Malgosia:
Please excuse my delay in responding, the weekend was pretty busy with
family matters and I couldn't get to my email on time. Your question is
not as easily answered, as one may at first think! Just recently I was
engaged in a conversation exactly about the materiality of public memory.
But I am starting at the wrong place, let's see:
This story dates back to ancient greece (being a rhetorician I will
source memory as a canon of rhetoric). Originally memory was one of the
five canons of memory and consisted mainly of techniques of memorizing
material for later use in speeches, public discourse, and so on.
Rhetoricians told their students to practice memory techniques like
putting images in a building, then they could imagine themselves walking
through the building and seeing the images, which would bring
recollection of the things they wanted to say. Memory seen this way was a
private practice, a gift or faculty of recalling things, and as such,
psychological. Not many folks treated it separately, most treatises
concentrated on the other canons. In De Oratore Cicero does tell the
story of Simonides who apparently was gifted with great memory and helped
identify people that died when the roof of a house caved in (moments
after he had stepped out) and the rescuers could not identify the bodies.
Although memory gets treated a bit differently through the middle ages
and the renaissaince, the main way they thought about it was as a
psychologistic practice. A natural faculty which people could improve
with practice (Cicero did say this earlier). Throught the rest of the
centuries after that the work of memory has been seen just like that,
individual recalls then shares with others, etc.
It really has been recently, middle of this century, that people started
paying attention more to memory in terms of how we craft history, how we
invent traditions, and how we come to agree on recollections of past
events. From this memory has moved to a crafted, dynamic, and fluid
process (always contested) through which people come to agree on how
certain events are to be remembered. The work of memory then, is taken to
be a construction, a social construction. It goes by the name of social
memory, collective memory, or public memory. Nowadays we talk about
public memory as a process of negotiating, remembering how certain events
took place, or are going to be remembered. As such, it is always
contested, oppositional, always erasing as it recollects. The public part
comes as a result of the public negotiating that takes place over such
histories that are crafted for a societies' remembrance. This work takes
many forms: commemorations, monuments, celebrations of heroes/heroines,
official "histories" about how certain events ought to be remembered,
interpreted (in the U.S. see the discussion about the display of the
dropping of the atomic bomb in Japan during WWII that was to be set up in
the Smithsonian institution), and so forth.
Problems: many still wish to fix the work of memory as an individual
practice of recalling material when needed. Presumably then these
individuals would share the memory and engage in a negotiating over how
we recall certain events in history. Some argue that this is indeed the
case and that those who talk about public memory are using memory as
trope and confusing the metaphor for what's "real." That is, they want to
be able to "find" memory. If indeed there is a public memory, where is
it? How do we pick it from the manifold texts out there? they ask. Those
who favor public memory, as a process that allows us to talk about how
certain public events are constructed and then
remembered/celebrated/commemorated and made history, say that the work of
public memory can be seen in the claims to memory made by many, and that
you find it in the claims made and the negotiations in which we engage
over those claims. This debate isn't really as big a debate as I've put
it here, but it has found some voices. Some people ask what is the
difference between public memory and history. Others ask why we just
don't talk about frames of remembrance instead of public memory, since we
can't seem to find public memory. What public? they also ask.
Regardless, public memory as trope seems to open up interesting
possibilities for examining the rich textuality underlying public claims
to memory. I beg the list's indulgence, this explanation has not been
thorough, yet at the same time it has gone on too long. I haven't
mentioned Foucault because I have not yet looked at him regarding this
issue, but would appreciate some pointers in that direction. If anybody
wants to exchange info privately about this topic I would be more than
happy to do that, so as not to take much list time.
Regards,
>Nacho Cordova, I m curious about the notion of "public memory". What is it?
>
>-m
>
Nathaniel I. Cordova
Department of Speech Communication
University of Maryland
2126 Skinner Hall
College Park, MD 20742
Phone: (301) 405-6527
Fax: (301) 314-9471
Email: cordova@xxxxxxxxxxx
===========================================================================
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the
point, however, is to change it."
Karl Marx (1818-83), Theses on Feuerbach, no. 11 (written 1845;
published 1888; repr. in Selected Works, vol. 1, 1942). The
observation
also appeared in Marx, The German Ideology (1846), and was inscribed
as
the epitaph on his tomb in Highgate Cemetery, London.
===========================================================================
Please excuse my delay in responding, the weekend was pretty busy with
family matters and I couldn't get to my email on time. Your question is
not as easily answered, as one may at first think! Just recently I was
engaged in a conversation exactly about the materiality of public memory.
But I am starting at the wrong place, let's see:
This story dates back to ancient greece (being a rhetorician I will
source memory as a canon of rhetoric). Originally memory was one of the
five canons of memory and consisted mainly of techniques of memorizing
material for later use in speeches, public discourse, and so on.
Rhetoricians told their students to practice memory techniques like
putting images in a building, then they could imagine themselves walking
through the building and seeing the images, which would bring
recollection of the things they wanted to say. Memory seen this way was a
private practice, a gift or faculty of recalling things, and as such,
psychological. Not many folks treated it separately, most treatises
concentrated on the other canons. In De Oratore Cicero does tell the
story of Simonides who apparently was gifted with great memory and helped
identify people that died when the roof of a house caved in (moments
after he had stepped out) and the rescuers could not identify the bodies.
Although memory gets treated a bit differently through the middle ages
and the renaissaince, the main way they thought about it was as a
psychologistic practice. A natural faculty which people could improve
with practice (Cicero did say this earlier). Throught the rest of the
centuries after that the work of memory has been seen just like that,
individual recalls then shares with others, etc.
It really has been recently, middle of this century, that people started
paying attention more to memory in terms of how we craft history, how we
invent traditions, and how we come to agree on recollections of past
events. From this memory has moved to a crafted, dynamic, and fluid
process (always contested) through which people come to agree on how
certain events are to be remembered. The work of memory then, is taken to
be a construction, a social construction. It goes by the name of social
memory, collective memory, or public memory. Nowadays we talk about
public memory as a process of negotiating, remembering how certain events
took place, or are going to be remembered. As such, it is always
contested, oppositional, always erasing as it recollects. The public part
comes as a result of the public negotiating that takes place over such
histories that are crafted for a societies' remembrance. This work takes
many forms: commemorations, monuments, celebrations of heroes/heroines,
official "histories" about how certain events ought to be remembered,
interpreted (in the U.S. see the discussion about the display of the
dropping of the atomic bomb in Japan during WWII that was to be set up in
the Smithsonian institution), and so forth.
Problems: many still wish to fix the work of memory as an individual
practice of recalling material when needed. Presumably then these
individuals would share the memory and engage in a negotiating over how
we recall certain events in history. Some argue that this is indeed the
case and that those who talk about public memory are using memory as
trope and confusing the metaphor for what's "real." That is, they want to
be able to "find" memory. If indeed there is a public memory, where is
it? How do we pick it from the manifold texts out there? they ask. Those
who favor public memory, as a process that allows us to talk about how
certain public events are constructed and then
remembered/celebrated/commemorated and made history, say that the work of
public memory can be seen in the claims to memory made by many, and that
you find it in the claims made and the negotiations in which we engage
over those claims. This debate isn't really as big a debate as I've put
it here, but it has found some voices. Some people ask what is the
difference between public memory and history. Others ask why we just
don't talk about frames of remembrance instead of public memory, since we
can't seem to find public memory. What public? they also ask.
Regardless, public memory as trope seems to open up interesting
possibilities for examining the rich textuality underlying public claims
to memory. I beg the list's indulgence, this explanation has not been
thorough, yet at the same time it has gone on too long. I haven't
mentioned Foucault because I have not yet looked at him regarding this
issue, but would appreciate some pointers in that direction. If anybody
wants to exchange info privately about this topic I would be more than
happy to do that, so as not to take much list time.
Regards,
>Nacho Cordova, I m curious about the notion of "public memory". What is it?
>
>-m
>
Nathaniel I. Cordova
Department of Speech Communication
University of Maryland
2126 Skinner Hall
College Park, MD 20742
Phone: (301) 405-6527
Fax: (301) 314-9471
Email: cordova@xxxxxxxxxxx
===========================================================================
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the
point, however, is to change it."
Karl Marx (1818-83), Theses on Feuerbach, no. 11 (written 1845;
published 1888; repr. in Selected Works, vol. 1, 1942). The
observation
also appeared in Marx, The German Ideology (1846), and was inscribed
as
the epitaph on his tomb in Highgate Cemetery, London.
===========================================================================