correlated to GATA-4 levels (21). These hearts were also characterized by increased rates of cardiomyocyte apoptosis (programmed cell death). Comprehensive microarray analysis also revealed that GATA-4 deletion significantly altered the expression patterns for a large number of genes of which at least three (PKCε, Bcl6, and caspase 12) are known to be involved in cell survival. These data nicely demonstrate the important role GATA-4 plays as a regulator of gene expression to maintain normal cardiac homeostatic remodeling in the unstressed adult heart by promoting cell survival and inhibiting programmed cell death. Hence, the driving mechanisms that served to develop through the embryonic life, ­substantially contribute to maintain us during our adult journey. Striking evidence for this view came recently from retrospective carbon dating of human hippocampal cells, which confirms substantial adult neurogenesis and suggests that the process contributes to brain function. This lesson sadly came from meta-analysis of the effects of above-ground nuclear bomb tests carried out more than 50 years ago, resulting in elevated atmospheric levels of the radioactive carbon-14 isotope (14C), which steadily decline over time. In a very recently published study, Spalding et al. used measurements of 14C concentration in the DNA of brain cells from deceased patients to determine the neurons’ age, and demonstrated that there is substantial adult neurogenesis in the human hippocampus (22). They provided thorough information on the extent of neurogenesis and showed that there is surprisingly large amount of this process, suggesting a role for the continuation of an embryonic initiated mechanism in adult neural turnover and human cognition. Cells were retrospectively dated in postmortem brains by measuring the levels of 14C. Since 14C is taken up by plants, and by animals that eat plants, humans also take up 14C at atmospheric levels, which have been declining at a known rate since the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963 put an end to above-surface nuclear bomb testing. The 14C finds its way into the DNA of proliferating cells, where it is integrated into chromosomes as they are duplicated before division. The proportion of 14C compared to the stable, and vastly more abundant, carbon-12 isotope (12C), the levels of which remain constant over time, provides a date of birth for individual cells. The analysis of the brains of 55 individuals of various ages, from 19 to 92, which focused on the assessment of 14C to 12C in the DNA of neurons in the dentate gyrus, a portion of the hippocampus known to be important for learning and memory, revealed that one-third of the neurons are regularly renewed throughout life, amounting to the addition of roughly 492

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1,400 new neurons per day, with the rate declining modestly with age (22). In the proposed model, a subpopulation of neurons continuously renews, whereas another population does not renew at all. The renewing cells live for a much shorter period of time than others, but are continuously turned over. These data also suggest that if new neurons are also more plastic in humans, neurogenesis may play a key role in brain function by maintaining a steady supply of younger cells, despite an overall neuronal loss with age. In the effort of staying forever young, a self-renewing part of our brain may supply unique solutions to learning, memory, and high cognitive functions essential for humans. On the whole, these findings indicate that a memory of initial embryonic steps exists at the molecular and cellular level during the adult life and is a repository of the f low of information that control tissue/organ homeostasis and self-healing.

Cellular reprogramming: when somatic cells remember the ancestral period of life In 2006 and 2007, Shinya Yamanaka made a groundbreaking discovery that would win him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine just six years later: he found that both mouse embryonic and human adult specialized somatic cells can be turned back (reprogrammed) into pluripotent, embryonic-like stem cells (23, 24). This seminal discovery was achieved by transferring of a few sets of genes (3–4 stemness-related genes) by the aid of viral vectors into human skin fibroblasts. These induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) were found to be able to make any type of cell in the body. Only embryonic stem cells are naturally pluripotent. Yamanaka’s discovery means that theoretically any dividing cell of the body can now be turned into a pluripotent stem cell. Nevertheless, the method invented by Yamanaka was based on the use of lentiviral vectors, a strategy that is not readily conceivable in clinical practice. Moreover, the yield of iPS differentiating along crucial developmental fates, including cardiac, neural, and skeletal muscle cells, was extremely low (usually below 1 percent), with a substantial proportion of undifferentiated cells that remained at the level of embryonic-like cells, with a consequent oncogenic risk. Despite these limitations, the results obtained by Yamanaka and colleagues clearly highlight the existence of an ancestral memory within our specialized somatic cells, going back to the initial clock when the embryo is fashioned from a single fertilized totipotent cell. This awareness prompted us to search for alternative strategies of cell reprogramming that may entail safety, efficacy, and transferability to the clinical use. We started with the consideration that all life exists within a seeming infinity of rhythms: vibrations at the atomic and molecular levels are the major conductors for our development and the maintenance of our identity. As discussed above, oscillatory patterns and their synchronization into resonating rhythms identify dynamic contexts that transcend the boundary of a single cell level, extending to and specifying the long-range assembly of tissues, organs, and of the entire individual. We hypothesized that a major driving force in the orchestration of cellular rhythms may result from inherent, endogenous electrical or electromagnetic activities existing in living cells. Finding a strategy to finely modulate these activities may ultimately result in the possibility of tuning cellular expression of potency and fate. In this regard, measurements of the response of organisms to the near field exposure show that this response, i.e., its absorption, transmission, and emission (ATE), of the organism, markedly differs from the behavior expected if one treats the organism as a simple dissipative conductive body (25). The results point to the at least partial active response of the organism. This active electrical response can be attributed at least partially to the response of the endogenous electromagnetic field of organisms, first 493

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postulated by Fröhlich (26), and further elaborated on the basis of the quantum field theory by Del Giudice et al. (27–29), and to the material structures that form an inseparable whole with this field. The near electric field inf luence, both on the organism and of the organism on the sensors, can be established either through the vicinity or through a direct nonconductive contact. This response correlates with the physiological state of an organism. Measurements performed with mealworm beetles indicated that the normal living organisms absorb and use some energy of the near electric field and therefore the transmitted (re-emitted) signal is weaker. The inactivated or the dead organisms are more passive electrical absorbers. Further support to the idea that living cells may rely on and respond to endogenous electromagnetic oscillations came from recent assessments of some properties of the cytoskeleton, which plays an essential role in the orchestration of mechanical and signaling patterning of living cells. Microtubules are important structures in the cytoskeleton, and have long been shown to display intrinsic oscillatory patterns. Moreover, microtubules are electrically polar. This suggests that certain microtubule normal vibration modes efficiently generate an oscillating electric field. Accordingly, there is strong experimental evidence which indicates electrodynamic activity of multiple cell types in the frequency region from kHz to GHz, and the microtubules are expected to be the source of this activity (30). In a recent and comprehensive review, Zhao and Zhan (31) integrated a large body of studies reporting the existence of dielectrophoretic forces and electromagnetic interaction around and between cells in different experimental conditions, discussing how cellular dynamics may be regulated by electric fields generated by synchronized oscillations of microtubules, centrosomes, and chromosomes. The intensities of electric field and of radiated electromagnetic power from the whole cellular microtubule network have been calculated (30). The subunits of microtubules (tubulin heterodimers) can be approximated by elementary electric dipoles. Mechanical oscillation of microtubules can be represented by the spatial function which modulates the dipole momentum of subunits. In these studies, the field around oscillating microtubules has been calculated as a vector superposition of contributions from all modulated elementary electric dipoles, which comprise the cellular microtubule network (30). Theoretical analysis of the electromagnetic radiation and field characteristics of the whole cellular microtubule network indicate that a macroscopic detection system (antenna) is not suitable for measurement of cellular electrodynamic activity in the radiofrequency region since the radiation rate from single cells is very low (lower than 10 -20 W). Low noise nanoscopic detection methods with high spatial resolution, which enable measurement in the cell vicinity, are desirable in order to measure cellular electrodynamic activity reliably. These studies suggest the possibility that cell behavior and fate may be inf luenced by ­electromagnetic fields. In this regard, we have previously shown that exposure of mouse embryonic stem (ES) cells to extremely low frequency pulsed magnetic fields (50 Hz, 0.8 MTrsm) was able to enhance selectively the commitment to a cardiogenic lineage, increasing the number of spontaneously beating, ES-derived cardiomyocytes (32). The effect was mediated by an increase in the transcription rate of a number of cardiogenic and cardiac-specific genes, involving the expression of their biologically active end-products (32). For decades scientists have attempted to drive stem cell fate through the use of chemistry. These findings have shown for the first time the possibility of using magnetic energy to drive stem cell growth and differentiation and lead to a number of interrelated considerations: (i) electromagnetic resonance modes between the endogenous cellular radioelectric (electromagnetic) oscillations are very likely occurring, although hardly detectable; (ii) every particular level of cellular hierarchy conceivably possesses a characteristic spectrum of endogenous electromagnetic oscillations originating from various processes; (iii) intra- and inter-level 494

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resonances should occur and provide a networking landscape between these processes. These considerations may harbor an important implication: modulation of these resonance modes may be conceived as a new strategy to handle (stem)cell homeostasis and fate. Accordingly, this may be achieved by appropriate delivery of radiofrequency magnetic fields to an entire organism or isolated cells, in conjunction with the establishment of a resonance circuit loop between the cellular microcurrents induced/modulated by the delivered magnetic field and the targeted organism (or cells) itself. We have recently accomplished this task by exposing isolated cells to a Radio Electric Asymmetric Conveyer (REAC) (33), an innovative device based upon the interaction of two oscillating magnetic fields. One is generated by the entire organism or cultured cells, and the other is a weak (2 mW radiated power) electromagnetic field of 2.4 GHz produced by the REAC system. This interaction results in the induction/ modulation of cellular electric microcurrents that are detected and conveyed back to a targeted area of the body or to isolated cultured cells by the aid of an electrode probe (33). The effect of REAC asymmetrically conveyed radioelectric fields was first tested in mouse ES cells (33). Cellular responses were investigated by real-time PCR, Western blot, and confocal microscopy. Single radio frequency burst duration, radiated power, electric and magnetic fields, specific absorption rate, and current density in the culture medium were monitored. REAC stimulation primed the transcription of genes involved in cardiac, skeletal muscle, and neuronal commitment, also modulating the expression of the self-renewal/ pluripotency-associated genes. REAC exposure enhanced the expression of cardiac, skeletal, and neuronal lineage-restricted marker proteins. The number of spontaneously beating ES-derived myocardial cells was also increased (33). Based on these results, we decided to investigate the effect produced by REAC-delivered radioelectric fields on human adult non-stem somatic cells. For this purpose, human dermal skin fibroblasts were exposed to a REAC apparatus working into a CO2 incubator, and set at a transmission frequency of 2.4 GHz, with its conveyer electrodes immersed into the culture medium (34). Radiated power was about 2 mW. Electromagnetic field E = 0.4V/m, with culture medium at a distance of 35 cm from the emitter. The duration of a single radiofrequency burst was 200 ms with an off interval of 2.5 seconds. Under these experimental conditions, the human fibroblasts were subjected to REAC exposure for a period of 72 hours, and then cultured for an additional 7 days without REAC stimulation. REAC exposure had no detrimental effects, since it did not significantly affect the amount of apoptotic, or necrotic cells (34). Interestingly, the REAC treatment induced a biphasic response on pluripotency genes, enhancing the expression of Nanog, Sox-2, Oct-4, and cMyc during the first 6–20 hours, while producing a stable downregulation in their transcription after 24 hours (34). The transient activation of stemness-related genes was sufficient to afford a direct reprogramming of the human fibroblasts into cardiac, neuronal, and skeletal muscle cells, as shown by the expression of a set of cardiogenic/neurogenic genes, including Mef2c, Tbx5, GATA-4, and prodynorphin, as well as neurogenic and skeletal myogenic orchestrators, such as neurogenin1 and myod, respectively (34). Confocal microscopy analysis confirmed the attainment of myocardial, neuronal, and skeletal muscle differentation providing evidence for the expression of tissue-restricted markers of terminal commitment. In this regard, the downregulation in stemness gene expression observed after 24 hours of REAC exposure is worthy of consideration, since it is now evident that the downregulation of Sox-2, Nanog, and Oct-4, after their initial induction, is a critical step in cell progression towards a differentiated state (35–38). It is also important to notice that REAC-induced reprogramming was achieved after extremely brief exposure pulses, showing long-lasting persistence of cell commitment upon the cessation of REAC treatment. 495

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Our findings show for the first time that human non-stem somatic adult cells could be rapidly committed to a high yield of critical fates in Regenerative Medicine, only proceeding through a transient pluripotent state, without being plastered in such an intermediate condition. This may avoid the risk of the persistence of stray cells that haven’t fully differentiated and might have the ability to turn into an unwanted cell type, like cancer cells or cells that fail to fulfill the desired requirement(s) for tissue repair. Importantly, these results were achieved without the aid of potentially harmful viral or protein transduction. After all, REAC acted as a time machine capable of resetting the clock of somatic human adult cells to an ancestral time where they may behave as pluripotent elements capable of multifaceted phenotypic decisions. In subsequent studies, we provided evidence that REAC exposure of human mesenchymal stem cells isolated from the adipose tissue (hASCs) with a novel non-enzymatic method (39) remarkably enhanced the transcription of a program of multilineage, tissue-restricted genes (40), including: (i) the cardiogenic genes prodynorphin, GATA-4, and Nkx-2.5; (ii) the vasculogenic genes Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor (VEGF), Hepatocyte Growth Factor (HGF), and von Willebrand Factor (vWF); (iii) neurogenin-1, and myoD, involved in neurogenic and skeletal myogenic commitment, respectively. Similar to the effect elicited in human fibroblasts, hASC exposure to REAC also finely tuned the expression of stemness-related genes, inducing an early increase in Nanog, Sox-2, and Oct-4 transcription during the first 4–12 hours, followed by a significant downregulation of transcript levels below the control value after 24 hours of treatment (40). Such a transcriptional profile was mirrored at the protein expression level. Confocal microscopy analysis has shown the appearance of tissue specific markers for cardiogenic, neurogenic, skeletal muscle, and endothelial c­ommitment in REAC-exposed hASCs, indicating that the induction of a ­t issue-restricted program of gene and protein expression elicited by REAC converged to a lineage specification in intact cells (40). The finding that REAC exposure elicited a concomitant, early expression of both stemness-related and lineage-restricted genes together with a high throughput of cellular differentiation indicates that its action may result from the optimization of stem cell expression of multipotency. Ongoing studies will dissect the electrophysiological and functional properties of REAC-committed hASCs, and assess whether improved tissue healing may result from their transplantation in defined animal models of disease, including heart failure, neurodegeneration, and skeletal muscle dystrophy. In the affirmative, the proper use of electromagnetic energy may represent the underpinning for future cell therapy approaches. A major problem in the clinical application of cell therapy is the progressive decline of stem cell multipotency with age. Recent evidence indicates that aging itself may have as a primary cause the exhaustion of the endogenous pool of tissue-resident stem cells. Therefore, stem cell aging may not only impair the tissue self-healing properties, but it may also blunt the rescuing potential of stem cell transplantation in both autologous and allogenic settings, as the donor’s age increases. We have recently shown that geroconversion of hASCs and loss of their multilineage commitment after multiple passages in culture (a method to induce cell aging in vitro) were efficaciously counteracted by hASC exposure to REAC-delivered radioelectric fields. In particular, REAC treatment afforded a marked downregulation in beta-galactosidase staining (41, 42), and in the expression of the senescence mediator genes p16INK4, ARF, p53, and p21CIP1 (42). Moreover, unlike unexposed cells, REAC-treated hASCs maintained their typical fibroblast-like morphology, as well as a multilineage potential along osteogenic, adipogenic, chondrogenic, and vasculogenic fates, even at late passages, both at morphologic and gene expression levels. 496

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So far, reversing of stem cell aging could only be achieved by the aid of viral vectormediated gene delivery (42). For the first time, age-associated molecular and morphological alterations have been reversed in stem cells by exposure to an innovative system of electromagnetic energy delivery, suggesting future perspectives in the clinical application of REAC technology for the treatment of pathologic aging and degenerative diseases.

Conclusions Living cells exist as a world of intrinsic oscillatory rhythms involving multifaceted transcriptional and signaling motifs, as well as the continuous remodeling of endogenous oscillating electromagnetic fields. Synchronization of these oscillatory patterns emerges as a crucial mechanism in the organization of developmental decisions, and in the maintenance and repair of tissue homeostasis. We provide evidence for the possibility of reprogramming our somatic cells or adult stem cells into cardiac, neuronal, skeletal muscle, or vascular lineages by a proper delivery of radioelectric fields, also showing that this strategy counteracts the physiological process of cellular aging. These findings show that electromagnetic energy can be exploited to finely tune the cell clock back to a “time zero” in which all kinds of decisions are still possible, like in an embryonic pluripotent stem cell. Intriguingly, these results show that all cells of our organism possess a double memory, the memory of the resident tissue, which entails a structural and functional specialization, and the memory of an ancestral state that projects backward to the initial clock of pluripotency. The effects elicited by REAC exposure show that we may be able to build time machines capable of interacting with the time machine in our cells, and operate a reversible switch between these two memories. This possibility is expected to pave the way to unprecedented strategies in cell therapy and Regenerative Medicine.

References   1. Abrams GA, Goodman SL, Nealey PF, Franco M, Murphy CJ. Nanoscale topography of the basement membrane underlying the corneal epithelium of the rhesus macaque. Cell and Tissue Research 2000; 299: 39–46.   2. Peek CB, Affinati AH, Ramsey KM, Kuo HY, Yu W, Sena LA, Ilkayeva O, Marcheva B, Kobayashi Y, Omura C, Levine DC, Bacsik DJ, Gius D, Newgard CB, Goetzman E, Chandel NS, Denu JM, Mrksich M, Bass J. Circadian clock NAD+ cycle drives mitochondrial oxidative metabolism in mice. Science 2013 November 1; 342(6158):1243417. doi: 10.1126/science.1243417.   3. Nivala M, Ko C, Nivala M, Weiss JN, Qu Z. The emergence of subcellular pacemaker sites for calcium waves and oscillations. The Journal of Physiology 2013 September 16. [Epub ahead of print.]   4. Kageyama R, Ohtsuka T, Kobayashi T. The Hes gene family: Repressors and oscillators that orchestrate embryogenesis. Development 2007; 134: 1243–1251.   5. Masamizu Y, Ohtsuka T, Takashima Y, Nagahara H, Takenaka Y, Yoshikawa K, Okamura H, Kageyama R. Real-time imaging of the somite segmentation clock: Revelation of unstable ­oscillators in the individual presomitic mesoderm cells. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 2006; 103: 1313–1318.   6. Dubrulle J, Pourquié O. Coupling segmentation to axis formation. Development 2004; 131: 5783–5793.   7. Palmeirim I, Henrique D, Ish-Horowicz D, Pourquié O. Avian hairy gene expression identifies a molecular clock linked to vertebrate segmentation and somitogenesis. Cell 1997; 91: 639–648.   8. Moloney DJ, Panin VM, Johnston SH, Chen J, Shao L, Wilson R, Wang Y, Stanley P, Irvine KD, Haltiwanger RS, Vogt TF. Fringe is a glycosyltransferase that modifies Notch. Nature 2000; 406: 369–375.   9. Brückner K, Perez L, Clausen H, Cohen S. Glycosyltransferase activity of Fringe modulates NotchDelta interactions. Nature 2000; 406: 411–415. 10. Bessho Y, Sakata R, Komatsu S, Shiota K, Yamada S, Kageyama R. Dynamic expression and essential functions of Hes7 in somite segmentation. Genes & Development 2001; 15: 2642–2647. 497

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11. Dale JK, Maroto M, Dequeant ML, Malapert P, McGrew M, Pourquié O. Periodic Notch inhibition by Lunatic Fringe underlies the chick segmentation clock. Nature 2003; 421: 275–278. 12. Morimoto M, Takahashi Y, Endo M, Saga Y. The Mesp2 transcription factor establishes segmental ­borders by suppressing Notch activity. Nature 2005; 435: 354–359. 13. Huppert SS, Ilagan MXG, De Strooper B, Kopan R. Analysis of Notch function in presomitic mesoderm suggests a g-secretase independent role for presenilins in somite differentiation. Developmental Cell 2005; 8: 677–688. 14. Rajapakse I, Perlman MD, Scalzo D, Kooperberg C, Groudine M, Kosak ST. The emergence of lineagespecific chromosomal topologies from coordinate gene regulation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 2009; 106: 6679–6684. 15. Zahanich I, Sirenko SG, Maltseva LA, Tarasova YS, Spurgeon HA, Boheler KR, Stern MD, Lakatta EG, Maltsev VA. Rhythmic beating of stem cell-derived cardiac cells requires dynamic coupling of electrophysiology and Ca2+ cycling. Journal of Molecular and Cellular Cardiology 2011; 50: 66–76. 16. Martens EA, Thutupalli S, Fourrière A, Hallatschek O. Chimera states in mechanical oscillator networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 2013; 110: 10563–10567. 17. Backs J, Olson EN. Control of cardiac growth by histone acetylation/deacetylation. Circulation Research 2006; 98: 15–24. 18. Garg V, Kathiriya IS, Barnes R, Schluterman MK, King IN, Butler CA, Rothrock CR, Eapen RS, Hirayama-Yamada K, Joo K, Matsuoka R, Cohen JC, Srivastava D. GATA4 mutations cause human congenital heart defects and reveal an interaction with TBX5. Nature 2003; 424: 443–447. 19. Molkentin JD, Lin Q, Duncan SA, Olson EN. Requirement of the transcription factor GATA4 for heart tube formation and ventral morphogenesis. Genes & Development 1997; 11: 1061–1072. 20. Kuo CT, Morrisey EE, Anandappa R, Sigrist K, Lu MM, Parmacek MS, Soudais C, Leiden JM. GATA4 transcription factor is required for ventral morphogenesis and heart tube formation. Genes & Development 1997; 11: 1048–1060. 21. Oka T, Maillet M, Watt AJ, Schwartz RJ, Aronow BJ, Duncan SA, Molkentin JD. Cardiac-specific deletion of Gata4 reveals its requirement for hypertrophy, compensation, and myocyte viability. Circulation Research 2006; 98: 837–845. 22. Spalding KL, Bergmann O, Alkass K, Bernard S, Salehpour M, Huttner HB, Boström E, Westerlund I, Vial C, Buchholz BA, Possnert G, Mash DC, Druid H, Frisén J. Dynamics of hippocampal neurogenesis in adult humans. Cell 2013; 153: 1219–1227. 23. Takahashi K, Yamanaka S. Induction of pluripotent stem cells from mouse embryonic and adult ­fibroblast cultures by defined factors. Cell 2006; 126: 663–676. 24. Takahashi K, Tanabe K, Ohnuki M, Narita M, Ichisaka T, Tomoda K, Yamanaka S. Induction of pluripotent stem cells from adult human fibroblasts by defined factors. Cell 2007; 131: 861–872. 25. Skarja M, Jerman I, Ruzic R, Leskovar RT, Jejcic L. Electric field absorption and emission as an indicator of active electromagnetic nature of organisms—preliminary report. Electromagnetic Biology and Medicine 2009; 28: 85–95. 26. Fröhlich H. The extraordinary dielectric properties of biological materials and the action of enzymes. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 1975; 72: 4211–4215. 27. Bischof M, Del Giudice E. Communication and the emergence of collective behavior in living organisms: A quantum approach. Molecular Biology International 2013; 2013:987549. doi: 10.1155/2013/987549. 28. Del Giudice E, Doglia S, Milani M, Vitiello G. A quantum field theoretical approach to the collective behavior of biological systems. Nuclear Physics B 1985; 251 [FS13]: 375–400. 29. Del Giudice E, De Ninno A, Fleischmann M, Mengoli G, Milani M, Talpo G, Vitiello G. Coherent quantum electrodynamics in living matter. Electromagnetic Biology and Medicine 2005; 24: 199–210. 30. Havelka D, Cifra M, Kučera O, Pokorný J, Vrba J. High-frequency electric field and radiation characteristics of cellular microtubule network. Journal of Theoretical Biology 2011; 286: 31–40. 31. Zhao Y, Zhan Q. Electric fields generated by synchronized oscillations of microtubules, centrosomes and chromosomes regulate the dynamics of mitosis and meiosis. Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling 2012; 9: 26. doi: 10.1186/1742-4682-9-26. 32. Ventura C, Maioli M, Asara Y, Santoni D, Mesirca P, Remondini D, Bersani F. Turning on stem cell cardiogenesis with extremely low frequency magnetic fields. The FASEB Journal 2005; 19: 155–157. 33. Maioli M, Rinaldi S, Santaniello S, Castagna A, Pigliaru G, Gualini S, Fontani V, Ventura C. Radio­ frequency energy loop primes cardiac, neuronal, and skeletal muscle differentiation in mouse embryonic stem cells: A new tool for improving tissue regeneration. Cell Transplantation 2012; 21: 1225–1233.

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34. Maioli M, Rinaldi S, Santaniello S, Castagna A, Pigliaru G, Gualini S, Cavallini C, Fontani V, Ventura C. Radio electric conveyed fields directly reprogram human dermal skin fibroblasts toward cardiac, neuronal, and skeletal muscle-like lineages. Cell Transplantation 2013; 22: 1227–1235. 35. Baal N, Reisinger K, Jahr H, Bohle RM, Liang O, Münstedt K, Rao CV, Preissner KT, Zygmunt MT. Expression of transcription factor Oct-4 and other embryonic genes in CD133 positive cells from human umbilical cord blood. Thrombosis and Haemostasis 2004; 92: 767–775. 36. Goodell MA. Stem-cell “plasticity”: Befuddled by the muddle. Current Opinion in Hematology 2003; 10: 208–213. 37. Lang KC, Lin IH, Teng HF, Huang YC, Li CL, Tang KT, Chen SL. Simultaneous overexpression of Oct4 and Nanog abrogates terminal myogenesis. American Journal of Physiology—Cell Physiology 2009; 297: C43–54. 38. Park SB, Seo KW, So AY, Seo MS, Yu KR, Kang SK, Kang KS. SOX2 has a crucial role in the lineage determination and proliferation of mesenchymal stem cells through Dickkopf-1 and c-MYC. Cell Death and Differentiation 2012; 19: 534–545. 39. Bianchi F, Maioli M, Leonardi E, Olivi E, Pasquinelli G, Valente S, Mendez AJ, Ricordi C, Raffaini M, Tremolada C, Ventura C. A new non-enzymatic method and device to obtain a fat tissue derivative highly enriched in pericyte-like elements by mild mechanical forces from human lipoaspirates. Cell Transplantation 2013; 22: 2063–2067. 40. Maioli M, Rinaldi S, Santaniello S, Castagna A, Pigliaru G, Delitala A, Bianchi F, Tremolada C, Fontani V, Ventura C. Radio electric asymmetric conveyed fields and human adipose-derived stem cells obtained with a non-enzymatic method and device: A novel approach to multipotency. Cell Transplantation 2013 August 30. doi: 10.3727/096368913X672037. [Epub ahead of print.] 41. Rinaldi S, Maioli M, Santaniello S, Castagna A, Pigliaru G, Gualini S, Margotti ML, Carta A, Fontani V, Ventura C. Regenerative treatment using a radioelectric asymmetric conveyor as a novel tool in antiaging medicine: An in vitro beta-galactosidase study. Clinical Interventions in Aging 2012; 7: 191–194. 42. Maioli M, Rinaldi S, Santaniello S, Castagna A, Pigliaru G, Delitala A, Lotti Margotti M, Bagella L, Fontani V, Ventura C. Anti-senescence efficacy of radio-electric asymmetric conveyer technology. AGE 2014 February; 36(1): 9–20. doi: 10.1007/s11357-013-9537-8.

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38 Memory of water Storage of information and spontaneous growth of knowledge Emilio Del Giudice, Alberto Tedeschi and Vladimir Voeikov

Introduction Living organisms include a very large number of components, whose ensemble is never at equilibrium but is involved in a time-dependent dynamics driving the organism across a large number of configurations. Any chaotic system, for example boiling water, also includes a large number of components that are far from equilibrium and change their configuration due to interactions. However, unlike chaotic systems, which need continuous and huge inflow of energy to stay in a non-equilibrium state, living systems utilize a very small quantity of energy for their working. Let us consider, as a particular case, the human brain. The amount of 1 joule of energy supplied to the most recent supercomputer frame allows production of 10 million operations; consumption of the same joule by a human brain guarantees the production of 100,000 billion operations, namely a number of operations 10 million times larger. As a consequence, the performance of a human brain demands only 20 watts, whereas the supercomputer frame demands 10 million watts (Mae-Wan 1998). More generally, the whole human organism demands about 100 watts for its working needs, much less than any household electrical appliance. How is it possible that such a huge array of operations as the ones present in living organisms gives rise to such a small energy bill? We should conclude that energy is not the main performing agent in living dynamics. In the framework of the concepts of modern physics, the only complex systems able to work spontaneously in a highly correlated way with a small expense of energy are quantum coherent systems. Such systems are made up of a huge number of components kept correlated by the property of coherence, which is the circumstance that a common phase (rhythm of oscillation) governs the individual f luctuations of the components. We will elaborate on this topic later. The energetic paradox of living systems can also be examined from another point of view. Should a living organism be like a thermal engine – namely a system having a high level of entropy and therefore subject to decline – its energy yield would not exceed 1 per cent according to the theorem of Carnot, which follows from the Second Law of Thermodynamics. As a matter of fact the yield, for instance, of cell membrane dynamics is between 60 and 70 per cent (Bockris and Khan 1993). Is therefore the Second Law of Thermodynamics 500

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grossly violated by biological dynamics? The only possibility is that a living system is not a thermal engine whose component molecules are independent so that energy f lows across it as heat; the alternative possibility is that energy f lows as free energy namely without an entropic component. A vanishing level of entropy is just a feature of a coherent system. This is a further indication that living organisms should be approached as quantum coherent systems and since the molecules are made of electric charges, the nature of the living state should be considered in the frame of the laws of quantum electrodynamics (QED) rather than thermodynamics ones. Moreover, all the processes in living systems (including biochemical reactions) follow sequences ordered in space and time; the reactions don’t occur at random but obey strict biochemical codes (Barbieri 2002). Each molecule interacts chemically, within any particular biological cycle, with well-defined partners and not with every possible molecule as would occur in an industrial chemical reactor. In other words the onset of the living state changes the nature of biomolecules from polygamy to monogamy. This property implies the onset of correlations among molecules, specifically the onset of the coherent state. In the frame of QED we will find the roots of the appearance and maintenance of a memory – the necessary property of all living systems. Finally, we wish to mention a puzzling feature of biological water. In most living systems water accounts for 60 to 70 per cent of their mass. However, since the water molecule is light whereas other biomolecules are heavy, water molar concentration, namely the fraction of water molecules with respect to the total number of molecules, reaches 99 per cent of the total number. Moreover, there are living organisms like jellyfish (Medusae) whose content of water can reach 99 per cent of the mass. A living organism therefore is a very diluted, aqueous solution. Why does water remain confined in the body volume and not spill out giving rise to a puddle on the f loor? This is impossible unless the water in a living organism exists not in the form of an array of independent molecules but as an entirely correlated ensemble of molecules, namely a coherent state. QED allows us to address the problem of the emergence and maintenance of coherence in water. Its application to the dynamics of water being the major constituent of all living systems sheds light on its role in ensuring the self-organization of organisms, which in turn requires the capability of the organism to keep a memory of past events.

Biology and quantum electrodynamic theory of water Biology is characterized by three primary features. It is first characterized as being tightly linked with time. There is an arrow travelling in time which allows organisms to be born and to die following an irreversible path which cannot be changed. On the contrary, the dynamics of an ensemble of independent atoms and molecules is governed by reversible laws. Where does irreversibility originate? What level of complexity of reality does the transition from a reversible system to an irreversible one produce? A second feature is the existence, within living matter, of organic molecular codes: molecules do not meet by chance in any possible way (as it happens in all industrial chemical reactors) but on the basis of ordered sequences in which each molecular species combines with privileged partners within each biological cycle. The most common example is the genetic code with its precise combinations among the different bases. But we could also refer to the cycle of Krebs, quite relevant in the most recent scientific literature. A third, and more important, feature is the emergence from within living matter of psychic, emotive and mental phenomena. How do joy, sorrow, passion, love 501

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emerge from the dark side of molecular atomic processes? Conventional biology has not been able to provide an answer yet but a tentative explanation can be found in the theories given by pioneers such as Wilhelm Reich, resulting from the revolutionary work of Freud in the field of psychodynamics at the beginning of the twentieth century. Such questions meet some challenging aspects of the theoretical formulation of quantum physics, as acknowledged by modern field theory. The most peculiar aspect of quantum physics is the acknowledgement of the non-existence of the isolated body. No body can be isolated. No body can be isolated from the quantum vacuum that becomes the bridge or, better yet, the connecting tissue, through which all the bodies in the universe are interconnected. The most correct theory of quantum physics, therefore, is not quantum mechanics but field theory. Here, tangible objects are considered as quanta of a matter field, combined with an interaction field. When referring to the scale of atoms and molecules, this interaction field is the electromagnetic potential of which the commonly known electromagnetic field represents the ensemble of vortices. The energetic content of the interaction field is within the electromagnetic field, while the potential does not have an energetic content but merely expresses an oscillation rhythm, normally referred to as ‘phase’. In the commonly known case of non-coherent oscillations in the matter field, the phase is not a well-defined quantity. Nevertheless, there is a possibility that the matter field and the electromagnetic potential combined together can acquire a well-defined common phase; in this case we talk about coherence. In the coherent state of matter, the well-defined phase generates an informational content. The oscillation of the matter turns from chaotic noise into music. Such change results in the appearance within the matter of those chemical codes we described before and, subsequently, of those psychic, emotive and mental contents. It is well-known that such contents cannot exist outside tangible bodies and the death of the body results in the collapse of the ‘relevant soul’, that is to say of all those intangible contents. The complex dynamics presented above has water as the main ‘character’ in living matter. It is in fact water which acts as a connecting tissue of living matter, a role that is usually played by quantum vacuum;1 that is to say that water is the ‘quantum vacuum’ of the living matter in the sense that it produces all the electromagnetic f luctuations which can pilot the dynamics of other molecules. Below are the different steps of the process as acknowledged so far by current research. 1

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It can be proved that a molecule ensemble, above a critical density and below a critical temperature, can go from a primitive non-coherent state (gas) to a coherent state (liquid) where the electronic clouds of molecules oscillate in phase between two patterns of their spectrum synchronically with an electromagnetic field whose wavelength determines the size of this Coherence Domain (CD). The common frequency of the oscillations of the ‘matter field’ (i.e., the set of molecules) and of the electromagnetic field is lower than the original frequency of the free electromagnetic field. Due to such re-normalization of its frequency, the electromagnetic field is trapped within the CD and cannot be released outside. The electromagnetic oscillations combine with the thermal fluctuations of molecules, which tend to destroy coherence; for each given temperature, a dynamic equilibrium is reached: in each moment, a fraction of the total number of molecules forms CDs while the remaining part remains non-coherent and appears as a thick gas compressed between the interstices among CDs. The structure of the liquid is characterized by the ongoing fluctuation between coherence and non-coherence. As a result, the set of CDs does not result in a stable structure separate from the non-coherent part but in a fluctuating ensemble where the two parts are mixed.

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The case of water is peculiar because the coherent oscillation combines the pattern of minimum energy of the water molecule in which all electrons are tightly linked (in this case water is electrically an insulator and chemically an oxidizer) with an excited pattern where one electron is just below the ionization threshold and can therefore be easily released. In this last pattern, water is electrically a conductor and chemically a reducer. The presence, within the CD, of plasma of nearly-free electrons allows, with very little energy expenditure, the formation of cold vortices; in other words, those not characterized by collisions among electrons which are forbidden by the existence of coherence and which, if present, would result in attrition and decay of the vortices. This is the reason why such vortices have a very long life span. During their life, the CD can be further excited by a flux of external energy and the CD becomes a ‘machine’ able to store energy. As such vortices are originated by the circular motion of charged particles. They create magnetic moments in the CD which are aligned by the terrestrial magnetic field or by local magnetic fields present in the environment. Thanks to such alignment, the various excited states are summed up in a coherent way and therefore a large number of environmental excited states are transformed over time into excited states able to activate the electronic levels of molecules. 3 The above possibility, which belongs to water exclusively, can develop its full potential if the coherent structure of water becomes stable over time, rather than remaining fluctuating due to thermal oscillations. That can happen in proximity to hydrophilic surfaces where the attraction between the surface and the CDs can protect the latter from thermal fluctuations and makes the coherent storage of the energy process stable over time. 4 Each molecule that is able to oscillate on the same wavelength as that of the CD can become part of the CD, the structure of which undergoes a change as a result of the different electromagnetic features of such guest molecule. Nevertheless, if the number of guest molecules is small, say less than 1 per cent of the total number of the CD molecules, they can be part of the common dance performed by the molecules of coherent water without altering the global dynamics. In order to enter the CD, the guest molecules can adjust their oscillation frequency using the kT energy of thermal collisions according to which a molecule can enter the CD if its oscillation frequency differs from the CD’s by less than kT. We have thus a selection criterion allowing us to decide which molecules can be part of living matter: only those whose oscillation frequency is less than 1/40 of electron volt (eV) (value of kT at room temperature) different from the oscillation frequency of the water CD. At room temperature, such value is slightly higher than 0.2 eV. This is why only around twenty amino acids out of the two hundred that are known are present in living matter. 5 If the ensemble of all water CDs is inside an external flux of energy, they will change such energy into coherent energy whose value grows over time and is not dissipated by thermal decays. This occurs through the production of coherent vortices. When the energy stored reaches the level of the activating energy of any biomolecule hosted in the CD, the CD coherent dynamics immediately transfers such energy to the molecule. The biomolecule is therefore activated and enabled to perform chemical reactions while the CD goes back to its state of minimum energy. If the external flux of energy is stable, the CD is recharged and can perform an oscillation over time where the charge is electromagnetic and the discharge is chemical. A reverse process can also occur, on the basis of which the energy resulting from a chemical reaction of the biomolecules is transferred to the water CD and creates an electromagnetic field trapped inside the CD, whose frequency changes and is enabled to activate further molecules. 503

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6 Such oscillations of the water CD, resulting from the combination of chemistry and electromagnetism lead to a large variety of patterns of the CD. On the basis of the properties described in 1, a further coherence system can be developed where the coherent units are the CDs and a dominion extended in space is formed. Its size is extremely big and is determined by the wavelength of the corresponding electromagnetic oscillation. The size of known living organisms corresponds to microwaves. But it is possible to generate more extended forms of coherence characterized by a bigger wavelength and able to combine in phase more living organisms that can be at the basis of coherence phenomena of species or ecosystems. 7 The above theoretical predictions based on quantum electrodynamics (QED) have recently found an experimental corroboration (Zheng et al. 2006). 8 It has been discovered that on hydrophilic surfaces liquid water assumes peculiar properties, very similar to the properties predicted for coherent water. Very thick layers are formed where solutes cannot enter; this property has been checked by using fluorescent dyes. For this reason such regions have been called Exclusion Zones (EZ). EZ water layers can be as thick as several microns (in special cases up to 500 microns). The viscosity of EZ water is much higher than in bulk water, its density is slightly lower and its ‘effective temperature’, as measured by infrared thermography, is below 200 K. Moreover it is very easy to draw electrons from it, producing – without applying any external batteries – electric currents whose negative pole is EZ water and the positive pole is the non-coherent aqueous medium. The role of interfaces can be understood by considering that in bulk water electromagnetic and thermal fluctuations couple each other so that coherent and non-coherent fractions are intimately mixed and the pattern of the coherent structure is so flickering that they have no possibility of exhibiting their properties for a time long enough to allow their detection. On the contrary, the attraction by a hydrophilic surface adds up an energy term that protects CDs from the thermal assaults, stabilizing their structure. In this way interfacial water exhibits permanently all the features of coherent water. This is of paramount importance for biology. All biological water can be considered interfacial water because of the huge density of membranes and surfaces (mostly hydrophilic) existing in living organisms. We can conclude that biological water is widely different from normal water and looks more similar to the EZ water. The stabilization influence of biological water due to the interaction with biological surfaces is of determining importance for biology, because it paves the way for the storage of information and memory of the biological events (biological electromagnetic field, biochemical reactions, environment electromagnetic field (Del Giudice et al. 2015a)). In fact the lifetime of the water molecules within coherent domains in an ideal liquid water would be very short, in the range of picoseconds. Such a system cannot keep the memory of the past longer than this period of time. Yet water that is put close to a hydrophilic substance having more or less a developed surface that can attach multiple water molecules organizes a layer of coherent water. This produces an excellent tool for the storage of information of the memory of biological events. We have seen that water is able to interact with the potential of the electromagnetic field while the cosmos and the environment where we live are able to send us signals in the form of the same potential that only a coherent physical system, such as a living organism based on water, is able to perceive. We can posit the theory that through water such electromagnetic signals can govern the evolution of ecosystems and that the set of information contained in water in the form of oscillations of its coherent structure has, in fact, a dual aspect. The first 504

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aspect is the control of biochemical reactions. But there is another aspect, more elusive and mysterious: can’t this coherent set of electromagnetic frequencies, variable over time, be considered as the development of a ‘logos’, a speech, an informative dynamics, a sequence of memories? After all, a speech and music are nothing but a set of frequencies ordered in time and space. We are now in the formal position to go back to the topics described before and, as with separate bricks of a cognitive wall, we can use them correctly to complete the whole building which can give us a complete vision of the phenomenon.

Towards a spontaneous emergence of knowledge in living organisms: the living pattern of function and structure The difference between living and non-living matter is intuitively clear. Until not long ago, though, the dynamics resulting in the two types of matter was not clear. The study of living organisms has highlighted some peculiar characteristics, which can shed some light on the difference between living organisms and non-living yet highly organized physical systems. The living organism – where most components are made of water molecules – can catch, store and use energy in a coordinated way in all parts of the organism. It can keep a high level of organization throughout the whole process. Energy is used through cyclical processes characterized by biological rhythms whose periods of oscillations can range from seconds to years. Such processes are mutually related. Energy is passed between the various cycles. From a thermodynamics point of view such cyclical processes occur at a very small and nearly constant value of entropy. The system can thus maintain its organization. Entropy is a function of the number of patterns of the microscopic components of the system and it affects its ability to evolve over time. A high value of entropy corresponds to a high level of internal disorder while a physically ordered organism is characterized by a low level of entropy. The very low level of entropy can grant that most of the total energy can be in the form of free energy, i.e., able to produce work.2 The above implies that there is a connection between the components of a living organism even if they are separated by large distances. Such connection is not supported by a f lux of energy, which would imply a very high energy bill for the organism. The correlation within the living organism is supported by a typically quantum mechanism. The translation into mathematical terms of the physical property on the basis of which quantum oscillations, described by that quantum variable called phase (which intuitively corresponds to the oscillation rhythm), cannot be observed directly. This means that the motion equations must be invariant with respect to the arbitrary changes of the phase. It has been mathematically demonstrated that such invariance requires the introduction of a new field, called the gauge field by physicists. It has properties of invariance with respect to peculiar physical transformations that can compensate the transformations of the phase. It can be proved that such gauge field must obey equations coinciding with the Maxwell equations, describing the potential of the electromagnetic field. We can conclude that quantum f luctuations of atoms cannot be observed directly because they are diluted in time and space by the electromagnetic potential, which spreads them at phase speed. Phase speed, as explained in all physics textbooks, can exceed light speed, which is the maximum speed at which energy can travel. Phase speed and the speed at which quantum f luctuations can travel can therefore be infinitely big. The aggregate of quantum f luctuations of the components of a complex system can have two different forms. In the first way, such f luctuations are not mutually synchronized, they remain unrelated and they lead to a very small global result characterized by small oscillations 505

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around the value of zero. But there is also the possibility that such f luctuations synchronize through a non-null gauge field, which acts as a connection tissue among the components. Such correlation is not connected to the transmission of energy but to the sharing of an oscillation rhythm (phase) (Del Giudice et al. 2013). A metaphor that well describes such a state (called coherent state by physicists) of the physical system is that of an orchestra composed of several players, each with a specific instrument. Without a coordinating presence, the aggregate of sound emissions of the players would just be noise, which can become music only thanks to the coordinating activity of a conductor who can synchronize the emissions of the players. In order to achieve such result, the conductor does not provide the players with any energy. They are responsible for the sound produced by the orchestra, to which the energy content is connected. The physics quantity given to the orchestra by the conductor is not energy but phase. However, such metaphor does not fully describe what happens in a coherent physics system. In our metaphor, in fact, the conductor is an independent party from the players. In a coherent physics system, instead, the creation of a well-defined collective phase is a spontaneous process resulting from the self-organization of the system (Del Giudice et al. 2009). Within the scope of the quantum field theory, the following theorem has been demonstrated (Preparata 1995): a set of microscopic components (atoms and/or molecules) having diverse internal patterns goes from a state where components are independent to a state of lower energy where a coherent connection is established among them when the temperature is below a critical value and density exceeds a given threshold. An intuitive vision of such theorem has been presented (Del Giudice et al. 2010) and can be summarized as follows: an atom (or molecule) whose size is on the order of 1 Angstrom (i.e., 1/100,000,000 cm) requires an energy in the range of some eV to go from one pattern to the other. Such change can be induced by a f luctuation of the electromagnetic field of vacuum, in the shape of a virtual photon, whose energy coincides with the necessary energy for the change in pattern. The size of such photon is given by its wavelength which, in our case, is equal to some thousand Angstroms. In other words, the size of the object (photon) able to change the pattern of an atom, is a thousand times bigger than the size of the object (atom) to be transformed. At the normal gas density in the environmental conditions of the Earth, the photon emerging from a vacuum can contain inside its volume thousands of microscopic components of the gas. If we call N such number and P the probability the atom has to catch the photon emerged from a vacuum (estimated at 10 -5 on the basis of quantum electrodynamics) the probability that the photon is caught by at least one of the components is P×N. When N is big enough and this product becomes equal to 1, the photon becomes a permanent prisoner of the microscopic components and cannot be released. The set of particles becomes therefore a trap for the electromagnetic f luctuations of vacuum and they result in an electromagnetic field, which is trapped in the set of particles and oscillating in phase with them. A resonance system is thus created where all the microscopic components in the region corresponding to the volume of the photon (called Coherence Domain [Preparata 1995]) oscillate collectively between two individual patterns at the frequency of the trapped electromagnetic field. In accordance with a theorem of electrodynamics (Preparata 1995; Del Giudice et al. 2010) each particle able to resound with such frequency common to atoms and electromagnetic fields is strongly attracted within the Coherence Domain. The trapped fields play a role that is crucial to confer an order to the combinations of molecules, which lead to chemical reactions. They are ordered thanks to a frequency code on the basis of which only the molecules that resound between themselves and with the trapped electromagnetic field are strongly attracted even if they are very far apart. The diffusive mechanism of molecular combinations, 506

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based on the random motion of molecules and their random combinations, so far considered by biochemical scientists as the model of chemical processes dynamics, is thus replaced by a mechanism where the molecular combinations within the coherent region are led by the electromagnetic field. The coherent state has a lower energy than the original non-coherent state and such difference is known as an energy gap. Such quantity must be compared to the energy of thermal collisions among atoms which, above a threshold to be assessed with the methods of statistical mechanics, breaks the phase coincidence among its microscopic components typical of coherent states. It is now possible to understand why coherence can exist only below a certain temperature. Among all atomic and/or molecular species, water has a very peculiar role because in its specific case the two patterns among which the coherent oscillation occurs are that of minimum energy (where all electrons are tightly linked to nuclei) and that of an excited pattern (where an electron per molecule is nearly free). The Coherence Domain of water is therefore a reservoir of nearly-free electrons able to perform collective plasma oscillations (vortices) when energy is received from the outside, thanks to coherence. It has been possible to calculate the spectrum of the excited states corresponding to the collective oscillations of nearly-free electrons. A further coherence, on a larger scale, where the role played by microscopic elements is taken by water Coherence Domains is possible. A set of Coherence Domains, whose size is the wavelength of the electromagnetic field responsible for the connection between the Domains, will result in a super Coherence Domain among Coherence Domains. The set of the Domain’s nearly-free electrons results in a further spectrum of excited states able to generate a further degree of coherence and so forth. A hierarchical structure of Coherence Domains is thus created. It is composed of different levels, each contained in the previous one and stretching over a large range of scales in terms of space and time characteristics. If we consider space, they range from 1/10 of a micron for Coherence Domains among molecules to meters for the highest correlations; with reference to time, the range goes from the very long lives of the smaller Coherence Domains which are fed by the quantum vibrations of vacuum, to the much shorter lives of the higher correlations, which are fed by environmental electromagnetic f luctuations. Each elementary component of the organisms is therefore involved in an ordered sequence of coherent oscillations, the set of which covers a wide scale corresponding to the sizes and oscillation rhythms of the microscopic components in which the given component is included. Water thus sees the birth of a complex vertical structure of Coherence Domains, each of which is included in the previous one, which results in a hierarchy parallel to the one found in living organisms (cells, organs, systems, tissues, individuals and species) (Del Giudice and Tedeschi 2009). Starting from normal water, it has then been possible to create supercoherent water where the above phenomena can be observed (Tedeschi 2010). The procedure starts from photosintetic processes that induce coherence into normal bulk water (WHITE Holographic Bioresonance method) and allow the treated water to obtain and mantain a state of coherence similar to the biological water of living systems. The observation of the oscillations of the electromagnetic potential within water that has been made permanently coherent, has allowed us to detect the structure of the oscillations. It has the same characteristics as fractals (Capolupo et al. 2014). Fractals are self-similar mathematical structures in which each element of the structure has the characteristics of the whole set. So, within the structure it is not possible to assess on which level of the scale one is. Selfsimilarity is a mathematical concept that identifies a condition for which a self-similar entity is exactly or approximately similar to one of its parts (i.e., one or more of its parts is internally 507

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homothetic to the whole); this is a typical feature of fractals. Such result is extremely important in the light of a theorem which connects fractal structures to coherent states (Vitiello 2012): a coherent state at the level of the dynamics of the system’s elementary components can be associated with a fractal structure. If we examine the fractal signals that can be found in watery systems, we have evidence of the existence of correlations among the frequencies of the various coherent levels of the system itself. The set of such frequencies is similar to a music score. And a characteristic element of such signals is the homogeneous distribution of energy over a large number of harmonic waves of the fundamental frequency. That grants strong stability to the oscillation. Such a phenomenon is typical of non-linear systems where the proportionality between cause and result is lost. The set of electromagnetic oscillations of Coherence Domains has a dual aspect. On the one hand it regulates the combinations of the molecules in the field and is therefore responsible for the building of the structure. On the other hand, considered in itself like a piece of music (as in our metaphor), its content is the procedure for the building of the structure: the latter is shown externally through its internal music. Signifier and signified do coincide. Such coincidence gives the music an intrinsic meaning. Each oscillation resounding with this music internal to the organisms is meaningful for it while a non-resonant oscillation is devoid of all interests and therefore not meaningful. Function and structure, then, do coincide (Vitiello 1998). An electromagnetic signal given from the outside to the coherent structure does not need to have informational content, which corresponds to the change it causes to the structure. In fact, if a sign is able to affect any element of the coherent hierarchical structure it will trigger a global dynamics which can lead to far bigger changes to its particular content; this occurs because a coherent structure has an intrinsic meaning which is able to ‘converse’ with the external stimulus. What is normally referred to as biological information has a different nature from the information the Shannon theorem refers to (Shannon 1948). In the Shannon theorem both the informing and the informed party are passive, unable to reorganize themselves. As a consequence, the information message must contain all the details concerning the operation to be performed as the informed party is unable to ‘gather’ them on the basis of its own internal dynamics. The above is confirmed by the experiments carried out by the group led by Luc Montagnier (Montagnier et al. 2011; 2015), who won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2008. There, some DNA segments, extracted from micro-organisms, are suspended in water. When the level of dilution, i.e., the water present, is higher than a threshold, low-frequency electromagnetic signals are recorded, confirming thus the connection between molecular dynamics and electromagnetism presented above. Such signals, strictly belonging to the original DNA diluted in water, can be recorded and sent electronically (via email) as a digital file to distant laboratories in order to avoid any danger of molecular contamination. This file transfer can be considered in fact similar to what usually happens when we download music in the form of digital files from the iTunes store and then we record it on our MP3 players or smartphones to play and enjoy the music we prefer. In the destination lab, the signals are given to a bottle containing pure water using a simple coil (Montagnier et al. 2011). After a suitable time of permanence in the water so treated, a PCR kit (the set of monomers DNA is made of ) is put inside, together with a suitable catalyst (polymerases). The amazing result is that within a short time the original DNA appears. The final watery system has therefore been able to rebuild a very complex structure such as DNA thanks to an electromagnetic signal having a much lower complexity and without the contribution of classic chemically 508

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driven reactions. It is very important to underline that this phenomenon is absolutely not driven by classical chemistry reactions: there is indeed the presence of the electromagnetic signals/information of the DNA only, no matter or molecules are working here at all! We can deduce that a physical system based on water can generate spontaneous dynamics able to build highly complex structures starting from relatively simple stimuli. It is therefore a system able to generate knowledge. The physical system is able to know, on the basis of its own internal dynamics, the potential of the signal received even when its informative content is objectively small. In the next future these researches on the biological signals coming from water (like the supercoherent water obtained with WHITE Holographic Bioresonance method) will be constantly refined becoming more solid, science proof and clinically tested. We will then face a new technology leap in order to heal and give wellness to people through electromagnetic signals. Billions of personal handheld smartphones worldwide could be the perfect tools to easily deliver such positive waves by simply touching an app icon on the screen. In conclusion, we are able to foresee a rationale scheme where the biological water content of living systems gains an intrinsic organization induced by the organic surface interaction. That is the main factor that subsequently triggers spontaneous dynamics able to build up highly complex structures starting from very basic stimuli: the living system is intrinsically prone to generate knowledge. The physical system is able to know the potential meaning of the received signal according to its internal dynamics; even in the case of an extremely poor content of information, it can successfully activate the dynamics described above. Are we now facing a new era of understanding the emergence of the psyche connected to living matter as a pattern of function and structure?

Acknowledgements While this paper was being finalized, Emilio Del Giudice, its main author and the inspirational leader and founding father of such an extraordinary vision of the world and of its deep explanations through the novel rationale of the physics of living matter, passed away (31 January 2014). The completion of the work has been possible following strict previous indications given by Del Giudice and through the adaptation of a recent paper: Del Giudice, E. and Tedeschi, A. (2014) Lo sviluppo spontaneo della conoscenza negli organismi viventi: unità di funzione e struttura. Rivista di Neoscolastica, Università Cattolica, Milano. Special thanks to Giuseppe Vitiello for supervising the physics aspects of this paper.

Notes  1  The strict definition of the vacuum is the minimum energy state of a physical system. The energy of the vacuum should be conceived as the energy necessary to maintain the bare existence of the system.  2  A detailed discussion of these aspects can be found in an interesting article (Mae-Wan 2013).

Bibliography Barbieri, M. (2002) “The organic codes: an introduction to semantic biology”, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Bockris, J. M. and Khan, S. U. M. (1993) “Bioelectrochemistry”, New York: Plenum Press. Capolupo, A., Del Giudice, E., Elia, V., Germano, R., Napoli, E., Niccoli, M., Tedeschi, A. and Vitiello, G. (2014) Self-similarity properties of nafionized and filtered water and deformed coherent states, International Journal of Modern Physics B, 28, 1450007-1–145007-20. 509

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Del Giudice, E., Pulselli, R. M. and Tiezzi, E. (2009) Thermodynamics of irreversible processes and quantum field theory: an interplay for the understanding of ecosystem dynamics, Ecological Modelling, 220, 1874–1879. Del Giudice, E., Spinetti, P. R. and Tedeschi, A. (2010) Water dynamics at the root of metamorphosis in living organisms, Water, 2, 566–586. Del Giudice, E. and Tedeschi, A. (2009) Water and the autocatalysis in living matter. Electromagnetic Biology and Medicine, 28, 46–54. Del Giudice, E., Tedeschi, A., Vitiello, G. and Voeikov, V. (2013) Coherent structures in liquid water close to hydrophilic surfaces, Journal of Physics: Conference Series 442, article ID 012028 Del Giudice, E., Voeikov, V., Tedeschi, A. and Vitiello, G. (2015a) The origin and the special role of coherent water in living systems, in D. Fels and M. Cifra and D. Scholkmann (eds), “Fields of the Cell”, Basel, 5, 95–111. Del Giudice, E., De Filippis, A., Del Giudice, N., Del Giudice, M., d’Elia, I., Lorenza Iride, Menghi, E., Tedeschi, A., Cozza, V., Baroni, A. and Tufano, M. A. (2015b) Evaluation of a method based on coherence in aqueous systems and resonance-based isotherapeutic remedy in the treatment of chronic psoriasis vulgaris, Current Topics in Medicinal Chemistry, 15, 542–548. Mae-Wan, Ho (1998) “The rainbow and the worm, the physics of organisms”, Singapore; River Edge, NJ: World Scientific. Mae-Wan, Ho (2013) Circular thermodynamics of organisms and sustainable systems, Systems, 1, 30–49, doi:10.3390/systems1030030. Montagnier, L., Aıssa, J., Del Giudice, E., Lavallee, C., Tedeschi, A. and Vitiello, G. (2011) DNA waves and water, Journal of Physics: Conference Series 306, 1, article ID 012007. Montagnier, L., Del Giudice, E., Aïssa, J., Lavallee, C., Motschwiller, S., Capolupo, A., Polcari, A., Romano, P., Tedeschi, A. and Vitiello, G. (2015) Transduction of DNA information through water and electromagnetic waves, Electromagnetic Biology and Medicine, 34 (2), 106–112. Preparata, G. (1995) “QED Coherence in Matter”, Singapore; London; New York: World Scientific. Shannon, C. E. (1948) A mathematical theory of communication, Bell System Technical Journal, 27, 379–423. Tedeschi, A. (2010) Is the living dynamics able to change the properties of water? International Journal of Design & Nature and Ecodynamics, 5, 60–67. Vitiello G. (1998) Structure and function, in S. H. Hameroff et al. (eds), “Toward a Science of Consciousness” Boston: MIT Press, 191–196. Vitiello, G. (2012) Fractals, coherent states and self-similarity induced noncommutative geometry, Physics Letters. A 376, 2527–2532, arXiv:1206.1854 . Zheng, J.-M., Chin, W.-C., Khijniak, E., Khijniak, E. Jr., and Pollack, G. H. (2006) Surfaces and interfacial water: evidence that hydrophilic surfaces have long-range impact, Advances in Colloid and Interface Science, 127, 19–27.

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39 The importance of memory in ecology Sven Erik Jørgensen

Evolution and development of ecosystems Evolution is maybe the most discussed topic in biology and ecology. Millions of pages have been written about it and its ecological implications. Today, the facts of evolution are taken for granted. It is considered the result of the relation between the dynamics of the external factors (the life conditions for the organisms) and the dynamics of the genetic pool. The external factors steadily change the conditions for survival, and the genetic pool steadily comes up with new solutions to the problem of survival. What is very important: The genes have the ability to memorize the good solutions. Without this memory there would have been no evolution. New solutions are built on the shoulders of what has already been achieved. This explains that evolution has been geared towards a wider and wider spectrum of solutions, better and better solutions for specific conditions, and higher and higher complexity. Nature is organized hierarchically: molecules, cells, organs, organisms, populations, ecosystems, landscapes, regions and the entire ecosphere. Although we will use the competition of species on the ecosystem level based on Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest as illustration below, a similar competition takes also place among biochemical molecules on the cell level, among organs on the organism’s level, among individuals on the level of population and among ecosystems on the landscape level. The importance of the memory about good solutions in the genes plays an equally crucial role on all the levels, because the genes determine the enzymes catalyzing the biochemical processes that inevitably will inf luence the cells, that again inf luence the organs, and thereby the organisms and the population and so on through the entire hierarchy. Survival in the Darwinian sense implies maintenance of the species’ biomass (survival). Darwin’s theory applied on the ecosystem level requires that populations have the properties of reproduction, inheritance, and variation. The selection of the species that offer the most survival under the existing conditions requires that there are enough individuals with different properties that a selection can take place and that once a change has taken place due to better fitness it can be memorized and conveyed to the next generation though the genes. All species in an ecosystem are confronted with the question: How is it possible to survive or even grow under the prevailing conditions? The prevailing conditions are considered as all 511

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factors inf luencing the species, i.e., all external and internal factors including those originating from other species. This explains co-evolution, as any change in the properties of one species will inf luence the evolution of the other species. The environmental stage on which the selection plays out comprises all the interacting species; each inf luences each other. All natural external and internal factors of ecosystems are dynamic – the conditions are steadily changing, and there are always many species waiting in the wings, ready to take over if they are better fitted to the emerging conditions than the species dominating under the present conditions. There is a wide spectrum of species representing different combinations of properties available for the ecosystem. The question is which of these species are best able to survive and grow under the present conditions, and which species are best able to survive and grow under the conditions one time step further and two time steps further and so on? The necessity in Monod’s sense is given by the prevailing conditions – the species must have genes, or maybe rather phenotypes (meaning properties) that match these conditions, to be able to survive or even grow. But the natural external factors and the genetic pool (the memory pool of applicable solutions) available for the test may change randomly or by “chance”. Steadily, new mutations (misprints are produced accidentally) and sexual recombinations (the genes are mixed and shuff led) emerge and give steadily new material to be tested by the question: Which species are best fitted under the conditions prevailing just now? These ideas are illustrated in Figure 39.1. The external factors are steadily changed and some even relatively fast – partly at random, such as the meteorological or climatic factors. Evolution is considered the recorded long-term change of the genomes, because it represents the entire and relatively steady memory about good solutions under the prevailing conditions, which, however, are currently changed. The species within the system are selected among the species available and represented by the genetic pool, which again is slowly but surely changed randomly or by “chance”. It is a selection of the organisms that possess the properties best fitted to the prevailing organisms according to the frequency distribution. Ecological development includes the changes over time in nature caused by the dynamics of the external factors, giving the system sufficient time for modifying its structure and ­behavior – to respond to the changes of external factors, considering the constraints on survival and growth. An alternative and supplementary description could be: The species are continuously tested against the prevailing conditions (external as well as internal factors), and the better they are fitted the better they are able to maintain and even increase their biomass and also to increase the memories about good solutions embodied in the genes. The specific rate of population growth can even be used as a measure for the fitness (see, e.g., Stenseth 1986). But the property of fitness must be heritable to have any effect on the species composition and the ecological structure of the ecosystem in the long run. The changes of these properties, memorized in the genome, describe the steady increase of more specific and more complex solutions.

Adaptation and shifts in species’ composition The external factors forcing functions or impacts on the ecosystems are constraints that the species try to surpass by changing their properties. The properties are determined by the genes. Three amino bases in the DNA determine one amino acid, and the enzymes, which direct and control the life processes, consist of the right amino acids in the right sequence. The properties are, however, not exactly the same for all organisms in a population, but are often Gaussian-distributed. At the same time the properties are changed randomly by 512

The importance of memory in ecology External factors Forcing functions

Ecosystem structure at time t New recombinations of genes / mutations

Gene pool

Selection

Ecosystem structure at time t+1

Figure 39.1  C  onceptualization of how the external factors steadily change the species composition Note: The possible shifts in species composition are determined by the gene pool, which is steadily changed due to mutations and new sexual recombinations of genes. The development is, however, more complex. This is indicated by: 1) an arrow from “structure” to “external factors” and “selection” to account for the possibility that the species can modify their own environment (see discussion in this chapter) and thereby their own selection pressure, and 2) an arrow from “structure” to “gene pool” to account for the possibilities that the species can to a certain extent change their own gene pool.

mutations and new sexual recombinations. Which of the many possibilities are selected? In accordance to Darwin the species with properties that are best fitted to meet the constraints – meaning, to grow or at least maintain the biomass under the prevailing conditions – will survive. As the constraints are constantly varying, so too will vary the properties of the species. As a result, newly emerging constraints will inevitably give new properties. For instance if a plant species is exposed to a toxic substance it will increase the resistance to the toxic substance over time and be better and better to resist further contamination by the toxic substance, and this new information is remembered in the genome. The information embodied in the plant genome has been changed and now contains now information on how to resist the toxic substance. All organisms are currently changing the memory (the information) embodied in the genomes to ensure a better survival by the currently varying constraints. Natural selection has been criticized for being a tautology: Fitness is measured by survival, and survival of the fittest therefore means survival of the survivors. However, the entire Darwinian theory including the above mentioned three assumptions cannot be conceived as a tautology but may be interpreted as follows: Species offer different solutions (have different properties) to survive under the prevailing conditions, and the species that have the best combinations of properties to match the conditions have also the highest probability of survival and growth. The properties are determined by the information embodied in the genomes or expressed differently; the genomes have the memory about the properties that have been selected as the best for survival. Human changes in external factors, such as anthropogenic pollution, have created new problems for organisms because new genes fitted to these changes do not develop overnight. 513

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Most naturally occurring changes have transpired many times before; therefore, the genetic pool is readily prepared and remembers to meet the natural changes to a certain extent. The spectrum of genes is able to meet most natural changes but not all of the human-caused changes because they are new and often untested in the ecosystem. However by adaptation, or sometimes shifts in species composition, the properties can be changed to meet also the impact of humans. There are numerous cases in ecology demonstrating these reactions of the memories stored in the genome. The classical example is the ability of insects to become resistant to the insecticide DDT. After several generations of insects, the insects are completely resistant to DDT, and the application of DDT becomes useless. The insects have – after several generations and several selections of the insects which can resist the DDT best – a memory in the genomes about how to produce enzymes able to break down the DDT molecules and thereby ensure survival. There are many more similar examples in which the use of pesticides in general makes the target organisms’ resistance to the pesticide due to adaptation and the properties of resistance are remembered in the genes. This experience has led to a more limited and more selective use of pesticides and use of other methods, for instance biological methods.

The memory capacity of organisms It is important in thermodynamics to distinguish between work energy and heat. Work energy is the part of the energy that is able to do work, in contrast to the heat energy at the temperature of the environment that cannot do work. It costs work energy to construct biomass and structures and to get information. Therefore, biomass and information possess work energy, which is transferable to support other work energy-requiring processes. Survival and growth can therefore be measured by use of the thermodynamic concept work energy. It is important in this context to understand two of the most basic laws in science, namely the first and the second law of thermodynamics. The first thermodynamic law states that energy is always conserved – it cannot be created or constructed. The second law states that all activities require work energy, and that a part of the work energy is inevitably lost at the temperature of the environment as heat and cannot do work. This law emphasizes the importance of work energy and that it is essential to lose as little work energy as possible whenever we are using work energy to carry out activities. Work energy is always calculated relative to a reference state. For hydropower, for instance, we use the top of the waterfall and the bottom of the waterfall relatively to the sea level to calculate how much hydropower the waterfall can provide. For ecosystems, the prebiotic (before life merged about 3.8 billion years ago) “inorganic soup” has been used as the reference. It means the same ecosystem but at thermodynamic equilibrium where there are no gradients, no information and no work energy available – all components are inorganic at the highest oxidation state. Therefore, it is reasonable to use the available useful work, as a measure of the distance from thermodynamic equilibrium for the ecosystem. Let us translate Darwin’s theory into thermodynamics, applying work energy as the basic concept. Darwin’s theory may therefore be reformulated in thermodynamic terms as follows: The prevailing conditions of an ecosystem steadily change and the system will continuously select the species and the processes that can contribute most to the maintenance or even growth of the work energy of the system. Ecosystems are open systems and receive an inf low of solar energy. The solar energy carries work energy, while the radiation away from the ecosystem carries less work energy. The ecosystem has used the difference for maintenance of the complex structure with its 514

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enormous information. If the ecosystem receives more work energy than needed for the maintenance, it will use the surplus work energy to move further away from thermodynamic equilibrium, and it means to build biological structure, biomass and obtain more information. The proposition (the translation of Darwin’s theory to thermodynamics) claims, with other words, that the ecosystem attempts to reach the highest possible work energy level under the given circumstances and with the available genetic pool ready for this attempt ( Jørgensen and Mejer, 1977 and 1979). Work energy of organisms or ecosystems is the work energy including the work energy that is embodied in the information. Boltzmann (1905) has presented an equation to calculate the work energy of information. Work energy can be calculated for living organisms as β × B × f kJ, where (β − 1)B is covering the work energy of the information and 1 × B the work energy of the biomass, B is the biomass (for instance in g) and f is the work energy per unit of biomass, which in average is 18.7 kJ/g, but higher for animals with a high fat content. If B is replaced by the concentration, c, B per unit of area or volume, we get β × c × f kJ per unit of volume or area, which is the work energy density, Sometimes the work energy of organisms and ecosystems are denoted eco-exergy to emphasize the use of the reference state (the same system at thermodynamic equilibrium) and that it encompasses both the biomass and the information. We can find the work energy density of living organisms or ecosystems, if it is possible to determine the β-values for different organisms. Based upon the knowledge about the genome of different organisms and by the use of Boltzmann’s equation, it has been possible to determine the β-values for different organisms; see Table 39.1. For details about these calculations, see Jørgensen, 2002; Jørgensen et al., 2005; Jørgensen et al., 2007; and Jørgensen, 2012. The work energy density of an ecosystem can be found by: (unit kJ/unit of area or volume, c is g/unit of area or volume) I = n Work energy density = f Sbi ci I = n The work energy due to the “fuel” value of organic matter, f, (chemical energy) is, as mentioned above, about 18.7 kJ/g (compare with coal: about 30 kJ/g, and crude oil: 42 kJ/g). It can be transferred to other energy forms, for instance mechanical work, directly and be measured by bomb calorimetry, which requires destruction of the sample (organism), however. The information work = (β − 1) × biomass or density of information work = (β − 1) × concentration. The information work exergy controls the function of the many biochemical processes. The ability of a living system to do work is contingent upon its functioning as a living dissipative system. Without the work energy of information, the organic matter could only be used as fuel similar to fossil fuel. But due to the information, organisms are able to make a network of the sophisticated biochemical processes that characterize life. Due to the information all the levels of the ecological hieararchy have emergent properties, which means that they are more than the sum of their parts. The value of organisms as a biomass made up by a combination of about twenty elements is minor. The chemical components of organisms as such have only a minor value, but organisms have, due to their content of information, a series of important and very valuable properties – for instance, a fish can swim, it can find food, it can reproduce, it can hide for a natural enemy and so on. The work energy (of which the major part is embodied in the information) is a measure of the organization ( Jørgensen and Svirezhev, 2004). 515

Table 39.1  ß-values = total work content relative to work energy of detritus (averagely 18.7 kJ/g) Early organisms

Plants

Animals

Detritus Viroids Virus Minimal cell Bacteria Archaea Protists

Yeast Algae Mesozoa, Placozoa Protozoa (amoeba) Phasmida (stick insects) Fungi, moulds Nemertina Cnidaria Rhodophyta Gastrotricha Porifera Brachiopoda Plathyhelminthes Nematoda Hirudinea Gnathostomulida Mustard weed Seedless angiosperms Rotifera Entoprocta Kinorhyncha Insecta Moss Coleodiea (sea squirt) Lepidoptera Crustacea Chordata Rice Mollusca Gymosperms Mosquito Angiosperms Fish Amphibia Reptilia Aves Mammalia Monkeys Anthropoid apes Homo sapiens

Source: Jørgensen et al. (2005).

516

β-values 1.00 1.0004 1.01 5.0 8.5 13.8 17.8 20 33 39 43 61 76 91 92 97 98 109 120 133 133 143 143 158 163 164 165 167 174 191 221 232 246 275 310 314 322 393 499 688 833 980 2127 2138 2145 2173

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eco-exergy

Eco-exergy kJ/g

40000

30000

20000

10000

0 0

1000 2000 3000 Million years ago

4000

Figure 39.2  The eco-exergy density in kJ/g for the most advanced organism is plotted versus time Note: Notice the abrupt increase at the beginning of the Cambrian period, about 540 million years ago. Also the enhanced increase by the emergence of the mammals, hominoids and humans can be seen clearly on the graph. See also Jørgensen, 2008; and Jørgensen, 2012.

This is the intimate relationship between energy and organization that Schrödinger (1944) was struggling to find. Notice that the translation of Darwin’s theory to thermodynamic implies that survival expressed as total work energy includes the work energy of information, which is much more than the biochemical work energy of the biomass. This is reasonable because organisms carrying more information are also better survivors, because they have knowledge about how to survive. In this context Table 39.1 of the (β − 1) values shows the information carried by the different organisms and therefore their memory or information capacity per weight unit. Calculations of total work energy or total work energy density for organisms and ecosystems have found a wide use in applied ecology as ecological indicators ( Jørgensen, 2012), because the more work energy an ecosystem has the better it is able to resist changes. It may be used to express the ecosystem services ( Jørgensen, 2010). It has also been used to develop ecological models that can account for the changing properties due to adaptation and shifts in species composition ( Jørgensen and Fath, 2011). By the use of work energy including information (as previously mentioned, sometimes denoted eco-exergy) it is possible to quantify the evolution. Figure 39.2 shows the ecoexergy for the most advanced organisms at a given time (it means the organism with the highest β-value) expressed as kJ/g versus the number of years ago. As seen, the work energy of organisms per g has increased more than expontentially or at least exponentially due to the increase of the information in the genome, because only 18.7 kJ/g is the work energy of the biomass (as fuel). A result of the evolution has clearly been that information content of the organisms and therefore their memory capacity has increased enormously.

Summary Evolution and development of ecosystems have only been possible because the organisms are able to remember the good combinations of properties that give the organisms possibility for 517

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survival and even growth. The properties are currrently changed by adaptation, new mutations and sexual recombinations, due to the changes of the constraints on the organisms, the populations and the ecosystems. Knowledge (memory) about the properties to ensure survival and even growth is therefore currently changed, too. As a result, new emerging constraints, for instance toxic substances produced by man, will inevitably give new properties which are remembered in the genome. It is possible to translate Darwin’s theory to thermodynamics and thereby quantify survival by use of the concept of work energy. Information has work energy according to Boltzmann, and calculation of the total work energy of organisms shows that the work energy of information is much more than the work energy of the biomass considered as “fuel,” which is about 18.7 kJ/g in average. The ratio of total work energy of organisms to biomass work energy, denoted β, is for different organisms found on basis of knowledge about the genome. The value of β − 1 represents the capacity of memory for the properties of the organisms; see Table 39.1. A graph of the work energy as kJ/g for the most advanced organism at a given time plotted versus time shows an exponential or slightly more than expontential increase. The graph can be considered a quantitative presentation of the evolution – the increase of information embodied in the organisms and the increase of the memory capacity of the more and more advanced and complex organisms.

References Boltzmann, L. 1905. The Second Law of Thermodynamics (Populare Schriften. Essay No.3 [Address to Imperial Academy of Science in 1886]). Reprinted in English in: Theoretical Physics and Philosophical Problems, Selected Writings of L. Boltzmann. D. Riedel, Dordrecht. Jørgensen, S. E. 2002. Integration of Ecosystem Theories: A Pattern. Kluwer, Dordrecht. Jørgensen, S. E. 2008. Evolutionary Essays. Elsevier. Amsterdam, Oxford. Jørgensen, S. E. 2010. Ecosystem services, sustainability and thermodynamic indicators. Ecological Complexity 7, 311–13. Jørgensen, S. E. 2012. Introduction to Systems Ecology. CRC, Boca Raton, FL. Jørgensen, S. E. and Mejer, H. F. 1977. Ecological buffer capacity. Ecological Modelling 3, 39–61. Jørgensen, S. E. and Mejer, H. F. 1979. A holistic approach to ecological modelling. Ecological Modelling 7, 169–89. Jørgensen, S. E. and Svirezhev, Y. M. 2004. Towards a Thermodynamic Theory for Ecological Systems. Elsevier, Amsterdam. Jørgensen, S. E. and Fath, B. 2011. Fundamentals of Ecological Modelling. 4th edition. Elsevier, Amsterdam. Jørgensen, S. E., Ladegaard, N., Debeljak, M. and Marques, J. C. 2005. Calculations of exergy for organisms. Ecological Modelling 185, 165–76. Jørgensen, S. E., Fath, B., Bastiononi, S., Marques, J. C., Mueller, F., Nielsen, S. N., Patten, B. C., Tiezzi, E. and Ulanowicz, R. E. 2007. A New Ecology. Elsevier, Amsterdam, Oxford. Schrödinger, E. 1944. What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK (niem.: Was ist Leben). Stenseth, N. C. 1986. Darwinian evolution in ecosystems: A survey of some ideas and difficulties together with some possible solutions. In: J. L. Casti and A. Karlqvist (eds.), Complexity, Language, and Life: Mathematical Approaches. Springer-Verlag, Berlin.

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40 Soundscapes as commemoration and imagination of the acoustic past Jan Marontate, Megan Robertson and Nathan Clarkson

Introduction How do sounds and aural experiences of the world shape individual and collective memories? This chapter examines strategies developed by soundscape researchers to document, commemorate and imagine acoustic experiences of environmental sounds of the past. The term soundscape has emerged as an ubiquitous keyword, particularly in creative work (like sound art) and in social scientific studies concerned with listening practices and acoustic communication. Although some scholars have expressed consternation at the widespread adoption of the term by people who use it in radically different ways, soundscape evokes the aural experiences of the interaction of spaces and people in a particular place, culture and time (Kelman 2010, Sterne 2013). Following Alain Corbin (1998), Emily Thompson (2002: 1) defines a soundscape as: An auditory or aural landscape. Like a landscape, a soundscape is simultaneously a physical environment and a way of perceiving that environment; it is both a world and a culture constructed to make sense of that world. From the perspective of memory studies, a soundscape may thus serve as what French p­ hilosopher Michel Foucault called a dispositif (a concept frequently translated into English as ‘apparatus’) or, loosely put, a vantage point that provides a way of tracing the interplay of experience, practices, discourses, institutions and systems of relationships that exercise power and generate meanings in interactions. After a brief consideration of the place of soundscapes in sound studies, the chapter ­presents a selective history of the activities of soundscape researchers involved in a series of initiatives begun in the 1960s. The chapter draws on interviews with soundscape researchers, written documentation and an archival collection of texts and audiovisual materials about the history of environmental sound. This case study traces the transformation of the attitudes of participants in a series of soundscape studies (community activists, researchers and musicians) from a preoccupation with documenting (and resisting) noise pollution at the origins of the movement, to the development of new ways of characterizing ‘sonic environments’. It examines 519

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their creative uses of audio recordings as a community resource for accessing intangible cultural heritage and promoting new ways of listening through embodied practices based on nostalgic ideas about acoustic ecology in the past. The chapter concludes with a critical assessment of the implications of their methods for memory studies of acoustic environments of the past. It raises questions about the potential of collections of texts, visual evidence and audio recordings to serve as affordances for understanding the history of environmental sound and proposes caveats for considering soundscape recordings as mnemonic devices for accessing the ‘audible past’.

Sound studies Historians and social scientists often maintain that vision occupies a dominant position in post-Enlightenment Western cultures, as modern science and print culture increasingly turned to visual evidence in methodologies for establishing knowledge claims, leading scholars to downplay the persuasiveness of “hearing, smell, taste and touch” (Classen 1997: 402; Bijsterveld 2008: 40). However, recent scholarly work in a variety of fields (among them, acoustic ecology, cultural sociology and urban studies) points to “the power of sound and music to denote place, but also critically to demarcate space” (Ingham et al. 1999; cited in Atkinson 2007: 1906). Collections devoted to the emerging area now known as ‘sound studies’ often include research about soundscapes of the past and historical transformations in ways of using sound as an affordance for action and embodied cognition (Pinch and Bijsterveld 2012, Sterne 2012, DeNora 2003). Monographs on topics such as the history of acoustic engineering (Thompson 2002), or cultural and technological issues in sound reproduction (Sterne 2003) and case studies about representations of sound in texts and staged performances (Bijsterveld 2013) offer rich reflections on the history of acoustic environments, listening practices and their implications for memory studies. Cognitive psychologists and scientists, historians and scholars working in environmental studies have also contributed much to the study of sound, memory practices and the acoustic past as well. There is little consensus about why acoustic environments matter or even how to characterize or study them. Protagonists in debates with different (and often incommensurate) objectives have developed specialized vocabularies and methods to document, analyze, shape or safeguard environmental sound as cultural heritage (among them ethnographers, musicologists, scientists, engineers, architects, artists, designers, medical practitioners, legislators, social workers, environmentalists and political activists). A composer and theorist of acoustic communication – R. Murray Schafer – is often credited with popularizing the terms ‘soundscape’ and ‘soundmark’ as aural counterparts to the more visually oriented notions of ‘landscape’ and ‘landmark’. In the 1960s, he launched an ambitious program of theoretical and applied research projects about sound in public spaces, notably an empirical investigation of environmental sound in Europe and Canada known as the World Soundscape Project (WSP). Schafer and several prominent participants in these endeavors (among them Barry Truax and Hildegard Westerkamp) authored foundational texts that continue to inspire both admiration and controversy among scholars, artists and activists concerned with acoustic environments, memory practices and sound studies more generally. Schafer left the project in 1975, but the Sonic Research Studio he founded remains a locus for soundscape researchers and houses an extensive archival collection. This chapter examines strategies for documenting the experience of listening in public spaces through an analysis of recent interviews with participants affiliated with the Sonic 520

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Research Studio in a long-running series of research initiatives that produced foundational work in the area of soundscape studies.1 The interviews sought insights from participants in these initiatives about the meanings of the documentation they created and the ways they conducted their research. (This case study of the Sonic Research Studio was undertaken in the context of a research program concerned with conservation strategies for contemporary forms of cultural heritage in time-based media, a term used by conservators of cultural heritage to refer to works created using ephemeral materials, performance-based practices or technologies that rapidly become obsolete). More specifically, this chapter focuses on methods participants developed for using recording technologies and listening techniques as affordances for understanding environmental sound in the past and documenting changing acoustic environments for future generations.

History of soundscape documentation in the Sonic Research Studio archives The Sonic Research Studio archives contain audio recordings, photographs, handwritten field notes and texts created in the context of fieldwork, documentary research and creative projects. The studio was established by R. Murray Schafer after he took up a position in 1965 as resident composer at Simon Fraser University, a new university on the West Coast of Canada. He raised funds to equip the studio with (then) state-of-the art field recording and post-production audio equipment. The World Soundscape Project grew out of Schafer’s concerns about noise pollution in the 1960s and transformations in the acoustic environment. According to Schafer, his students felt little could be done to abate what he considered unpleasant sounds of modern life, therefore he tried to develop a more positive approach to exploring acoustic communication (Schafer interview 2011). The documentation accumulated in the course of these activities has been conserved and organized under the supervision of Barry Truax, a composer and acoustic communication theorist. He has supervised subsequent projects and maintained archives documenting activities at the studio during the last half century. The archives include material created for the WSP in various media and a database of digitized (and digital) audio recordings available for consultation.2 The audio recordings are indexed in a subject catalogue. The arrangement of these subject categories – beginning with the elemental sounds of nature (including sounds of water, sounds of air, sounds of fire) and moving through human and social sounds to mechanical sounds and sounds as indicators – follows the hierarchy of organic and inorganic sounds proposed by Schafer (1977/1993). Although the objectives of the researchers were not necessarily to create an archive of memories of acoustic environments, the documents in the collection provide materials for a socio-mnemonic narrative of evolving theories of soundscapes and methods for studying acoustic environments. The materials in the archives are associated with a body of work that holds an important place in the history of scholarship about environmental sound and acoustic ecology. Team members produced widely read textbooks and treatises still in use. For example, Truax’s compendium of terms and concepts, the Handbook for Acoustic Ecology (1978/1999), his textbook on Acoustic Communication (1984/2001), and Schafer’s Tuning of the World (1977), reprinted in 1993 as The Soundscape: Our Environment and the Tuning of the World, proposed theories and concepts that have had a formative inf luence on an eclectic body of scholarship related to creative and scholarly work on sound, space and place. Hildegard Westerkamp has had a long association with the studio and her writings have been particularly inf luential among environmental activists, music educators, musicians and composers. 521

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Protagonists in debates in sound studies have raised questions about core concepts and methods used by participants in Sonic Research Studio projects (Kelman 2010, Thompson 2002, Shelemay 2006). Critics have expressed concerns about the ideological assumptions embedded in early theories, for example, Schafer’s aesthetic judgments about the superiority of acoustic environments with low levels of ambient noise; his idealized, nostalgic depiction of soundscapes in the past; his abhorrence of dislocated machine-made sounds; and his emphasis on listening techniques geared to the sensibilities of musicians trained in Western traditions (see, for example, Bijsterveld 2008, Kelman 2010, Thompson 2002, Sterne 2012, Sterne 2013). Other criticisms revolve around ethical concerns, for example, the lack of cultural diversity in the choice of sites and communities to study and the potentially hegemonic nature of prescriptive views about how people should listen to and engage with soundscapes (Akiyama 2010).

Interviews with soundscape recordists and researchers Oral history interviews were conducted with surviving key participants in the World Soundscape Project and other projects associated with the studio to seek insights about how (and why) they created this documentation. All of the interviewees had played roles in the creation of materials in the archives, although not all at the same time or on the same projects. Interviewees included recordists involved with three iterations of a longitudinal study of soundscapes in the Vancouver area in the 1970s, 1980s and 2009–2010. Some had been involved in early initiatives in the 1960s and 1970s (Schafer, Truax, Peter Huse, Bruce Davis and Westerkamp). Others (Bob MacNiven and Vincent Andrisani) were recordists for two series of soundscape studies conducted in the 1990s and in 2009–2010, respectively. The semi-structured interviews adopted the format of a topical account of practice, a form of oral history interview that uses biographical-narrative techniques to study work and lived experience over time (Bertaux and Bertaux-Wiame 1981). Topics included the history of the interviewee’s work with soundscapes and transformations in their approaches and interests over time. Participants were asked to discuss criteria they used to make decisions about what sounds should be recorded and preserved. For example, did they seek ‘typical’ or unique acoustic environments? They were asked about their recollections of conditions and objectives surrounding specific projects, techniques, technologies, recording conventions, aesthetics and other factors that informed their activities. How, for example, did they decide what constituted a ‘successful’ recording? What were their interpretations of the meanings of the materials in the archives? How should records of their work be preserved? What ideas did they have about prospective future uses of the recordings they had made?

Varieties of methods in soundscape documentation The research teams had adopted eclectic strategies. All of the core participants interviewed had strong interests in music and little training in the social sciences. They developed methods that drew on traditions in ethnomusicology, anthropological fieldwork, dramaturgical techniques in sociological studies of symbolic interaction and other social science methodologies, as well as approaches inspired by theatrical improvisation and creative practices in musical performance and composition (related to innovations in musique concrète and electroacoustic music). Participants drew on these interdisciplinary toolkits for the most part without a set of pre-determined criteria or overarching methodological strategy. 522

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In the interviews it became clear that the materials in the Sonic Research Studio archives were generated in the course of a diverse range of initiatives undertaken in a spirit of pioneering, sometimes playful, investigations of a topical and a very original research agenda in the mid-twentieth century. Certainly the team leaders (notably Schafer and later Truax) held strong feelings about their theories and aesthetic evaluations of environmental sound and played central roles in developing fieldwork activities. However, team members recalled intense involvement in collaborative activities, for example, spending long hours listening to recordings over and over in the studio together and discussing what they heard. Westerkamp recalled that the development of ideas for empirical research activities went hand in hand with the elaboration of concepts and terminology: We developed a method … through the ideas that we had … Murray was calling the shots most of the time. He had the idea, he was telling us … we really need this and this and this, we need to get – What are the signals of this city? What are the soundmarks of this city? He invented the terms as we went along (Westerkamp interview 2011). All of the participants recalled being encouraged to experiment in their documentary and creative work. Their activities were undertaken in an era marked by the emergence of exuberant youth movements that promoted cultural experimentation and social change, and the West Coast of Canada was a centre of countercultural activity: Our generation, the post-war generation, the boomers, … we were trying, we were questioning everything as well. And so when I came here in ‘68 right in the summer of all the revolutionary things happening among the students in Europe and in North America where we were trying to break the conventions of university education, that also played into this…. Vancouver at that time was a very exciting place because there were experimentations going on all over the place. There were … new formats, new places happening where we were allowed to be creative. And this kind of sense of being allowed to be creative and nobody questioned the boundaries of that was to me personally significant…. So I was just, “Wow, we can do this here?” And Murray had absolutely no fears. He just went ahead with his ideas and he also did the fundraising so that we could go ahead and do this studying (Westerkamp interview 2011). This eclecticism and focus on creativity generated a collection that cannot be considered a representative sample of soundscape documentation, but the archives are a surprisingly rich source of insights into memories of the acoustic past. This is in part because the earliest projects were concerned with noise as an environmental threat and had an interest in capturing memories of disappearing sounds in a changing world (Bosma 2006, Bijsterveld 2008, Schafer 1977/1993). Schafer was inspired by his abhorrence of sounds of the city: When I first came here from Toronto, my experience was that Vancouver was a much noisier place than Eastern Canada was. The reason for that is that you don’t have such a severe winter…. Therefore you don’t need to do as much insulation in buildings and home. You don’t have double glazing on windows…. And so, I was struck by the noise of Vancouver almost as soon as I arrived…. If you remember the early 1960s, it was the beginning of rock music, the loudest music that had ever been heard on the planet. It was the time of the Detroit automobile, people were developing muscle cars, which were 523

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noisier than any other car produced up to that time. The Concorde jet aircraft was off the tarmac now and a potential problem worldwide (Schafer interview 2011). Members of the team worked with Schafer to compile literary descriptions of sounds of the past and gathered documentation about noise control legislation. Others embarked on a detailed study of sound in the immediate locale (Vancouver), a cross-Canada recording tour and a European tour. They produced field recordings of sounds of specific places and types of sounds (such as train whistles and church bells). They made audio recordings in outdoor and indoor spaces (among them a farm, a mining town, a monastery, city streets, restaurants and public transportation vehicles) and created compilations of ‘found sounds’. They took photographs of some of the sites where field recordings were made and took notes about where and how they produced recordings in log sheets, technical field notes and maps. They interviewed residents of communities about memories of sounds. They sometimes recorded commentaries about listening to the fieldwork recordings. Some participants published scholarly papers and books and gave lectures about their work. They produced radio programs for local and national networks. Even after the initial funding for the WSP ended in 1977, many participants continued their work. They sought ways to heighten public interest in environmental sound as a dimension of the lived experience of community life with performances and sonic art installations. Some embraced activist agendas and new methods, such as ‘ear cleaning’ workshops (built on Schafer’s instructional techniques) and ambulatory excursions called ‘soundwalks’ (typically led by guides who instruct members of the general public to walk and listen in silence, sometimes while recording their journey) with the goal of enhancing the public’s awareness of environmental sound. Documentation of some of these activities is also included in the Sonic Research Studio archives. Given the diversity of the methods and interests of the team members, it was remarkable to note the consistent emphasis interviewees placed on ways that the act of making audio recordings and listening to them transformed their understandings of the meanings of sound in public spaces and the role of sound in mnemonic narratives about community life, a topic discussed below.

‘Phenomenological recording’ One of the paradoxes of Schafer’s legacy is that, while he abhorred mechanical and electronic sounds associated with modern technologies, he embraced new recording technologies in his efforts to raise awareness of changing soundscapes. Schafer’s enthusiasm for using audio recording as a method of raising people’s awareness of their acoustic environments spurred people involved with the Sonic Research Studio to collect recordings of environmental sound (Benschop 2007). He encouraged his acolytes to make recordings as a resource for their investigations: Just as a photograph frames a visual environment, which may be inspected at leisure and in detail, so a recording isolates an acoustic environment and makes it a repeatable event for study purposes (Schafer 1973, liner notes, n.p.). Some hoped eventually to amass a collection for a sound museum (Huse and Davis interview 2011). Some team members began to see their activities as a form of memory work or cultural heritage preservation. 524

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In 1972 a generous grant from a private foundation supported the acquisition of high-quality modern portable recording equipment and post-production technologies. Access to these technologies offered new possibilities for enhancing the capacities of the human ear (Sterne 2003). Westerkamp observed that the act of recording was itself transformational: When you hear the environment through a microphone, monitoring on headphones, your ears go through an incredible shift of awareness. Suddenly you are listening to the environment in a new way, you hear everything (Westerkamp interview 2011). The trajectory of their investigations thus provides insights into the impact of recording technologies on ways of thinking about soundscapes and memory. All of the interviewees became avid users of recording technologies. Their approaches were initially premised on the notion that it was possible to document external reality objectively. In one method, sometimes called ‘phenomenological recording’ they tried to “interfere with the recording process as minimally as possible” in order to achieve ‘objective’ reproductions of sounds as they heard them (Truax interview 2009).

Creating memories Soundscape recordings were not only used by recordists to create memories of their own experiences but also to recover other people’s memories of the acoustic past. The first team of WSP researchers was interested in sounds that no longer existed in public spaces and designed projects (in Canada and Europe) with the goal of capturing ‘disappearing sounds’, or sounds made by ‘obsolete machines’ (Davis and Huse 1974: 30). These included sounds that were vanishing as a result of changing technology or drowned out by mechanical sounds in urban settings. Recordists located sound making devices that had fallen into disuse, such as sirens and horns used in maritime communication or as emergency warning signals, or devices such as butter churners or outdated machinery. They made recordings of efforts to coax people to activate the devices with much merriment on the part of the participants, but beyond the humour these records indicate that the methods they used relied on both chance and control. While they were making audio recordings of the devices in action, they also took sound level measurements. Schafer had observed that effective signals for public communications, such as the siren of a fire engine, had to achieve a signal-to-noise ratio that allowed the signal to be distinguished from other ambient sounds (Truax 1984/2001). On the basis of recordings and measurements of the sounds of historic devices it was possible to make hypotheses about noise levels in environments during past eras that predated modern sound measurement studies (for example, a comparison of antiquated sirens to newer signal systems would provide some form of measurement indicative of ‘signal to noise’ ratios between sirens and acoustic environments of the past). Researchers also sought field sites with architectural and geographic configurations that resembled literary descriptions of historic settings, for example, a working mining town, a farm and villages in Europe. At times their work on acoustic dimensions of life in historic sites took on the character of action-research fueling cultural heritage preservation initiatives. For example during a visit of team members to a French coastal fishing town in Brittany they noticed a recurring pattern made by cycles of winds and the bouncing buoys. Schafer recalled: Once we sort of got this pattern through our recording and our listening … we went to the fishermen and we said, “Hey, you know you got these….” and they said, “Of course 525

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we know that, its called ‘vents solaires’, that’s how we know when to go fishing. If there’s a change in those sounds it might be a storm; we can tell; we can read the environment” (Schafer interview 2011). During the team’s visit the French government announced plans to construct a highway on the crest of the hill by the village. A French participant affiliated with UNESCO used research by the team to argue that putting in the road would ‘kill the village’ because the fishermen wouldn’t be able to hear the sounds of the solar winds. Radio France produced an award-winning program on the topic. According to Schafer: I think we, in fact, were the ones who initiated the program because of our research and our approach to discovering that really the changes in the sounds of a village could either encourage or destroy aspects of village life (Schafer interview 2011). While they often planned field recording sessions to coincide with anticipated acoustic events or predicable sonic events (for example, timing sessions to coincide with a fireworks display or an hourly clock signal), they also experimented by collecting what Truax calls “found sound recordings”: “You take a microphone and you set it up without necessarily knowing what you’re going to record. You just take what is there” (Truax interview 2009). (This is what Schafer called phenomenological recording.) The work has had enduring influence on soundscape researchers internationally, as witnessed by a project led by Finnish researchers who revisited the sites and published their findings in 2009 ( Järviluoma et al. 2009).

Soundscape composition: from simulation to imaginary acoustic environments Initially the work remained primarily in documentary mode, and editing was considered a technique for analysis. For example, a team recorded environmental sound during a 24-hour period in a rural monastery, and then took 2-minute samples from each hour to create a composition that charted the ebb and flow of nature sounds over the course of a day. Here they adopted the phenomenological recording (or ‘found sound’) approach for each recorded segment, over a 24-hour period they recorded 15 minutes each hour, and then took 2 minutes from each of those recordings (in the studio) to construct a 48-minute piece to represent the passing of a day. While the recordings were done with minimal interference, there was still the choice of the day to record, which microphone to use, how to position it in the field and, most importantly, which 2-minute sample from each recorded segment to use in the final piece. Therefore, while the recordings were ‘phenomenological’ in a sense, the end result was highly constructed. (The composition was broadcast as part of a ten-part series of one-hour radio programs on the national radio network and spurred reflection on the preservation of the acoustic ecology of heritage sites.) ‘Authentic’ sound recordings of community life could not all be documented by naturalistic recording of ‘found sounds’. The team rapidly developed methods that moved from simply preserving original recordings to mixing recorded tracks to simulate soundscapes. For example, in a composition created for the Vancouver Soundscape series – Entry to the Harbour – the WSP team tried to reconstruct the experience of entering Vancouver harbour in a boat. In an actual recording with the technology of the time, the sounds of the boat approaching and advancing or receding foghorns or splashing buoys would have been 526

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drowned out by the boat motor. Instead, separate recordings were mixed and transformed into a simulation, thereby “abandoning the ear as a navigational tool in favor of modern electronic instrumentation” (Truax 1995: 5). Soon the recording activities expanded to include fictional or imaginary compositions (or what Bijsterveld terms ‘staged sound’). In Truax’s words: Although the principal work of the WSP was to document and archive soundscapes, to describe and analyze them, and to promote increased public awareness of environmental sound through listening and critical thinking, a parallel stream of compositional activity also emerged that created, perhaps less intentionally, what I have called the genre of the “soundscape composition” (Truax 1996: 54). For Truax the distinguishing feature of soundscape composition is “the presence of ­recognizable environmental sounds and contexts, the purpose being to invoke the listener’s associations, memories, and imagination” (Truax 2013). Their approaches to soundscape composition varied in their intent: from representing the real with a minimal alteration through to, well frankly, completely imaginary soundscapes, ones that have been so abstracted from the real world that they are more metaphorical, symbolical, idealized, virtual even, imaginary, and yet they make sense as if they were real soundscapes (Truax interview 2009). Truax and Westerkamp achieved recognition as internationally acclaimed soundscape composers. Westerkamp was commissioned by the Canada Pavilion of Expo 1986 to create a work performed for the public by tugboats in Vancouver harbour, “breaking down the concert hall barrier, and hence the division of music and the soundscape, the concertgoer and the general public” (Truax 1995: 7). The recording of environmental sound had begun to nurture new ways of using our sense of hearing to engage with public spaces and places through innovative art forms (Westerkamp 2001).

‘Ear witness’ accounts and soundwalking Other methods were used to gather and share information about acoustic environments, notably by seeking memories of the past and their relation to contemporary soundscapes. In the 1970s Westerkamp conducted a series of interviews with older members of communities about sounds that no longer existed: We began asking people questions like, “What sounds do you hear now that you didn’t hear as a child and what sounds did you hear as a child that you no longer hear today?” So we became in a sense a sound museum, and we went out and recorded some of those sounds people described as disappearing sounds. We made catalogues, brought them back to this studio and began to make catalogues with the sounds we recorded (Schafer interview 2011). As outsiders on their visits to field sites, the recordists sometimes sought the viewpoint of members of what they came to call ‘acoustic communities’. These interviews came to be known as ‘ear witness accounts’ and were used to explore the interplay of sounds, memories and listening processes (Truax 1984/2001). Sometimes they took the form of conventional 527

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oral history interviews, but recordists also engaged in informal conversations with local residents as they listened together in situ at field sites. The early activities of the WSP had focused largely on documenting acoustic environments (past and present). However, Westerkamp sought to engage listeners with their acoustic environments and inspire action (Westerkamp interview 2011). Westerkamp introduced the practice of soundwalking (walking through the environment and listening silently) to publics in her local co-op radio program Soundwalking (1978) by broadcasting recordings and her commentary about what she heard (Westerkamp interview 2011). More recently she has developed new approaches to guiding listeners on soundwalks by encouraging them to listen to their thoughts as well. Methods developed for soundwalking have been adopted for a variety of purposes, for example, in music therapy and music education, in the design of organized walking tours of cultural districts, as an interactive component of public art initiatives and as a social scientific data collection method in urban planning (Semidor 2006, Kull 2006, Paquette and McCartney 2012). By enhancing attentiveness to sensory experiences of the audible world such research reconfigures memory practices.

Stealing sounds and positioning the recordist in the field In her soundwalking broadcasts Westerkamp explicitly acknowledged her presence in the environments she recorded. However, as she mentioned in her interview, she initially made a sharp distinction between her own thoughts and commentaries and the acoustic phenomena she recorded. Other interviewees usually attempted to position themselves as invisible, unobtrusive observers, and some even expressed the capacity to do this as the earmark of a good soundscape recordist: “As soon as you walk up with it [the microphone] and start to record something it’s going to affect the outcome … [but] it’s a natural skill of the recordist to disappear” (Davis interview 2011). Davis and Huse saw surreptitious recording as a way of minimizing their impact and gathering authentic data: “We stole genuine human activity rather than manipulating human activity” (Davis interview 2011). Not all of the techniques for recording in public spaces relied on non-reactive measures. At times they staged events in ways that might not pass muster with research ethics boards today. For example, during a cross-Canada tour Davis and Huse periodically stopped their car to ask for directions to local landmarks and recorded the responses using a concealed microphone without obtaining informed consent to record the responses. They used the recordings to produce a program aired on national radio called Directions (1974) that featured changing dialects and modes of cultural interaction in their travels across the continent. In the interviews it was impossible to ascertain how recordists decided what was appropriate to record. Clearly they had ideas about proscribed sounds. There are, for example, no recordings of public toilets in the archives. As well, decisions were made to exclude materials from the archives, for example, recordings of conversations with homeless people in an inner city district known for extreme poverty, drug addition and prostitution have been removed from the collection. The recordists usually attempted to avoid interaction with other people when making field recordings, but the presence of the microphone and equipment (especially in the earliest series when the portable equipment was larger and more obvious) frequently inspired questions from passersby. Interviewees recalled their frustration at interruptions by curious bystanders: I don’t know how many people came up to me and started talking and saying, “You’re making a film?” or “What are you doing?” or “You recording something?” or they 528

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would just come up and, if it was an ambient recording that I was trying to take it was ruined, it turned into something else (MacNiven interview 2011). Some of the exchanges are preserved on the tapes, and log sheets from the recording sessions occasionally note with exasperation the inconvenience of unsolicited interventions. Recording openly in public spaces sometimes elicited outright resistance. In one session near public tennis courts, MacNiven recalled: There were two guys really seriously having a tennis match together and, if you stood right at the net with, again with the stereo, you would get the ball traveling back and forth between the two extremes of the left and right channels, and one guy dropped his racquet and then decided it was my fault. He came over … and insisted that I was the problem. I was ruining his game so I, I had to cease recording at that point. I thought that was quite funny. I didn’t tell him that at the time. He was really quite strident about it (MacNiven interview 2011). Overall, then, the interviewees expressed ambivalence about the role of publics in documentation of acoustic environments. At times members of acoustic communities were embraced as informants who could assist with interpretations or planning. However, users of the field sites who made their presence audible during recording sessions were frequently depicted as despoilers interfering with the documentary process. The extent to which the recordists considered themselves participants in the environments they were documenting remains ambiguous, too. Inspired by contemporary ethnographic methods that acknowledge the presence of the observer, in the third series of the Vancouver soundscape recordings, completed in 2011, Vincent Andrisani intentionally situated himself as witness and participant by recording commentary on his own experiences (Andrisani 2011: 31). The transformation of strategies adopted by soundscape researchers thus provides rich avenues for memory scholars seeking to understand the evolution of ways of thinking about environmental sound and transformations of ways of documenting the experience of acoustic environments of the recent and distant past. This suggests several caveats about the uses of recorded soundscape in memory studies.

Concluding remarks: soundscape documentation in memory studies of the acoustic past The activities of the researchers interviewed span almost half a century of initiatives devoted to the study of environmental sound. During this period they devised diverse approaches, sometimes positioning themselves as unobtrusive observers, at other times prearranging staged acoustic events, re-creating sounds (for example, by recording obsolete sound making devices) or composing imaginary soundscapes. Although they initially approached audio recording as a method for collecting objective documentation about spaces and places, they rapidly expanded their research techniques to explore varieties of listening experiences and subjective processes of understanding the meaning of sound. Their audio recordings survive as artifacts of both research and artistic activities. Distinctions between research and creation may be irrelevant for many users of the collection. The varied combinations of social scientific methods and creative practices raise questions about historic documentation of memories of the acoustic past. Does it matter if a recording is a naturalistic transcription of found sound? 529

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To what extent are simulations or post-production of audio recordings acceptable as ‘data’? What can documentation about soundscapes tell us about the life in the past? What is ethical to record? Who ‘owns’ the sound and who has the right to share it? The answers depend, of course, on the objectives and research questions users hope to resolve in studying this or any other collection of recordings. From the perspective of memory studies, the work of these soundscape researchers suggests that research on the nature and experience of acoustic environments provides potentially rich avenues for investigation of changing contexts and modes of engaging with the listening to the world. However, their diverse strategies and objectives illustrate the need to recognize that collections of historic recordings ref lect decisions about what to record, when and how, and as such ref lect changing methods and values of their creators. The human and non-human sounds that constitute acoustic environments are manifestations of the complex interplay of human and non-human networks marked by political, economic, environmental, material and social conditions. So are the documents created to preserve memories of acoustic environments of the past. Contemporary researchers might begin planning their research strategies by considering what questions they have about the place of sound in the phenomenon, context or community they wish to study. While recordings may have the potential to serve as what American psychologist J.J. Gibson (1986) called ‘affordances’ for perception, cognition and action, collections of historic audio recordings are not impartial documents. Analysis of documentation about acoustic environments must consider the production of that documentation as a situated practice, produced in a specific historical context (even if the documentation is very recent). Such documentation is shaped by the researchers’ approach to listening and the many choices recordists make about what, when and how to create records. The strategies our interviewees developed provide rich examples of the wide range of issues involved in the creation of records of the acoustic past. While the primary objectives of many researchers interested in the relations of sound, space and place in memory studies may not be centred on the questions about environmental sound that captivated these soundscape enthusiasts, the strategies they used for documenting and exploring the experience of listening with the aid of audio recording technologies provide insights into the complex methodological issues that recordists encountered that should be considered when interpreting the meaning of the documentation they produced. The availability of powerful, portable and relatively inexpensive technologies for documenting, analyzing, replicating, producing and disseminating sound has opened new avenues for investigations of the acoustic dimensions of contemporary life and re-creation of acoustic environments of the past (Casey and Gordon 2007). However there are challenges in creating and interpreting audio recordings of acoustic environments. Did the act of recording perturb the dynamics of the situation? Was the sonic event naturalistic or artificially contrived? Do recordings capture the experience of listening? Technologies don’t ‘know’ how to listen the way members of an acoustic community do, at least not yet. Documenting acoustic experiences is not a simple mechanistic process. The testimony of this group of soundscape researchers provides insights into the potential as well as the challenges of using audio recordings and other forms of historic documentation as affordances for accessing and understanding memory practices.

Notes  1  The authors wish to acknowledge with gratitude support for this study from the Vice-President Research of Simon Fraser University (an institutional grant for “New Directions in Ethnographic 530

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Audio Preservation and Research: A Case Study of the World Soundscape Project” to co-applicants J. Marontate and B. Truax awarded in 2009) and from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (a strategic grant in the Image, Text, Sound and Technology competition for “Listening with Technology: Transformations in the Study of Sonic Environments” awarded to J. Marontate, principal investigator, and co-investigators B. Truax and D. Murphy in 2010). The authors also thank Dave Murphy, Chris Jeschelnik, Laurynas Navidauskas and Maggie Chao for their work on videotaping and transcribing the interviews.  2  The digitized audio recordings are available for use by authorized users on a secure site, but at the time of writing permission and codes to access the audio recordings must be obtained from the current Director of the Sonic Research Studio, Barry Truax. A subject catalogue of the audio recordings is available to the public through links on the university website (http://www.sfu.ca/sonic-studio/ srs/index2.html, accessed 30 June 2014).

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Schafer, R. Murray (Ed.). (1973). The Vancouver Soundscape (2 LPs and book). Burnaby: World Soundscape Project, Sonic Research Studio, Simon Fraser University. Schafer, R. M. (1977/1993). The Tuning of the World: Toward a Theory of Soundscape Design. (2nd edition published as The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World.) New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Semidor, C. (2006). Listening to a City with the Soundwalk Method. Acta Acustica united with Acustica, 92(6), 959–64. Shelemay, K. K. (2006). Soundscapes: Exploring Music in a Changing World, 2nd edition. New York: W W Norton & Company Inc. Sterne, J. (2003). The Audible Past. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sterne, J. (Ed.). (2012). The Sound Studies Reader. London: Routledge. Sterne, J. (2013). Soundscape, Landscape, Escape. In Soundscapes of the Urban Past: Staged Sound as Mediated Cultural Heritage, K. Bijsterveld (Ed.). New York: Columbia University Press, 181–93. Thompson, E. (2002). The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Truax, B. (1978/1999). Handbook for Acoustic Ecology, 2nd edition. Self-published. Available at: http://www.sfu.ca/sonic-studio/handbook. [Accessed 9 June 2015]. Truax, B. (1984/2001). Acoustic Communication, 1st and 2nd editions. Westport: Albex Publishing. Truax, B. (1995). Sound in Context: Acoustic Communication and Soundscape Research at Simon Fraser University. 21st International Computer Music Conference Proceedings, Banff. Available at: http://wfae.proscenia.net/library/articles/truax_SFUniversity.pdf. [Accessed: 22 August 2014]. Truax, B. (1996). Soundscape, Acoustic Communication and Environmental Sound Composition. Contemporary Music Review, 15(1), 49–65. Truax, B. (2013). Soundscape Composition. Available at: http://www.sfu.ca/~truax/scomp.html. [Accessed: 9 August 2014]. Westerkamp, H. (1974). Soundwalking. Sound Heritage, 3(4), 18–27. Westerkamp, H. (2001). Linking Soundscape Composition and Acoustic Ecology. Organised Sound, 7(1), 51–6.

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Page numbers in bold refer to tables. Abbott, Andy 23 Abe, Shinzō 349, 367 Aboriginal remains 137 abuses of memory 116–17 Accidental Death of an Anarchist (Fo) 390, 391 acculturation 67 acknowledgment of guilt 36 The Act of Killing (documentary) 332–3 action and responsibility 113, 114 active forgetting 420–3 activism see social movements actor-network theory 25 actors and organizational memories 97 Adam, Barbara 121 adaptation, species 512–14 Adorno, Theodor W. 126 advertising 274–5, 276 aesthetics 73–4, 383, 390–2 affect see emotions and affect Africa 127 The African Religions of Brazil (Bastide) 43 afterlife 133, 135 agency 16–17, 68 aging and cell memory 496–7 Alessandri, Jorge 372 Alexander, Jeffrey 206, 210, 368 Allende, Salvador 372–8 al-Qaeda 416, 417 Altamirano, Carlos 375–6 Alva, Arturo 405 Alzheimer’s disease 448, 453–4 Amato, Mario 387 amnesia 451–5 Amnesty Law (Spain) 184 “amnesty without amnesia” 55–6, 58, 62 amputation and phantom limb syndrome 459, 463 amygdala 475–6 Anarchist Pinelli’s funeral (Baj) 390–1 Andreotti, Giulio 386 Angkar 336 Annales movement 28, 32–3, 35, 39

anniversary syndrome 467 anthropology: death and burial 137; memory studies in 42–3; photography 283 anthroposophy 462 anticipation see expectations Antigone (Sophocles) 132, 181, 185–8, 406 anti-memory 145 anti-Semitism 57–8 anti-Zionism 57–8 anxiety 475 Appadurai, Arjun 122 appropriation of survivors’ stories 433–4 Arad, Michael 398–402, 407 Arafat, Yasser 85 archaeology 136, 137 architecture: cultural mood 178; space and boundaries 465; styles and place 194–5 archives: digital trauma archives 205–6, 208–16; Documentation Center of Cambodia 335; memory as an archive 449–50; organizational memories 103, 105–6, 107; photography 275; reading societies 94–7; soundscapes 521–2, 524 Arendt, Hannah 54 Argentina 181, 186–7, 189–90 Ariès, Philippe 136 arousal 477–8 artifacts 68, 69, 137–8 arts: memory and aesthetics 73–4; Piazza Fontana bombing 383, 387, 390–2; “re-remembering” 59 Asociación de Ayuda a las Víctimas del 11-M 416, 421–2 Asociación 11-M Afectados del Terrorismo 416, 418–19, 423 Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica 183, 184, 186 Asociación Víctimas del Terrorismo 416–19, 421 aspirations 122–3 assassination 84–91 Assmann, Jan 44, 66–7, 95–6, 112 Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory 183, 184, 186 533

Index

Association of Southeast Asian Nations 329 Association Piazza Fontana December 12, 1969 395 Atocha Train Station bombing see Madrid bombing, 2004 attention and emotional self-regulation 478–9 authenticity 195, 196–7, 240 autobiographical memory 124, 450–5 Autobiographical Memory Questionnaire 450–1 autobiography 314–23 Aznar, José María 416, 417–18

Buddhism 337, 464 Buffalo Creek mudslide 361 Buffett, Warren 176 built environment 194, 221 Burgoyne, Robert 251 burial practices and graves 131–9, 303–4, 337–9 Burke, Peter 15 Büsch Society 96–7 Bush, George W. 81, 398 Butler, Judith 406

Baccolini, Raffaella 260 Baer, Ulrich 254, 280 Baj, Enrico 390–1 Bal, Mieke 50 Bali 337 banal commemoration 84–91, 116–17 “banality of good” 225–6 Band of Brothers (television series) 67, 70 banking 175–6 Barry, Dan 403 Barthes, Roland 279–80, 281, 282 Bartlett, Frederick 17–18 Bastide, Roger 43 Batchen, Geoffrey 273 Bate, David 283 Bauman, Zygmunt 56–8, 62 bearing witness 153 Beck, Ulrich 152, 154, 171, 176, 225–6 Beloved (Morrison) 59 Ben Jelloun, Tahar 88 Benjamin, Walter 54, 127, 280 Bergson, Henri 430 Berlin, Germany 229, 301, 306, 306–8, 307; see also Turkish immigrants in Berlin Bertaux-Wiame, Isabelle 112 Bertillon, Alphonse 275 bias 38 biblical studies 12 Bijlmer disaster 365, 367 Billig, Michael 86 biological markers 448 biological water 500–9 Bloch, Ernst 127 Bloch, Marc 28, 39, 49 Blondel, Charles 49 body memory 458–71 The Book of Eli (film) 260–2, 268, 269 Boorstin, Daniel 176 Borg, Jerry J. 401–2 Borghese, Junio Valerio 386 boundaries and the body 464–5 Brabenec, Vratislav 158–9, 161–6 Brandt, Willy 229 Broken tombstone memorial (Augustynek) 304 Brown, Adam D. 259–60 Budapest, Hungary 210–16, 212, 215

Calabresi, Luigi 388–90, 391 Calvino, Italo 314–23 Cambodia 330–2, 334–7 Camera Lucida (Barthes) 279–80 Cameron, David 81 campaign of terror (Chile) 373 Capra, Fritjof 464–5 carriers 47–8, 82–3, 94 Carter, Jimmy 81 Casey, Edward 311–12 Cater, Douglass 173 catharsis 391–2 celebrity scandals 172, 176–7 cell memory 489–97 cell therapy 495–7 Central Europe see East and Central Europe Central Intelligence Agency 374, 382, 384–6 Cercas, Javier 74 Ceremony to Commemorate the War Dead 348–50 Cervinkova, Hana 57 Cetina, Karin 24, 175 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 127 Chernobyl disaster 362–4 Chicago School 193, 195 childhood memories 313–14 childhood sexual abuse 450, 468 Chilean revolution 371–80 China: cultural heritage 231; disaster mourning 366; Great Leap Forward Famine 363–4; politics of collective memory 54; Sichuan earthquake 367; traditional culture 360 Chinese medicine 461–2 Christensen, Dorthe Refslund 136 Christian Democrats (Chile) 372–6, 379 cinema: cultural memory studies 74; memory culture 248–50; Piazza Fontana bombing 387; scholarship 247–8, 250–7; trans-nationalization of memory 150; trauma 184, 253–4; see also futurist dystopian cinema Cinema, Memory, Modernity (Kilbourn) 250, 251–2 cities 193–201, 523–4 civil rights movement 80–1 civil scandals 172, 176–7 civil society 117–18, 152 Clinton, Bill 81, 82, 89

534

Index

Coan, James 479 cognition 17–18, 474, 482 cognitive theories of responsibility 115–16 Coherence Domains 502–4, 506, 508 Cohn, Marisa 106 Coldy, Claude 469 collective imagination 62–3 collective memory: and collective imagination 62–3; commemorative vs. non-commemorative forms 85–6; disorders of 449; as emergent memory 13–14; Nora, Pierre 30–1, 34; origins 12–13; pathological vs. normal states 9–10; plasticity of 288; politics of 54–5; relation to history and commemoration 12; vs. cultural memory 66; see also public memory The Collective Memory (Halbwachs) 43 Colonial Williamsburg 228 colonialism 72, 126–7 comics 391–2 commemoration: banal commemoration 84–91; cultural heritage 229; cultural memory 67–8; Czech Underground 162–3; disasters 364–7; France 34–5; globalization of memory 149; Madrid bombing, politics of the 414–15, 416–25; national myth-making 148; natural disaster-war linkage 348–51; Piazza Fontana bombing 392–5; social movements 80–2; transmission of memory 115; types 11–12; wars and war dead 364–5 commerce 362 Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation 338 communications 145, 173 communicative memory 13, 44, 96 communism 54–5, 158–66 Communist Party 33–4, 373, 375–6, 378 community and disaster memories 358–9, 361, 364–7 compensation funds 404–5 confabulation 454 Connerton, Paul 115 consciousness: body memory 463–4; emotional self-regulation 474; historic consciousness 49; memories of the future 125; organizational memories 98–9 conservation and preservation 14–15, 34–5 contemporary history see living memory context and photography 278, 282–4 Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage 224 Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict 224 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage 224 Convention on Cultural Diversity 225 Cook, Haruko Taya 346 Cook, Theodore 346

coping mechanisms 455–6 corruption 170–1 cosmopolitan memory 145, 151–4, 222–3, 368 counter-memory 145, 387, 390, 391 creative independence 55 creativity 73–4 crimes against humanity 184 Croatia 229 cross-cultural issues in trauma memory 336 cultural heritage: cosmopolitan memory 222–3; digital scholarship 205; France 34; global heritage community 223–7; heritage projects 151–2; heritage sites 223, 224, 228–31; history and heritage 222; Nora, Pierre 30–2; social science analyses 227–9; tangible vs. intangible heritage 221–2 cultural issues: afterlife 135; anticipation 122; carriers of memory 47–8; city cultures 193–201; collective imagination 63; cultural mood of monuments 178; Czech Underground 162; death and burial 132–9, 137; disaster mourning 366–7; mediazation of culture 173; memories of the future 125; photography 277–8, 283; scandal 172; sensory elements of place 312–13; traumatic memory studies 336–9 cultural memory: communicative vs. cultural memory 66–7; concepts 65–6; disasters 361–2; folklore studies 13–14; future of 75; generations 112; literature 73–4; mediation and remediation 69–70; memorability 70–1; multidirectionality 72; organizational archives 95–6; remembering as cultural practice 68–9; unspeakability 71–2; Warburg, Aby 43; see also music Cultural Revolution 54 cultural studies, memory studies in 43–4 cultural trauma 206–7, 207–16, 382–3 Cummings, Vicki 136 Czarniowski, Stefan 49 Czech Underground 158–66 dance 460–1, 468–70 Darnton, Robert 14 Darwinian theory 511–15, 517–18 DDT 514 death and the dead 131–9, 184–5, 303–4, 337–9 de-centering the media 172–8 deconstruction of narratives 29 Dekel, Irit 61 Delli Carpini, Michael X. 173 dementia 448, 453–4 Demnig, Gunther 71 demonstrative features of events 24–6 demythologization 49 Dendena, Francesca 388, 392 denied futures 127 Derrida, Jacques 36 destruction of memorials 291 535

Index

development and “progress” 126–7, 128 developmental quality of events 24 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 447–8 diaspora 150–1 Dickens, Charles 124 differences and similar differences 11 digital technology: cinema and memory studies 256; de-centering the media 173; obsolescence 105–6; photography 275, 277; trauma archives 205–6, 208–16 Dijck, José van 256 Diller, Elizabeth 399 disasters: collective trauma 361–2; commemorations 364–7; globalization of trauma 367–8; Great East Japan Earthquake 346–55, 352, 363, 367; individual trauma 360–1; natural disaster–war linkage 346–55; philosophical concepts 358–60; politics and trauma 362–4; as social 358 distance 22, 47, 104 distortion 9–10, 17–19, 100 distributed remembering 429–31 divine law 131–2 Il Divo (film) 386 documentaries 332–3, 339 Documentation Center of Cambodia 335 documents and organizational memories 103 Doss, Erika 292–3 Dosse, François 36 Douglas, Mary 43 dualism 460–1 Dunn, James 12 duration 110–13, 116 Durkheim, Emile 42, 100–1, 357–8 dysfunctional remembering see memory disorders dystopian cinema see futurist dystopian cinema ‘ear witness’ accounts 527–8 earthquakes see disasters East and Central Europe 54–8, 62, 158–66, 207–16 Eastern philosophy 464 Ebbinghaus, Hermann 42 eco-exergy 517, 517 Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales 30 ecological psychology 313 ecology and memory 511–18 economics 175–6 ecosystems 511–18, 513, 516, 517 editing: photographs 277; soundscapes 526–7 editorials 353 Edkins, Jenny 398 Edwards, Elizabeth 283–4 Einstein, Arik 89 elections 372–4, 375, 416–18 electronic data 103 Elias, Norbert 110 elite and urban spaces 195–6 536

Elsaesser, Thomas 254 embodied memory 436–8 embodied routines 99–100, 101, 106 embodiment and responsibility 115 embryo development 489–91 emergent memory 13–14 emotions and affect: arousal 477–8; attention 478–9; catharsis 391–2; Garden of Stones memorial 305; heart rhythm patterns 478; HeartMath process 484–5; instability 479; intuitive heart 483–4; memorials 293–4; memory, role of 474–6; photography 281–2; physiology 482–3; selfregulation 473–4, 476–7, 479, 480, 482, 484–5 Encounter Point (film) 59 energy: body 461–2; memory of water 501–7; work energy 514–15, 516, 517 engrams 449–50 Enlightenment 95 enlightenment prejudice 54–5 entropy 505 environmental sound see soundscapes Erll, Astrid 145, 249–50 Ernst, Wolfgang 215 esho-funi 464 essentialism and photography 278 establishment/underground relationship 160, 163–6 d’Estaing, Giscard 34 Estonia 49 ETA 414, 416–19, 421–5 ethics: death and burial 133–4, 137–8; responsibility 114, 115 ethnicity see race and ethnicity Europe 128; see also East and Central Europe Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 43 event, memory as 22–6 evoked potential analysis 483 evolution 511–18 existential perspectives on death 134, 135, 138 expatriates 150–1 expectations 122–8 externalization in knowledge management 103 extreme right 56–8 Facebook 214 fact/fiction distinction 99 failure to address past injustices 340 family 131, 467–8; see also victims and families of victims Family Frames (Hirsch) 254–5 famine 363–4 Faulkner, William 53 fear 475 Febvre, Lucien 28 festival marketplaces 195 fiction 55, 59, 73–4, 99, 124 fields and disciplines 42–5, 226, 291–4 film see cinema; futurist dystopian cinema

Index

financial scandals 171–2, 175–6, 179 Flag of Honor, 9/11 memorial 401, 401 Fo, Dario 390, 391 folklore 13–14 forced migrations 151 forgetting: active forgetting 420–3; multi-­ directional memory 150; politics of forgetting 55–9; see also memory disorders formal commemorations 90–1 “found sound” recordings 524, 526, 530 Foundation for the Victims of Terrorism 423 Fowler, Chris 136 frames and framing: of events 15; mediation of ­survivors’ stories 432–4, 440; “re-­remembering” 60–1; scandal 170 France: cultural heritage 229; Les Lieux de mémoire (Nora) 28–32, 33–4, 39; national traditions of memory studies 48–9; sites of memory studies 46 Freud, Sigmund 43, 450 Friedländer, Saul 189 Frisch, Michael 14 Fukushima nuclear accident see Great East Japan Earthquake Furet, François 34 future: future presents 122; history and 33; past as guide for 54–5; temporal continuity 112; see also memories of the future futurist dystopian cinema: The Book of Eli 260–2; future selves 259–60; The Road 262–8 Gallimard publishing house 30–1 Galton, Francis 275 Gamson, Joshua 172 Ganser, Daniele 386 García Márquez, Gabriel 371 Garden of Stones memorial (Goldsworthy) 299, 300, 302, 303; experiencing 299–305; memorial dilemma 297–9; and Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe 306–8 Gaulle, Charles de 33 gay rights movement 82–3 gender and the mind/body relationship 461 generations: memories of the future 124–5; memory and duration 112–13; photography 254–5, 282; transmission of memory 115; trauma politics 182–3, 183–5, 189; Turkish immigrants, pre-1990s 234–7; Turkish immigrants and music 238–45 genetics: cell memory 489–97; memory of water 508–9; species adaptation 512–14; species composition 513 genocide, Cambodian 334–6 gentrification 196–8 geography and sites of memory studies 45–6 German-Turks see Turkish immigrants in Berlin Germany 48–9; see also Berlin, Germany Gervereau, Laurent 37–8

ghosts and trauma politics 188–90 Giddens, Anthony 110–11 Gilroy, Paul 128 Giordana, Marco Tullio 387 Giuliani, Rudy 398 Gladio 386 global financial crisis 175, 179 globalization: analytic frameworks 145–6; cosmopolitan memory 151–4; disaster memories 367–8; French identity 29; global heritage community 222–7, 230–1; hyper-globalism 146–9; terminology 143–4; trans-nationalization of memory 149–51; typology 144–5 “glocalization” 144, 147 Godoy, Camilo 408 Goffman, Erving 168, 169, 170 Goldsworthy, Andy 293–4, 298, 300, 301, 303, 305–8 Gombrich, Ernst 281 good death and bad death 337–8 Goody, Jack 43 Gorbachev, Mikhail 88 Grainge, Paul 250, 251, 252 grassroots memorials 290, 290, 365, 366, 423 graves see burial practices and graves Great Depression 179 Great East Japan Earthquake 346–55, 352, 363, 367 Great Expectations (Dickens) 124 Great Leap Forward 54, 363–4 Greek drama 181, 185–8 Greenwich Village, NY 82 “grievability,” different standards of 406 Ground Zero memorial see 9/11 memorial group identity 146 group memories 43, 115 Groves, Chris 121 guest worker songs 234–5 Guida, Marcello 388 guilt, acknowledgment of 36 Gurdjieff, Georges Ivanovic 462–3, 470 Gutman, Yifat 60 Habermas, Jürgen 379–80 Hague Convention 224 Halbwachs, Maurice: Assmann, Jan and 44; ­collective memory 42; cultural memory studies 135; distributed memory 430; history and memory distinction 94; history definition 10; individual and collective memory 100–1, 106; material structures and collective memory 104; methodological nationalism 145; national traditions of memory studies 48–9; Nora, Pierre, influence on 31; place 194; the present and memory 54; reality and history 16; social memory/historical memory distinction 222; time periods and memory studies 46 The Halfmoon Files (film) 69 537

Index

Harrison, Susan 431–3, 435–6, 438–9 Hartog, François 33 Havel, Václav 158, 159, 161–5 ‘Hawthorne effect’ 3 healing see reconciliation and healing heart: arousal 477–8; brain/heart interaction 474–6, 481; cell memory 491–2; and emotions 478, 479–82; intuitive heart 483–4 heartbeat evoked potentials 482 HeartMath process 484–5 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 131, 133, 185 Heidegger, Martin 134, 135 heritage see cultural heritage heritage sites 223, 224, 228–31 Herndon, William 13 Hertz, Robert 135 Hewison, Robert 227–8 Hillsborough disaster 365, 366–7 Hinduism 337 hip-hop 237–8 Hiroshima anniversary commemorations 348–9 Hirsch, Marianne 47, 254–5, 281–2 historians 12 historic preservation 14–15, 34–5 historic sites 223, 224, 228–31, 525–6 historical consciousness 49 historical trauma 182 historiography: cultural heritage 229; memory studies in 44–5; national traditions of memory studies 49; Nora, Pierre 29, 32–3, 37–9, 38–9; Yellow Star Houses Project 210–16 history: cinema 252; definition 10; as distinct from memory 94, 227; and film 251; and heritage 222; learning from 379–80; memory studies in 44–5; and reality 15–17; relation to collective memory and commemoration 12; ‘unaccomplished memory’ 383–8 Holocaust: globalization of memory 149–50, 152–3; Hungary 207–16; politics of collective memory 54; “re-remembering” 60–1; responsibility 117; Ricoeur’s criticism of Nora 35–6; Stolpersteine 71; trauma politics 182–5, 188; unspeakability and multidirectionality 72 The Holocaust (Segal) 296, 296 Holocaust Memorial Museum 60–1 Holocaust memorials: Garden of Stones memorial (Goldsworthy) 299, 299–305, 300, 302, 303; The Holocaust (Segal) 296; language 294–6; memorial dilemma 297–9; ortho-memorial practice 288–9; Silent Cry (Michaelson) 297; Statue of Mordechai Anielewicz 298; Warsaw Ghetto Monument 294, 295 Honda, Katsuichi 13 hope 128 horizons of expectation 122–6, 372 Horkheimer, Max 126 Hoskins, Andrew 214 538

House of Terror Museum 60 human law 131–2 human remains 137–8 human rights 153, 183 humanities 66, 135 Hungary 207–16, 208, 210, 212, 215, 363 Huntington, Richard 134, 136 hybridization of identity 146 hypermnesia 450 hyperreality 173, 174 icons 11 identity: burial 136–7; cultural heritage 223; hyper-globalism 146, 148; memorials 292; and memory disorders 451–5; and temporal continuity 111, 112; topological identities 316–17; topological identity 323; trans-­ nationalization of memory 151; urban spaces and city cultures 195–6 identity, individual 146 identity politics 37, 38, 137–8 ideology: France 34; photography 283; urban spaces 198–9 Ieng Sary 335 images and personal memories 435–6 imagination 36, 62–3 immigrants see Turkish immigrants in Berlin; undocumented immigrant victims indexicality 278, 279, 281–2 individual identity 146 individual memory: contemporary society 117; death and burial 136; distributed r­ emembering 429–31; Halbwachs’s theory 100–1; ­organizational memories 102, 106; survivors’ personal memories 429, 431–40; trauma 360–1; vs. collective memory 3; Yellow Star Houses Project narratives 213–14 Indonesia 329, 330, 331–2, 331–4, 338–40 induced pluripotent stem cells 493 informal commemorations 90–1 information technology 116 Ingvar, D. H. 121 inherited memories see intergenerational memory transmission innovation and historiography 37 “L’Insolite Lieux de mémoire” (Ricoeur) 35–7 institutional time 111 institutions and responsibility 110 intangible heritage 221–2, 231 intergenerational memory transmission 112–13, 182–3, 254–5 intermedial dynamics 71 International agreements 224–5 international memory see globalization international organizations 225 Internet 240–2 interpretation 36

Index

Irangate 178–9 Irish Famine 364 Israel 54, 297, 298, 301, 305 Israeli-Palestinian conflict 59–60, 62 Italy 147; see also Piazza Fontana bombing James, William 99 Jameson, Frederic 127 Janowitz, Morris 173 Japan see Great East Japan Earthquake Jewish heritage 36, 303–4 Jews in Hungary 207–16 Jones, Andrew 136 journalism see news media journey, memory as 321–2 Juana Chaos, José Ignacio de 417 Juliá, Santos 184 justice 127, 182, 186, 229 Kahneman, Daniel 18 Kalahari Bushmen 230 Kan, Naoto 348–50 Kant, Immanuel 359–60 Kaplan, E. Ann 253, 254 Kardashian, Kim 176–7 Katyn (film) 74 Kauffmann, Sylvie 57 Kazimierz, Poland 304 Kelly, Ned 70 keying 15 Khan, Mohammad Sidique 436, 439–40 Khmer Rouge 330, 331, 334–6 Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre 60 Kilbourn, Russell 250, 251–2 knowledge and knowledge management 98, 103, 106 Kohl, Helmut 229 Koizumi, Junichirō 353 Koselleck, Reinhart 123 Kuhn, Annette 247, 250 kulturelles Gedächtnis 66–7 Kundera, Milan 44, 53, 55, 63 Kwon, Heonik 337 LaCapra, Dominick 182 Lacey, John and Beatrice 482 lamentation 26 Landsberg, Alison 255–6 Lang, Gladys 178 Lang, Kurt 178 language: cultural memory studies 70; Holocaust memorials 294–6; and place 312; survivors’ stories 438–9 Lanzmann, Claude 148 Lavisse, Ernest 30 Le Goff, Jacques 15 Leach, Edmund 13

Left Revolutionary Movement (Chile) 373, 376 left-wing politics: Chilean revolution 372–3, 375–6, 378–9; Piazza Fontana bombing 390, 392–3 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 359 Levi, Primo 109 LeVine, Peg 336 Levy, Daniel 368 lexical link of war and natural disasters 346–8 Liberation monument (Rapoport) 296 Libeskind, Daniel 407 Les Lieux de mémoire (Nora): critics of 35–7; cultural heritage 229; importance of 28; memory palaces 30–2; Nora’s reflection on 32–5; Nora’s response to critics 37–9; timing 29–30 Lincoln, Abraham 12–13, 17 Linde, Charlotte 105 Lisbon earthquake of 1755 359–60 literary studies, memory studies in 43–4 literature: cultural memory studies 73–4; memories of the future 124; reading societies 94–5; trauma politics 186 lived experience, space as 104 “living in truth” 162 living memory 34–5, 36, 37 living systems and the memory of water 500–9 local populations 230–1 Lock, Margaret 448 Loftus, Elizabeth 18 The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Societies (Goody) 43 London bombing, 2005 431–40 loss 399–400 Lotman, Yuri 46 Lotta Continua 389 Lovejoy, Arthur 19 Lowen, Alexander 461 Lowenthal, David 227 Luhmann, Niklas 122 Lyotard, Jean-François 31 McSweeney, Terence 250, 252 Maddrell, Avril 136 Madrid bombing, 2004: commemoration and partisanship 416–18; flawed c­ ommemorative process 424–5; grassroots vs. institutional ­commemoration 423; media partisanship 419–20; victim exclusion from commemorative process 420–3; victims’ associations disputes 418–19 Maier, Christian 185 managed memories 102–3 Mandela, Nelson 81, 91 Manjón, Pilar 416, 418–23 Mannheim, Karl 125 marginalized groups 200, 223 marginalized histories 73–4, 82–3 Mark, James 160 Martens, Lorna 313–14 539

Index

martyrs 83 mass media see media and mediation material characteristics of memory media 69 material culture 273 materiality: burial 136–7; cinema and memory studies 250; “negative evidence” 405; organizational memories 105, 107 Mayo, George Elton 3 Mead, George Herbert 16 meaning: intergenerational memories 113; memory as event 25; memory disorders 454; monuments 71 measurement of memory 450–1 media and mediation: act of remembering 68–9; artifacts 72; banal commemoration 90; burial 136–7; cultural memory studies 65–6; de-centering 172–7; distributed memory 430; globalization of memory 146–7; hyper-­ globalism 148; literature 73–4; Madrid bombing 419–20; models 70–1; and music 238–42, 245; ­normalization of scandal 177–9; personal ­memories, reframing of 434–6; public cultivation of shared memory 67–8; and remediation 69–70; scandals 168–9, 170; survivors’ stories 431–40 Mediated Memories in the Digital Age (van Dijck) 256 Mediation at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin (Dekel) 61 melancholy 128 memorability of events 12 Memorial Mania (Doss) 292–3 Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Eisenman) 306, 306–8, 307 memorialization and memorials: burial 132, 133; cultural heritage 229; cultural mood 178; death and burial 137; events in the doldrums 26; forced migrations 151; forms 289–91; grassroots memorials 365, 366, 423; identity politics 37; inclusion and exclusion 406–7; memorial museums 60–1; memory scholarship 291–4; ortho-memorial practice 288–9; place 194; purpose of 291; transformative power of 308–9; trauma politics 182, 186; see also Holocaust memorials; specific memorials memories of the future 121–8 memory: as an archive 449–50; archipelagos of 2; and emotions 474–6; as event 22–6; and place 311–12; as process 68–9; and reality 15–17; soundscape-created memories 525–6 Memory and Popular Film (Grainge) 250, 251, 252 memory culture: cinema 248–50; death and burial 132; globalization of memory 144, 146, 151–2, 154 memory disorders 447–55 Memory of the World project 151–2 memory palaces 30–2 memory politics 144, 181–90, 285 memory recovery movement 183–4 540

memory studies: comparative approaches 336–9; disciplines involved in 42–5; national traditions of 48–50; neuroscientific view 449–50; sites of 41; theoretical isolationism 1–2; travelling memory studies 50–1 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 463–4 Merton, Robert K. 122, 207–8 metanarratives 185 metaphors: cinema 254; memory as a journey 321–2; memory as an archive 449–50; memory as an event 22–6; photography as memory 273; war and natural disasters 346–8, 363 metaphysical pathos 19 Metcalf, Peter 134, 136 methodological nationalism 145 Mexican immigrants and the 9/11 memorial 400–1, 403–6 Michnik, Adam 54–5, 55–6, 58, 62 Middle East 59–60 middle-class and urban spaces 196–8 migration 150–1 Milan, Italy see Piazza Fontana bombing Milk, Harvey 82–3 Millennial Cinema (Sinha and McSweeney) 250, 252 mind-body relationship 460–1, 474–6 mindfulness 469 minorities: cultural heritage 223; identity politics 37; urban spaces 200 Mississippi 81–2 Mitchell, W.J.T. 277 Mitterrand, François 34 mobility of events 23–6 models for remembrance 70–1 modernization and modernity: cinema and memory studies 251–2; cultural memory studies 67–8; memories of the future 126, 128; reading ­societies 94; reflexive modernization 171; responsibility 114 modes of computational work change 106, 107 Monument to the Ghetto Heroes (Rapoport) 294, 294–6, 295 monuments: burial 136–7; commemoration 11–12; cultural memory 67–8; cultural mood 178; intermedial dynamics 71 morality 153–4, 454 Morán, Eloy 420–3 Mordechai Anielewicz statue 298 More, Thomas 127 Moro, Aldo 384–5 Morris, Errol 277 Morrison, Toni 59 mourning: disasters 364–8; mourning codes 294, 296, 302, 304, 306, 307 Moylan, Tom 260 multidirectional memory 72 multi-directional memory 149–50 Mumford, Lewis 127

Index

Museum Society 96–7 museums: human remains 137–8; “re-remembering” 60–1; trans-national spaces 151; trauma politics 182 Museums of Medical History, Berlin 137 music: commemoration 11; contemporary Turkish immigrants 243–5; German-Turk hip-hop 237–8; and media 238–42; Turkish immigrants, pre-1990s 234–7 myth transmission 13 mythology: burial rituals 133; national myths 148; national traditions of memory studies 49 Nahdlatul Ulama 333 Nakba 54 names and naming: banal commemoration 87–8; place names 194; transforming events 3–4; undocumented immigrant victims 400–1, 403–10 Nanking Massacre 13 Napolitano, Giorgio 394–5 narratives: cultural heritage 229–31; Czech Underground 163; emplacing memories 320–1; French historians 29; global heritage community 223; heritage sites 228; history films 251; interpretation 36; memories of the future 124, 125; memory as event 25; models for remembrance 70–1; personal memories of survivors 431–9; photography 280–1; post-communism memory 165–6; post-9/11 398; social movements 82–3; trauma politics 181–2, 185; urban spaces 198–9; Yellow Star Houses Project 213–14 national contexts 1–2, 3 national culture 47–8 national identity: France 29–32; Nora, Pierre 39; sites of memory studies 46 national traditions and memory studies 48–50 national trauma 414–15, 424–5 National Trust (United Kingdom) 228 nationalism: France 34; globalization of memory 145–9; and migration 151; post-9/11 398; trauma politics 182; urban spaces 198–9 nations see nation-states nation-states: East Central European memory 164; global heritage community 225–6; heritage sites 223; mnemonic places 33; Southeast Asia 330; urban spaces 198–9 Native Americans 137 NATO 386 natural disasters see disasters natural selection 511–14 near electric field 493–4 “negative evidence” 405 neo-colonial historiography 39 neo-fascism 56–8 neo-liberalism 63, 147 Netanyahu, Benjamin 89 Netherlands 365, 367

neurocardiology 482 neurogenesis 492–3, 495–6 neuroscience 447–8, 449–51, 474–6 neurotrauma 452–3 “never again” metanarrative 181–2, 183, 186, 189–90 New Social History 223, 228 news media: natural disaster-war linkage 351–4, 352; photography 283; Piazza Fontana bombing 390; scandal 173–4 Nichiren Buddhism 464 9/11 attacks 23, 25–6, 398 9/11 memorial 399, 402, 409; absence in the design of 399–403; Madrid bombing commemoration compared to 414, 417; undocumented immigrant victims 400–1 Nobel Peace Prize 81 Noda, Yoshihiko 349, 367 non-commemorative forms of memory 85–6 non-governmental organizations 225 non-Western countries 12 Nora, Pierre: cultural heritage 229; distributed memory 430; materiality and memory 405; nationalism 145; plasticity of collective memory 288; sites of memory 340; sites of memory studies 46; See also Les Lieux de mémoire (Nora) North, Rachel 431, 434, 435, 437, 438, 440 nostalgia 125–6, 127, 151 novels 55, 59, 73–4, 124 The Nuer (Evans-Pritchard) 43 Obama, Barack 81 obsolescence and digital memories 105, 107 Occupy Wall Street movement 80, 200 Olick, Jeffrey 273, 274 Olin, Margaret 282 Olmert, Ehud 87 Open Society Archives 208, 211 Oppenheimer, Joshua 332 optimism 359, 475, 483 Oral History Association 209 oral memories 13, 14, 208–9, 522 organic memory 43 organizational memories: as collective memories 100–2; digital memories 105–6; as managed memories 102–3; places and spaces 103–5; reading societies 94–7; subjective memories 97–100; as topic of study 93–4 Orlikowski, Wanda 205 Ortiz, Simon J. 267–8 “others” 132, 134, 138, 368 painting 390–2 pairs, relational 159–61, 163, 165 Palestinians 54, 59–60, 62 Pancasila, Pemuda 332–3 Parry, Ross 205 541

Index

Pasolini, Pier Paolo 385, 392 Passabe (documentary) 339 Passera, Luigi 392 passive vs. active commemoration 87 past: and the body 467; body memory 468–70; memories of the future 124; temporal continuity 112 Paster, James 274–5 patterning and transnational memory culture 152 pedagogy 38, 39 Pedraza, Ángeles 421 Pelosi, Giuseppe 385 perception: and historiography 37; memory as form of 16; organizational memories 98, 100 performativity 24, 25–6, 68–9 permanent vs. impermanent memorials 290, 290 perpetrator testimony 332–3 persecution 162–4 personal memory see individual memory personal photography 273, 275, 279 pessimism 475 phantom limb syndrome 459, 463 phenomenology: body memory 463–4; burial 135; death and burial 134, 135, 138; duration 110–11; emplaced memories 322; horizon of expectation 123; organizational memories 98–100, 101–2, 104–5, 106–7; soundscapes 524–5, 526 philosophy 358–60 photography 274; essence of the medium 279–82; history of memory/photograph relationship 273–9; personal memories, reframing of 435; processual approach 284–5; trauma 254–5 physiology: brain/heart interaction 474–6, 481, 482–3; coherence 480; emotions and heart rhythm patterns 478 piacular rites 357, 362, 364 Piazza Fontana bombing 382–3, 388–96, 389 Pinelli, Giuseppe 388–9, 391–3, 395 Pinelli, Licia 392 Pinney, Christopher 280 place: childhood memories 313–14; heritage sites 223; and memory 30–2, 311–12; of music 235–7; organizational memories 103–5; The Road to San Giovanni (Calvino) 314–23; sensory aspects 312–13; transformation of 383; urban spaces and city cultures 193–201 Plastic People of the Universe 158, 161–2 plasticity of collective memory 288 “Plato’s pharmacy” 36 Plotzker, Sever 89 Pol Pot 332, 335 Poland 49–50, 55–8, 74 politics: appropriation of memory 39; Chilean revolution 371–80; collective imagination 63; commemoration of the Madrid bombing 414–15, 416–25; cultural heritage 223; cultural memory studies 70; death and burial 137; 542

disasters 362–4, 367; enlightenment ­prejudice 54–5; of forgetting 55–8; “grievability,” ­different standards of 406; of identity 37, 38; media coverage of the Madrid bombing 419–20; mediation of survivors’ stories 432–4; ­memorial museums 60–1; memory politics 144; of memory studies 44; naming and ­transforming events 3; photography 285; Piazza Fontana bombing 390, 392–3; political parties 80; of regret 229; scandal 170–1, 174–5, 178–9; social movements and memory 79–80; trauma politics 181–91; undocumented migrant victims 405–6; urban spaces 199; victims’ associations disputes 418–19 Popular Party (Spain) 416–19, 424–5 Popular Unity party 372–8 positive emotions 483, 484–5 positivists 38–9, 54–5 postcolonialism 127, 128 post-communist era 54–8, 62, 158–66, 207–16 postgenerations and photography 254–5 post-heroic era 177–9, 366 post-memorial work 189 postmemory 47, 282 postmodernism 195 post-traumatic stress disorder 336, 360–1 post–World War II era 224 “Pourquoi canoniser Pierre Nora” (Gervereau) 37–8 power 36, 104, 110, 116, 403 precipitating events 22–3 preferable futures 122 present: memories of the future 124; mnemonic places 33; present future 122; temporal continuity 112 preservation 14–15, 34–5 Pribram, Karl 474, 477, 479, 485 professionalization 226 progress 125–7 promises of the past 126 “prosthetic memory” 73–4, 255–6 protest see social movements psychiatry 43, 447–8 psychology 42, 448, 450–1 public attitudes and opinions: cultural heritage 226; Madrid bombing, responsibility for the 416; news media 173 public drama of scandal 169–70 public history 205–6, 208–16 public memory 283, 388–96; see also collective memory public mourning 364–7 public/private memories 102 Quack, Sibylle 297 quantification of memory 450–1 quantum theory: body memory 462–8; electrodynamic theory of water 501–5; sociology of events 23

Index

Rabin, Yitzhak 84–91 race and ethnicity 81, 150–1, 195–7, 200 radio 528 Radio Electric Asymmetric Conveyer 495–7 Radstone, Susannah 249–50, 255 Rapoport, Nathan 294–6 Rasinki, Lotar 57 rationalization 171, 176 REAC-induced reprogramming 495–7 reading societies 94–7 Reagan, Ronald 178, 229 realists 12 reality 15–17 reconciliation and healing: globalization of memory 153; Indonesia 333; memorial studies 292; social movements 82; Southeastern Asia 338–9; trauma politics 181 Red Brigades 386, 394 re-discovery 150 redundance 13 reflexivity: death and burial 137, 138; literature and memory 74; modernization 171; nostalgia 126; organizational memories 99; responsibility 114–15 Reich, Wilhelm 502 relational memories 159–61, 163–5 relativity theory 466 religion 337–8, 350; see also spirits and spirituality remediation 70–1 remembering, process of 68–9 remembering together 111 Remembrance Day for Victims of Terrorism and Massacres 394, 395 “repeated reproduction” method 17 representation 44; features of events 25; genres 25; photography 279; social movements 82 repressed memories 36, 43, 450, 459–60, 468–9 repression, political 377–8 “re-remembering” 55–6, 59–61 re-sacralization of bones 137 resilience and emotional self-regulation 473, 480 Resina, Joan Ramon 187 responsibility: for burial 131–4, 137–9; cultural heritage 229; disaster victims 368; globalization of memory 153–4; memory, time and 109–18; Piazza Fontana bombing 394–5; war memories 346–7 restorative nostalgia 126 revolutions 127, 198, 200 rhetoric 292, 294–6 rhythm and life 489–90, 493 Ricoeur, Paul: abuses of memory and forgetting 53, 55; critique of Les Lieux de mémoire (Nora) 35–7; existential phenomenology 135; memory and forgetting 59; memory and history 61; memory approaches 17 right-wing politics 373–8, 390, 392–3

Rignet, Ann 281 rituals: burial 132–9; disasters 357–8, 362, 364; nation-states 148; reconciliation 339; Stolpersteine 71; transmission of memory 115; traumatic memory studies 337–9 The Road (film) 262–9 The Road to San Giovanni (Calvino) 314–23 Robinson, Mary 364 Rodriguez, Almudena 184 Rohde, Erwin 135 Romanzo di una strage (film) 387 Rosenthal, Gabriele 102 Rosenzweig, Roy 205 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 359 routines 99–100, 101, 106 Rumor, Mariano 390 Russia 74 Rwandan genocide 62 Sacks, Oliver 454–5, 459, 463 sacralization of memory 116–17 sacred movements 460–1, 470 Sada, Carlos 403 San Francisco, California 296 Sassen, Saskia 200 satellite TV 241 “sayability” 70 scandal: de-centering the media 172–7; mediation of 168–9, 170; normalization of 177–9; political scandal 174–5; and secrets 169–70 Schacter, Daniel L. 9 Schafer, R. Murray 520, 521, 523–4, 525–2526 Scheler, Max 97 schema 17–18, 70–1 Schindel, Estela 189 Schneider, Rene 374 Schudson, Michael 85, 173 Schuetzenberger, Anne Ancelin 467–8 Schutz, Alfred 97, 98–9 Schwartz, Barry 55, 177–8 scientific approaches to cultural heritage 226 Scofidio, Ricardo 399 Sebald, W.G. 74 secrets 168, 169–70, 172 Segal, George 296 Sekula, Allan 275 self identity and memory disorders 451–5 self-fulfilling prophecies 122 self-healing, tissue 496 self-regulation, emotional 473–4, 476–7, 479, 480, 482, 484–5 sensitive dance 469–70 sensory memories 436–8 September 30th Movement 333 7/7 attacks see London bombing, 2005 Sewell, William 23 shape-taking qualities of events 24–5 543

Index

Shapiro, Judith 54 Sheffner, Philip 68 Shereskevshy, Solomon 450 Shils, Edward 54 Sichuan earthquake 366, 367 Sidaway, James 136 Silent Cry (Michaelson) 297 Simmel, Georg 168 simplification 17–18 simulated soundscapes 526–7 Singapore 340 Sinha, Amresh 250, 252 sites of memory: historic sites 223, 224, 228–31, 525–6; hyper-globalism 147–8; memorials 291 situational distortion 17 slavery 59 Slow Food movement 147 Smith, Anthony D. 148 Snapchat 275, 277 Snowden, Edward 177 Social Baseline Theory 479 social change and politics of memory 54–5 the social condition 61–2 social constructionism 194, 278 social control 103, 106 social discontent 37 social drama 169–70 social framework and memory disorders 454 social groups and cultural heritage 223 social issues: banal commemoration 90; body memory and anniversary syndrome 467–8; disasters 358–9; French national memory 36; memories of the future 123–4 social media 275 social memory: death and burial 136; as distinct from historical memory 222; duration 111–12; memories of the future 121; photography 283, 284–5; plasticity of 288 social movements 79–83, 125, 198–201, 523 social sciences: cultural heritage 227–9; globalization of memory 152; memories of the future 123–4; memory studies 3, 44; sensory aspects of place 312–13 social vs. cultural memory studies 43–4 Socialist Party (Chile) 373, 375–7 socialization and responsibility 114 socioeconomic class 195–201 sociology: burial 134–5; collective memory 66; competing positions on memory studies 53–4; duration 110–11; of knowledge 98; memory as event 22–6; memory studies in 42; naming and transforming events 3–4; responsibility 114; urban sociology 193–201, 195, 198 Sodaro, Amy 60 software 105 Sonic Research Studio 520–4, 531 Sophocles 132 544

Soros, George 176 Sorrentino, Paolo 386 sound studies 520–1 soundscapes: ‘ear witness’ accounts 527–8; methodology 522–4; recordists and the public 528–9; research issues 529–30; simulated soundscapes 526–7 soundwalking 528 South Africa 81 Southeast Asia: Cambodia 334–6; failure to address past injustices 340; Indonesia 332–4; memory studies 329–32; traumatic memory studies 336–9 Soviet Union 362–4 space 31, 103–7, 147, 464–5 space-time 465–8, 469–70 Spain 181, 183–5, 189; see also Madrid bombing, 2004 Spanish Civil War 183–6 Spanish Day of Victims of Terrorism 422 species adaptation 512–14, 513 Spielberg, Steven 215 spirits and spirituality 131–2, 138–9; see also religion spoils system 170–1 spontaneous shrines see grassroots memorials sports 460 staged symbolic communities 228 stakeholders and tourism 229–30 stalled events 26 ‘state terror’ 383–8 Statue of Mordechai Anielewicz 298 Steiner, Rudolf 462 stem cells 489–97 Stolpersteine 71 stones and Jewish memorialization 303–4 Stonewall Inn 82 storage hypothesis of memory 449–50 Strassler, Karen 274, 278 ‘strategy of tension’ 383–8, 387 structural trauma 182 subjectivity and organizational memories 97–100, 102, 106 Suharto 330, 331, 332–4, 340 supercoherent water 509 survival, evolutionary 511–18 survivors: collective shaping of personal memories 431–40; distributed memory 430–1; personal memories 429; rejection of victimhood 439–40; Suharto regime 333–4 sustainable tourism 230 Sutton, John 430 Syarikat 333 symbolic communities, staged 228 symbolism: death and burial 138; photography 281–2; urban spaces and city cultures 196 symptoms as answers 455 Sznaider, Natan 368 Sztompka, Piotr 207–8

Index

Ta Mok 335 Tagg, John 282 Taguieff, Pierre-André 126 Takahashi, Tetsuya 350, 351 tangible heritage 221, 231 Taoism 464 Tavory, Iddo 61 Taylor, Mark 175 Tea Party movement 79–80 technology: de-centering the media 173, 174; digital trauma archives 209–10; memories of the future 126; music 238–42, 245; photography 275, 277; responsibility 114; simulated soundscapes 526–7; soundscapes 524–5, 530 Teitelboim, Volodia 375 temporary memorials see grassroots memorials Terrazas, N. 404, 405 Terror Museum 60 terrorism see specific acts of terrorism testimony and cultural memory 72 thanatology 135 theodicy 359 theoretical isolationism 1–2 therapeutic politics 181, 182, 183 thermodynamics 514–15 Thomas, W.I. 173 Thompson, John B. 170 3/11 see Madrid bombing, 2004 Till, Emmett 81 time and timing: burial 136; distance from events 50; and historiography 37; Madrid bombing, 2004 416–18, 424; memory and responsibility 109–18; photography 279–80, 282; and place 312, 319–20; social movements 82; time periods and memory studies 46–7 Timor-Leste 338–9 Titanic, sinking of the 362 Tomic, Radomiro 372 topological identity 316–17, 323 tourism: cultural heritage 230–1; heritage sites 228; trans-nationalization of memory 150 traditional Chinese medicine 461–2 traditional culture 360 transmission of memory: Cambodian genocide 336; collective memory 15; embodiment 115; generations 112–13; responsibility 116–17; trauma politics 182–3 transnational memory 164, 165; see also globalization trauma: artistic representation 390–2; body memory 459–60, 467, 468–9; Cambodia and Indonesia 334–6; cinema and photography 253–7; comparative approaches memory studies 336–9; cultural trauma 206–7; disaster memory 361–8; disasters as social 358; dystopian cinema 259–60; individual trauma of disasters 360–1; naming and transforming events 4; photography 280; politics and disaster trauma 362–4; politics

of 181–90; politics of collective memory 54–5; social movements 82 Trauma Cinema (Walker) 253–4 Trauma Culture (Kaplan) 253, 254 traumatic brain injury 452–3 travelling memory 50–1, 71 Treaty of Trianon 207 Treblinka, Poland 301 tribunals 335 Truax, Barry 521–3, 526–7 truth and reconciliation commissions 153; Cambodian genocide 335; Timor-Leste 338–9; trauma politics 182, 189 Tulloch, John 429, 431–4, 436–9 Turkish immigrants in Berlin: cultural memory formation 243–5; hip-hop 237–8; historical and musical background 234–7; music and media 238–42 turning points 24 ‘unaccomplished’ memory 383–8 underground 158–66 undocumented immigrant victims 400–1, 403–10 UNESCO 151–2, 222, 224–5, 231 unfulfilled expectations 128 United Kingdom 227–8, 365, 366–7, 431–40 United Popular Action Movement (Chile) 376 United States: cultural heritage 228; memorials 292–3; national traditions of memory studies 50; political scandal 174–5; scandal 170–1; social movements 80–3 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, UN 224 universality 135, 152–4 “Unknown” (Godoy) 409 unknown victims 400, 405–10 unmediated/mediated memory 430 unspeakability 71–2 urban spaces 193–201, 523–4 US National Trust 228 utopia 127–8 Valley of the Communities memorial 301, 304, 305 Varela, Francisco 115, 116 victims and families of victims: generations and time 112–13; globalization of memory 153; heritage 222; Madrid bombing, 2004 416–25; Piazza Fontana bombing victims 392–5; survivors’ stories 438–9; undocumented immigrants 400–1, 403–10; see also survivors victims’ associations disputes 418–19 Vidal-Naquet, Pierre 15 Vietnam Veterans Memorial 178, 293 Vietnam War 337–8 violence 81 virtual exhibitions 213 Visual History Archive 215 545

Index

Volcker, Paul 176 Voltaire 359 Vulliamy, Ed 158 Walker, Janet 247, 253–4 Walker, Peter 399 Wall Street investment banks 175 war crime tribunals 182 Warburg, Aby 43 wars: linkage to natural disasters 346–55, 352, 363; as memorial 398; public mourning 364–5 Warsaw Ghetto Monument 294, 294–6, 295 water, memory of 500–9 Watergate 178–9 wave/particle theory of body 462–3, 464–5 Wawrzyniak, Joanna 50 Wearing, Clive 454–5 Weber, Max 94, 98, 100, 170, 171 websites: Open Society Archives 211; Oral History Association 209; Yellow Star Houses Project 212, 212–14 Wechsler Memory Scale 450–1 Welzer, Harald 44 West, Nancy Martha 274–5 West Bali 337 Westerkamp, Hildegard 521, 523, 525, 527–8 Western societies 116, 126–7, 449 Willerslev, Rane 136 Williams, Bruce A. 173 Williamsburg, Colonial 228 Winfrey, Oprah 81

546

witness reliability studies 18 Wodianka, Stephanie 249–50 work energy 514–15, 516, 517 World Heritage Center 224 World Soundscape Project 520, 521, 524–8 World Trade Center see 9/11 memorial World Trade Organization 230 World War I 68–9 World War II: aesthetics and memory 74; cultural heritage 229; cultural memory 67; Hungary 207–16; see also Holocaust Wright, Paul 227 writing 11 Wundt, Wilhelm 42 Wyse, William 133 xenophobia 58 Yad Vashem 60, 297, 301 Yamanaka, Shinya 493 Yasukuni Shrine worship 350 Yates, Frances 31 Yellow Star Houses Project 208, 210, 210–16, 212, 215 Youk Chhang 335 youth movements 523 Zelizer, Barbie 283, 284 Zionism 85 Zolberg, Vera 55 Zukin, Sharon 197