Memory Studies Exam

1) Patrick Hutton, "Collective Memory and Collective Mentalities"

o American historian who considers, in this text, the difference between history and memory, as understood in the work of sociologist Maurice Halbwachs and the historian Philippe Ariès—" Halbwachs and Ariès might be regarded as exemplars of contrasting lines of approach to the puzzle of memory's relationship to history." His hope is to examine the degree which the celebrated works of Ariès does historiographical investigation of the relationship between memory and history, which has some connection to Halbwachs. The essay reconstructs that connection for the light I shed on the way in which the history of collective mentalities in which Ariès pioneered is integrally related to the problem of collective memory as it was presented by Halbwachs § Halbwachs: memory and history are mutually opposed ways of appreciating the past. Memory is unreliable for a scholarly appreciation of the past—after all, we are immersed in memory. The methods of the historian set memory aside so that the past may be scanned from a critical distance. § Ariès: memory and history are intimately allied. For all of memory's vagaries, it is still our point of entry into the past. Memory and history are not counterpoints of a dichotomy for him. As he sees it, there is no history that is not born of memory. In his case, his own living memory is what served as his path into those neglected area of the history of culture for which he is acclaimed · Memory as a resource for history. Collective memory is a foundation for collective mentalities o Halbwachs three primary books on memory § 1) Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (1925) · Scanned the many social contexts in which collective memory operates: notably family, religion, and social communities § 2) La topographie légendaire des évangile en Terre Sainte (1941) · A case study of the way in which memory is modified over time in a single setting § 3) La mémoire collective (1951), · Published posthumously, it was to be a synthesis of all of his observations on the subject of memory. As a victim of Nazi persecution, Halbwachs was neve permitted to craft its details. o It's theoretical groundwork is clear however § Halbwachs' theory is built our of critique of the ideas of on of his first teachers, the philosopher Henri Bergson—who thought of memory as a personal, subjective experience. Bergson noted the relativity of time from the perspective of memory. As he taught, the time of memory does not exist in discrete, measurable unit. Rather it endures, and it may be telescoped or expanded in our recollections by the intensity of the emotions it inspires or the vividness of the imagery it evokes. Armed with what he learned from sociology seminar of Durkheim on the formative power of the deep social structures shaping all conscious human endeavor, Halbwachs challenges the notion that memory is a resource of the individual psyche, as it was proclaimed to be in the work of Bergson § Halbwachs theory has 3 principal elements · 1) Halbwachs argued for the necessity of a social foundation for all recollection. For him, individual memories are by nature vague, fragmented, and incomplete, as Freud had previously taught. Freud's quest had been to explain how conscious memories might be made whole b establishing their connections to unconscious ones hidden in the individual psyche.9 Halbwachs' intent, by contrast, was to lift the investigation of memory out of this hermetic world of the unconscious psyche into the conscious and readily identifiable one of social understanding. o Halbwachs says individual memories might better be characterized as provisional rather than as fragmented, as they become whole only in social contexts. He does not question existence of individual memories, but rather their meaning apart from the social settings that give them their integrity § Memories are formed out of the imagery of shared experience. § "Memories, therefore, conform to the conceptual structures of particular groups, whether these be of family, church, or communal association. As Halbwachs expressed it, memories are shaped by their cadres sociaux.

2) Amin Shahid, Event, Metaphor, Memory

o Amin is a post-colonial, subaltern historian § Concerned with official discourse of the elites—colonial and post-colonial —their sense of the past, and the way in which that history is in the service of certain elite national goals, which include the history from below—subaltern narratives. The aim of the subaltern historian is not only to look at official history as it construes the past, but also try to unearth subaltern perspectives that have often been suppressed by the elite histories. This poses a problem: how do you get to the subaltern perspective. Does the subaltern speak?" because in the end, the hegemonic account/official record dominate so much, there doesn't seem to be a possibility of a resistance of that. Even if you could hear what the subaltern has to say, it is always refracted by the elite discourses. How can you distract and destabilize such a discourse in order for the subaltern narrative to emerge? · Where does Amin stand in regard to the peasant subject? o The nationalist, the judiciary, local systems of trade or is he holding out the possibility of some kind of willful freedom to choose through limited—a subject that can become an agent within their own destiny? § Amin goes through a lot of trouble at the beginning of the book to fill in the local contexts of the event. He is trying to account for the historical context—the event was not just the moment, but all the moving pieces moving up to that point, construing the event as a process. He removes the linear narrative structure and emphasize causality. He tempts the reader to expect the eventual imposition of causality, to locate their own causality. He is saying that there are multiple narratives and it is only the official narrative that give you a specific causality. He is trying to disrupt this and show how people assume different positions in the narrative according to their own narratives and stories—and not a master narrative.

1) John Gillis, Commemoration

o Book claims that the notion of identity depends on the idea of memory, and vice versa. We are constantly revising our memories to suit out identities. Memories help us make sense of the world we live in; and "memory work" is, like any other kind of physical or mental labor, embedded in complex class, gender and power relations that determine what is remembered (or forgotten), by whom, and for what end. o "The relationship between memory and identity is historical; and the record of that relationship can be traced through various forms of commemoration discussed in this volume. Commemorative activity is by definition social and political, for it involves the coordination of individual and group memories, whose results may appear consensual when they are in fact the product of processes of intense contest, struggle, and, in some instances, annihilation. In this collection the focus is on public rather than private commemoration, though the parallels between the way identity and memory operate in personal and public life are striking and a reminder that the division between public and private is also historical, appearing natural only in retrospect." § "Identity has taken on the status of a sacred object, an 'ultimate concern,' worth fighting and even dying for." · National identities are, like everything historical, constructed, and reconstructed; and it is out responsibility to decode them in order to discover the relationships they create and sustain § "At this particular historical moment, it is all the more apparent that both identity and memory are political and social constructs, and should be treated as such." o History of commemoration - three phases in the Western World § 1) the pre-national (before the late eighteenth century) § 2) the national (from the American and French revolutions to the 1960s) · "Prior to the era of the French and American revolutions, memory tended to divide rather than unite," · "rior to the era of the French and American revolutions, memory tended to divide rather than unite, just as it continues to do in places like northern Ireland · This began to change as a result of the simultaneous political and eco nomic revolutions of the late eighteenth century.1 7 The demand for commemoration was then taken up by the urban middle and working classes, gradually expanding until, today, everyone is obsessed with recording, preserving, and remembering." § 3) the present, post-national phase · Know very little about the early history of memory (or, more properly, memories), but what is certain is that its practice(s) was either highly localized or relatively cosmopolitan. Pierre Nora argues that prior to the nineteenth century memory was such a pervasive part of life—the "milieu of memory" is what he calls it—that people were hardly aware of its existence. Only the aristocracy, the church, and the monarchical state had need of institutionalized memory. Outside the elite classes, archives, genealogies, family portraits, and biographies were extremely rare; and there was no vast bureaucracy of memory as there is today. Ordinary people felt the past to be so much a part of their present that they perceived no urgent need to record, objectify, and preserve it. o Popular differs from elite memory in important ways § "While the latter attempted to create a consecutive account of all that had happened from a particular point in the past, popular memory made no effort to fill in all the blanks. If elite time marched in a more or less linear manner, popular time danced and leaped. Elite time colonized and helped construct the boundaries of territories that we have come to call nations. But popular time was more local as well as episodic, consolidating, as in rural Ulster today, certain "Great Days which rise out of time like hills off the land, signaling centers, letting boundaries drift from attention."1 3 This was not a time that could be contained within fixed boundaries. It was measured not from beginnings but from centers: "From the Great Days, time spreads both ways, backward and forward, to form seasons; seasons become years, years lost to time." Content to live in a present that contained both the past and the future, ordinary people did not feel compelled to invest in archives, monuments, and other permanent sites of memory, but rather they relied on living memory" § National memory us shared by people who have never seen or head of one another, yet who regard themselves as having a common history. They are bound together as much by forgetting as by remembering, for modern memory was born at a moment when Americans and European launched a massive effort to reject the past and construct a radically new future. The American revolutionaries urged their compatriots to forget everything and start afresh. Jefferson declared that "the dead have no rights...Out Creator made the world for the use of the living and not of the dead." And the French Republic embarked on the extraordinary project of altering time consciousness of the entire Christian world by declaring 1792 to be year I, a symbol of their conception of new beginnings. · Collective amnesia o Changes occurring at the economic as well as the political level created such a sense of distance between now and then that people found it impossible to remember that life hadn been like only a few decades earlier. § Modern memory was born not just from the sense of a break with the past, but from an intense awareness of the conflicting representations of the past and the effort of each group to make its version the basis of national identity. · "New nations as well as old state require ancient pasts." § The first military cemeteries were created during the American Civil War, but Europeans did not take up the idea that men who fought together should be buried together. Yet American memory was selective in other ways: · "As Kirk Savage shows us in his fascinating account of post-Civil War monument building in the American North and South, these memories in stone provided a basis for consensus between old enemies. However, they were the icons of whites only. Post—Civil War American identity was forged by forgetting the contributions of African Americans to the military effort, forgetting even what the struggle had been about. Faced with oblivion as the quintessential American "other," ex-slaves invented their own commemorate of the Emancipation Proclamation, known to them (and largely only to them) as "Juneteenth."" o "On both sides of the Atlantic, national commemorations were largely the preserve of elite males, the designated carriers of progress, who, as a consequence of newly defined gender divisions, felt the past to be slipping away from them much faster than did women. The new imperatives of individualism set men on a fast track, producing among them a profound sense of losing touch with the past. Thought of as belonging more to the past, women came to serve in various (and usually unpaid) ways as the keepers and embodiments of memory. They provided consolation to men terrified that they had become rootless as a result of their own upward and outward mobility." § The creation of national mother's days in America and Europe on the eve of the First World War simply underlined the gendered nature of national commemorative practice, of if was for their deeds but for their being that women were remembered. Women and minorities often serve as symbols of a "lost" past, nostalgically perceived and romantically constructed, but their actual lives are most readily forgotten.

1) James Young, At Memory's Edge

o Book offers an intelligent discourse on Holocaust monuments "at the edge." Considers Holocaust representation, specifically how the Holocaust will be remembered through "anti-redemptive memorials" as well as provocative, rather than elegiac and often sentimental artistic representations. The question: How is a post-Holocaust generation of artist supposed to "remember" events they never experience directly? o Jay Winter: "The general theme of book is the rejection of aesthetic redemption in Holocaust commemoration. Whereas national political leaders especially but not only in Germany still seek symbols of healing and closure, artist undermine that enterprise. They offer countermonuments," in which the key space consists not in the design or object but the space between the object and the viewer." · It takes seriously post-modernism, asking the question of whether the audience understands it. Remarkably, the answer, I think, is "yes," as indicated by the success of the resentment at some of these installations being built in Germany. Does the audience like having such monuments, especially in Germany, the land where the crime was conceived and perpetrated? Probably "no;" but the Holocaust was such a major rip in the fabric of civilization that the descendants of perpetrators understand the need to remember and the desire to forget. Most important, by his treatment of this subject, Young reminds us that artistic memorialization can be more effective in telling the story of the Holocaust than the methods we consider sacred, such as history and literature, especially if it catches the viewer unexpectedly. o "the status of monuments in the twentieth century remains double-edged and is fraught with an essential tension: outside of those nations with totalitarian pasts, the public and governmental hunger for traditional, self-aggrandizing monuments is matched only by the contemporary artist's skepticism of the monument. AS a result, even as monuments continue to be commissioned and designed by governments and public agencies eager to assign singular meaning to complicated permanence. The state's need for monument is acknowledged, even as the traditional forms and functions of monument are increasingly challenged. Monuments at the end of the twentieth century are thus born resisting the very premises of their birth. Thus, the monument has increasingly become the site of contested and competing meanings, more likely the site of cultural conflict than one of shared national values and ideals." § Chapter 1 · Art Spiegelman's MAUS is conceived as a serious literary and artistic memory book that contains much ambivalence about memory and representation, but is judged by Young as successful § Chapter 2 · David Levinthal's Mein Kampf is a series of blurred photo images of the Third Reich made from toy figures is problematic for Young. He suggests that because of the peculiarities of Levinthal's images, hist work forces the viewer to "imagine and thereby collaborate," and also provides ambiguous conclusions about the possibilities of how art may inspire or provoke § Chapter 3 · Relates the outdoor, life-size projections of San Francisco artist Shimon Attie. This art form, which is based upon project old images of an active Berlin Jewish quarter on now abandoned buildings subject to new use suggests the relevance of ghost-like images as well as what Pierre Nora has called "the will to remember," and what Young calls an "act of remembrance." Thus, Attie has utilized a technological art to remember the past and the absence of the Jews in Germany. But this work can go beyond mere remembrance, into a form of social activism, as intended by Attie's Portraits of Exile, displayed in Copenhagen during 1995. This series introduced a grouping of lighted portraits that floated in Copenhagen harbor near the docks. Some images alluded to the successful rescue of Danish Jews in 1943, an event Denmark takes pride in remembering. Others, however, reflect on the less than successful stories of new refugees whose acceptance has been more difficult than that of the Jews. Thus, memory can be a two-edged sword, instilling either pride or shame for national policies. In this respect, Young's analysis affirms what we know too well—how dangerous art may be as a weapon for change and as a means for inspiring memory.

3) Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember

o Chapter 2 § "The narrative tells of historical events - but of historical events transfigured by mythicization into unchanging and unchangeable substances. The contents of the myth are represented as being not subject to any kind of change. The myth teaches that history is not a play of contingent forces." § Ritual: · Lukes: "rule-governed activity of a symbolic and character which draws attention of its participant to objects of thought and feeling which, they hold to be of special significance." o Rites: are held to be meaningful because they have significance with respect to a set of further non-ritual actions to the whole life of a community. They give value and meaning to the life of those who perform them. § "Thus, in the world religions, but also in the rites of many preliterate peoples and in a number of modern political rituals too, there exist a variety of ceremonies which share certain common features: they do not simply imply continuity with the past by virtue of their high degree of formality and fixity; rather, they have as one of their defining features the explicit claim to be commemorating such a continuity" · "question as to whether we can have good reason to think that rituals which are represented as being explicitly commemorative do indeed have the significance, as means of transmitting social memory, which is claimed for them by their participants." o Argues that in seeking to understand those features which commemorative ceremonies share with other elaborate rituals, we are liable to be impeded by a tendency, characteristic of most modern interpretations of ritual, to focus attention on the content rather than on those features which distinguish commemorative ceremonies as rituals. · "A ritual is not a journal or memoir. Its master narrative is more than a story told and reflected on; it is a cult enacted. An image of the past, even in the form of a master narrative, is conveyed and sustained by ritual performances. And this means that what is remembered in commemorative ceremonies is something in addition to a collectively organized variant of personal and cognitive memory. For if the ceremonies are to work for their participants, if they are to be persuasive to them, then those participants must be not simply cognitively competent to execute the performance; they must be habituated to those performances. This habituation is to be found - in ways about which I shall have more to say subsequently - in the bodily substrate of the performance. I have sought to analyze commemorative ceremonies until they yield the bodylines that is their substrate. My argument is that, if there is such a thing as social memory, we are likely to find it in commemorative ceremonies. Commemorative ceremonies prove to be commemorative (only) in so far as they are performative. But performative memory is in fact much more widespread than commemorative ceremonies which are - though performance is necessary to them - highly representational. Performative memory is bodily. Therefore, I want to argue, there is an aspect of social memory which has been greatly neglected but is absolutely essential: bodily social memory." o Chapter 3: bodily practices: § " § We preserve versions of the past by representing it to ourselves in words and images. Commemorative ceremonies are pre-eminent instances of this. They keep the past in mind by a depictive representation of past events. They are re-enactments of the past, its return in a representational guise which normally includes a simulacrum of the scene or situation recaptured. Such re-enactments depend for much of their rhetorical per- suasiveness, as we have seen, on prescribed bodily behavior. But we can also preserve the past deliberately without explicitly re-presenting it in words and images. Our bodies, which in commemorations stylistically re-enact an image of the past, keep the past also in an entirely effective form in their continuing ability to perform certain skilled actions. We may not remember how or when we first learned to swim, but we can keep on swimming successfully - remembering how to do it - without any representational activity on our part at all; we consult a mental picture of what we should do when our capacity to execute spontaneously the bodily movements in question is defective. Many forms of habitual skilled remembering illustrate a keeping of the past in mind that, without ever adverting to its historical origin, nevertheless re-enacts the past in our present conduct. In habitual memory the past is, as it were, sedimented in the body" · Consider posture, as it contributes to communal activity/memory o "It is true that the body has recently received attention as a bearer of social and political meanings. But even that acknowledgement is cast in an etherealized form. The point is commonly, if not always, made with a markedly cognitive tilt. Frequently what is being talked about is the symbolism of the body or attitudes towards the body or discourses about the body; not so much how bodies are variously constituted and variously behave. It is asserted that the body is socially constituted; but the ambiguity in the term constitution tends to go unexamined. That is to say, the body is seen to be socially constituted in the sense that it is constructed as an object of knowledge or discourse; but the body is not seen equally clearly to be socially constituted in the sense that it is culturally shaped in its actual practices and behavior. Practices and behavior are constantly being assimilated to a cognitive model. The ambiguity of meaning in the words constitution and construction tends to be glided over, one of the meanings being privileged at the expense of the other. But the body is socially constituted in a double sense. To argue for the importance of performances, and in particular habitual performances, in conveying and sustaining memory, is, among other things, to insist on that ambiguity and on the significance of the second term of its meaning."

3) Andrew Valls, "Justice, Acknowledgement, and Collective Memory"

o Confederate monuments and statues § Competing with civil rights monuments · "In the South the earliest memorials tended to be simple obelisks, usually erected in cemeteries. After the end of Reconstruction, however, more monuments began to be erected in town centers and often featured a "common soldier" standing high atop a pedestal." o "Interpreting the meaning and message of these monuments is fraught; they present, as Levinson puts it, "wrenching semiotic issues" (1995, 1107). At one level, many of them are simply memorials to fallen soldiers and (p.68) therefore arguably unobjectionable (see Schedler 2001). Savage suggests that one of the points of the monuments was to "smash" the equation of the South with slavery, so that the monument could be focused not on the issues underlying the Civil War, but on military valor (1997, 129-30). Yet Savage also emphasizes that "the common soldier is . . . always white and Anglo-Saxon in physiognomy [which] suggests that the memorials offer up not a neutral individual body but a collective body conceived with certain [racial] boundaries and allegiances" (1994, 131; see also Savage 1997, 186-88). In the case of the statue of Robert E. Lee on Monument Avenue in Richmond, which portrays Lee sitting high on his horse, Savage argues that the stature rests on a "disguised racism" that makes claims "for the prerogatives of Southern white manhood [that are] not lost on many people" (1994, 133-34). This kind of statue can easily be interpreted as "celebrat[ing] not just the veteran but also his cause. It signifie[s] the South's conviction that it had acted rightly" (Foster 1987, 131). Poole argues that the monuments are "provocative statements of Confederate nationalism . . . [that are] an image of defiance" (2005, 127). They reflect the idea that "the struggle for the South's peculiar institution would carry on, albeit in a largely symbolic warfare" (Poole 2005, 129). Furthermore, it is a mistake to attempt to glean the significance of Confederate memorials individually, for as Savage emphasizes, their effect is cumulative (1997, 209). The fact is that the southern landscape is filled with monuments to those who defended the old order of slavery and white supremacy. The Southern Poverty Law Center (2016) finds that there are over fifteen hundred of them on the American landscape, mostly (though not exclusively) in the South." · Can't just tear them down. Is there historical value? There are some Neo-Confederate memorial activists putting new monuments up like the bust of confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest. o Confederate flag, symbol of southern segregationist resistance. In the 50s, Georgia changed the design of its state flag to prominently incorporate the Confederate Battle Flag, and S.C. began to fly the battle flag o Justice: symbolic measures in the absence of policies to achieve material justice can easily become empty and meaningless. Justice requires, I have argued in the last chapter and this one, policies that pursue both material justice and appropriate means of knowledge and acknowledgment that affirm the equal moral and civic standing of all citizens.

1) Andrew Valls, "Justice, Acknowledgement, and Collective Memory"

o Considers measures to memorialize the past and reject the ideas associated with human rights abused of the prior regime—truth commissions, apologies, memorials, museums, changes in place names, national holidays, and other symbolic measures—on the heels of argument that the material legacies of past injustices toward African Americans remain with us in the form of sever racial inequality and opportunities are only on class of inequality, only on manifestation of the legacies of the past. · Justice: There is a diverse repertoire of practices that can convey rejection of the injustices of the past, contribute to appropriate memorialization, and affirm the equal citizenship of all. § Restore human and civic dignity o "Here I focus on some of the more obvious candidates: truth commissions, apologies, and the use of various kinds of memorials and symbols. All of these, I will argue, have been used to some extent with respect to the history of African Americans in the United States, and especially in connection with the Jim Crow era and the civil rights movement. As with reparations, while too little has been done at the federal level, there are a number of promising developments at the state and local level, and in civil society. There is now what we might call an established practice of acknowledgment, which often includes apology, other symbolic expressions, and memorialization. However, at the same time, there continues to be political conflict over the interpretation of the past, conflict that reflects a resistance to endorsing the civic equality of all, and indeed often reflects a nostalgia for the era of de jure racial hierarchy. Hence there are competing narratives, competing interpretations of the past and (therefore) of the present, and to some extent, this is as it should be. But to the extent that a significant portion of the population clings to the symbols of racial hierarchy, and certainly to the extent that the state seems to endorse their view, to that extent we still have far to go toward a racially just society." § "inequality of wealth, income, and opportunities are only one class of inequality, only one manifestation of the legacies of the past. These inequalities may be the most tangible and readily measured ones, but distributional issues do not exhaust the issues of justice raised by our racial past. As Iris Young (1990, chap. 1) has pointed out, too often liberal theories of justice have focused exclusively on distributional issues, or, when confronted with questions that do not fit the "distributive paradigm," they either attempt to redescribe non-distributional matters to fit the paradigm, or they define the issue as not being an issue of justice at all. I agree with Young that justice involves non-distributional questions, and in this chapter I focus on questions of collective memory, acknowledgment, and state speech as issues of justice. I argue that justice requires that the state acknowledge the harms of the past and reaffirm the equal status and equal moral worth of all citizens. It must reject the racist practices and norms and the symbolic and cultural expressions associated with them. It must attempt to create a collective memory that conveys the appropriate interpretations and evaluations. This applies to the federal government and state and local governments, as well as (p.45) the major institutions of civil society that purport to uphold the fundamental values of a liberal society." o Established practice of acknowledgment: § Often includes an apology, other symbolic expressions, and memorialization o Liberal theory on nonmaterial issues involved with acknowledgement and collective memory § Some say it does not have the tools because acknowledgment and apology lie outside the usual liberal framework of justice, since they are not about rights or the redistribution of wealth. § Valls disagrees and says, in agreement with Jacob levy, that certain version of liberalism have some difficulty with symbolic issues, but this has more to do with the traditional focus of liberal theory than liberalism's theoretical resources

1) Reinhart Koselleck, "War Memorials"

o Considers the job of war memorials. Claims that the only identity that endures clandestinely in all war memorials is the identity of the dead with themselves. All political and social identifications that try to visually capture and permanently fix the "dying for..." vanish in the course of time. For this reason, the message that was to have been established by a memorial changes. Remember democratization of death through depicting the common solider, which may have started as a revolutionary impulse to push back against big estates! Also negative monument and anti-memorial § War memorials do more than just keep alive the memory of the dead for whose sake they were first erected § Memorials which commemorate violent death provide a means of identification · 1) "the deceased, the ones killed, and the ones killed in action are identified in a particular respect: as heroes, victims, martyrs, victors, kin, possibly also as the defeated; in addition, as custodians or possessors of honor, faith, glory, loyalty, duty; and finally, as guardians and protectors of the fatherland, of humanity, of justice, of freedom, of the proletariat or of a particular form of government." · 2) "the surviving observers are themselves put in a position where they are offered an identity: an offer to which they should or must re- act. The maxim mortui viventes obligant (the living are obliged to the dead) is variously applicable depending on the classifications given above. Their cause is also ours. The war memorial does not only commemorate the dead; it also compensates for lost lives so as to render survival meaningful." · 3) the dead are remembered—as dead o Different for war memorials because they are supposed to recall violent death at hands of human beings. Thus, they are "in need of legitimation and obviously are, therefore, especially worthy of remembrance." o "Thus a double process of identification is contained in the difference between the past death that is recalled and the visual interpretation that a war memorial offers. The dead are supposed to have stood for the same cause as the surviving sponsors of memorials want to stand for. But the dead have no say in whether it is the same cause or not. Yet over the course of time, and this is what history teaches, the in- tended identity similarly eludes the control of those who established the memorial. More than anything else, memorials erected permanently testify to transitoriness." § War memorials began spreading throughout Europe in last 2 centuries. Important development that was NOT offered before the French Revolution (12-18th century developments): · Otherworldly beyond of death was indicated figuratively with death being interpreted not as an end but as a passageway · In this outlook upon the world, the represented death remained differentiated by estate, even though death became increasingly individualized. o Double tombs in western Europe 15th & 16th century for rulers and the rich § Until 18th century, "soldiers appear everywhere on victory monuments but not on war memorials. Within the society of estates, mercenaries or soldiers recruited by the state remained relegated to the lowest level, un- worthy of a monument." · "In 1727, a German handbook for the estate of soldiers (Kriegerstand) argued against soldiers being burned like witches or counterfeiters. 10 And "old Fritz') (Frederick the Great) counted them among the scum of the earth. Even at Koniggratz, that is, at a time when soldiers were already worthy of memorials, the dead were deposited in mine tunnels and, after Sedan, they remained where they fell, barely covered." o Shift to modernity à § 1) while transcendental sense of death fades, inner-worldly claims of representation of death grow—which Christian images of death always had. Since French Revolution and the Wars of Liberation (1813-14), number of war memorials dedicated to soldier increased. Not just in churches and cemeteries but they have also moved from churches into open space into the landscape. Not just the death of soldiers that serve political purposes, but the remembrance of it is also put to political service à "The war memorial is intended to fulfill this task. It shifts the memory of the death of soldiers into an inner-worldly functional context that aims only at the future of the survivors. The decline of a Christian interpretation of death thus creates a space for meaning to be purely established in political and social terms." § 2) As war memorials become more widespread, they are divested more and more of the traditional differences of the society of estates. It is democratized, equality of death as the names of all dead are described, not jus the great people · Boer War memorials prefigured the type of memorials of the world wars

1) Paul Connerton, How Modernity Forgets

o Considers what is forgotten in modernity, which is profound: the human-scale-ness of life, the experience of living and working in a world of social relationships that are known. It notes that there is some transformation in what might be described as the meaning of life based on shared memories, and that meaning is eroded by a structural transformation in the life-spaces of modernity. · "Heritage, together with its French and German equivalents, le patrimoine and die Musealisierung, museology, ethnohistory, industrial archaeology, retrofitting, retrochic, Holocaust memorials, counter-monument, counter-memory, lieux de mémoire" o Memory became a central issue in philosophical thinking with Bergson, in psycho- analytic thinking with Freud, and in autobiographical literature with Proust. At the opening of the 20th century, memory was psychologized; at the close of the century the turn was to cultural memory. § Why is memory such a hot button topic? The Holocaust is in part to blame, but more significantly is due to modernity problem with forgetting · Modernity: the objective transformation of the social fabric unleashed by the advent of the capitalist world market which tears down feudal and ancestral limitations on a global scale, and psychologically the enlargement of life chances through the gradual freeing from fixed status hierarchies—mid nineteenth century accelerating to the present § Two types of memory. One is the focus of this paper · 1) place memory, which is dependent on topography—loci. "The loci or places in question can be actually perceived or they can be simply imagined. The real or imagined place or set of places functions as a grid onto which the images of the items to be remembered are placed in a certain order; and the items are then remembered by mentally revisiting the grid of places and traversing them step by step." o Memory has two essential features § 1) it depends essentially upon a stable system of places § 2) remembering relates implicitly to the human body and the acts of memory are envisaged as taking place on a human scale § Forgetting—separate from memory · Associated with processes that separate social life from locality and from human dimensions: superhuman speed, megacities that are so enormous as to be unmemorable, consumerism disconnected from the labor process, the short lifespan of urban architecture, the disappearance of walkable cities, etc. o Chapter 2 § Memorial vs. locus · Memorial places can be as spare as place-names or pilgrimages · Locus, consider the house and the street § Memorial often viewed as the "carrier of cultural memory." What makes it different than a locus. Much of the answer to this question consists in its different relationship to the process of cultural forgetting. · "Many memorials are, admittedly, powerful memory places. Yet their effect is more ambiguous than this statement might imply. For the desire to memorialize is precipitated by a fear, a threat, of cultural amnesia." o The relationship between memorials and forgetting is reciprocal: the threat of forgetting begets memorials and the construction of memorials begets forgetting.

3) John Gillis, Commemoration

o Counter/anti monument movements § "The leaders of recent avant-garde counter monument movements, many of whom are politically active artists, would have citizens do more rather than less memory work. They advocate radical designs that, like the monument on the Mall, not only invite more interaction, but challenge the status of memory as a knowable object." · Hamburg monument o "The anti-monument movement represents a radical turn not only aesthetically but epistemologically. Its advocates reject the notion of memory sites and want to deritualize and dematerialize remembering so that it becomes more a part of everyday life, thus closing the gap between the past and the present, between memory and history. By dematerializing memory, they also wish to strip it of all appearances of objectivity, thereby forcing everyone to confront her or his own subjectivity, while at the same time acknowledging a civic responsibility not to let the past repeat itself." § "Whether these aims are achieved is an open question. It would appear that most people find it difficult to remember without having access to mementos, images, and physical sites to objectify their memory.5 9 Yet the controversy over the counter monuments is symptomatic of the rethinking of memory practice going on in the United States, Europe, and many other parts of the world. Museum reformers have also begun to search for new ways to engage visitors. Movements to liberate history from its association with particular times and places—the classroom, library, and archive-— have been active since the 1960s.6 0 These efforts coincide with a remark able surge in the popular historical practice. The "roots" phenomenon has inspired mass interest in genealogy, producing in the case of the Mormons what Alex Shoumatoff aptly describes as a "mountain of names." Virtually every community, religion, business, and voluntary association must now have its own history, just as it must have its own identity" § "Today everyone is her or his own historian, and this democratization of the past causes some anxiety among professionals, most of whom still write in the nationalist tradition, and who still retain a near monopoly over professorships and curatorships, even as they lose touch with the general public. Most people have long since turned to more heterogeneous representations of the past. A n d while conservatives decry Americans5 lack of factual knowledge about their national history, fearing the loss of a common heritage will lead to a loss of national identity, the reality is that the nation is no longer the site or frame of memory for most people and therefore national history is no longer a proper measure of what people really know about their pasts.6 2 In fact, there is good evidence to show that ordinary people are more interested in and know more about their pasts than ever before, though their knowledge is no longer confined to compulsory time frames and spaces of the old national historiography. Both Americans and Europeans have become compulsive consumers of the past, shopping for that which best suits their particular sense of self at the moment, constructing out of a bewildering variety of materials, times, and places the multiple identities that are demanded of them in the post-national era." · The old, compulsory forms of commemoration survive, but only where states are still in the process of constructing a singular national identity. o This shift is huge: dynamics remind us of the struggles at the time of the Reformation that pitted anti-ritualistic, iconoclastic Protestants against the older Catholic practices of locating the sacred only in certain times and places. Radical Protestants demanded that the sacred be brought into everyday life, into history itself; and to do so they abolished the separation of holy from secular days, insisting that the divine leave its old haunts—churches and pilgrimage sites—to become a part of the work place, the household, to be identified with the history of peoples (at first reforming sects, later with whole nations) chosen by G o d to carry out his divine purpose in secular time and space. Pg. 18 § 1) In the course of the nineteenth century nations came to worship themselves through their pasts, ritualizing and commemorating to the potin that their sacred sites and time became the secular equivalent of shrines and holy days. § 2) From the mid-nineteenth century onward history became the modern world's oracle. The terrible consequence of collective self-worship eventually became evident in the course of two world wars, but it took until the 1960s for a new iconoclasm to develop. This time the attack was direct not against the churches but against the schools, the universities, and the shrines and holidays of the nation-state, whose representation of itself had become too impersonal, totalizing, and alienating. · Actively desacralizing the nation-state, but the struggle is not yet over, and its most intense period may be ahead of us. o "For those who regard the national "heritage" as a sacred text, the democratization of memory is equivalent to profanation, or what is worse, cultural suicide. Just as some accuse the anti-monument movement of "manufacturing oblivion," there are those who regard any revision of the traditional curriculum as threatening national security. Reformers reply that all literary canons, standardized texts, and preferred lists of names and dates are themselves deadly, cutting off the present from the past, discouraging rather than enhancing active citizenship." § "taking memory out of the hands of specialists, diffusing its practices over time and space, runs the risk of merely privatizing rather than really democratizing it. Today packaged forms of both memory and history have proved so profitable that we must be wary of the results of commodification and commercialization as much as the consequences of political manipulation. Yet there are also examples of collective memorialization that owe little or nothing to either the market or to church and state." o "There is a chance that, like Funes, the Memorious, we may drown in floods of memories, just as we may be torn apart by the multitude of identities. The future is unpredictable, and not a little frightening, but there is no turning back. We have no alternative but to construct new memories as well as new identities better suited to the complexities of a post-national era. The old holidays and monuments have lost much of their power to commemorate, to forge and sustain a single vision of the past, but they remain useful as times and places where groups with very different memories of the same events can communicate, appreciate, and negotiate their respective differences. In this difficult and conflicted period of transition, democratic societies need to publicize rather than privatize the memories and identities of all groups, so that each may know and respect the other's versions of the past, thereby understanding better what divides as well as unites us.6 8 In this era of plural identities, we need civil times and civil spaces more than ever, for these are essential to the democratic processes by which individuals and groups come together to discuss, debate, and negotiate the past and, through this process, define the future." o Chapter 1 § Is identity a useful concept cross-culturally § Literature concludes that there are significant differences in the ways in which "person" and "self" are conceived by people in different parts of the world. But the concept of identity seems to have escaped scrutiny. · On the one hand, to deconstruct notions of cultural identity at precisely the moment when the disempowered turn to them may aid the reactionary social forces who seek to reassert the validity of homogeneous "main stream" collective identities against proponents of "multicultural" diversity. On the other hand, to support without criticism identity claims is to aid in the reproduction of an ideology that is both hegemonic and, I believe, oppressive § Chapter 2: identity, heritage, and history · We validate public and private memories and construct self-identities not just through single-minded obsession with one thread of our past but through catholic awareness of the whole patchwork quilt. National heritage emerges from linkages (and rivalries) among all the identities that inhabit us. § Chapter 3: national memory in early modern England · Then as now, national memory was selective, subjective, and inscriptive, and responsive to a changing present. The question of who owned memory was contested and open-ended, The myriad local modifications of the common national commemorations point to a restless popular creativity operating in counterpoint with a divided political elite. § Chapter 4: public memory in an American city: commemoration in Cleveland. Pg. 74 · Considering the challenging of shaping a past worthy of public commemoration in the present. This essay explores the subject of publicly construct memory in modern America, something that historians have seldom examined, and suggest some of the fundamental issues and debates that it entails. o Considers the Vietnam Veterans Memorial § "commemorative impulse did not originate in any drive to honor the nation-state" · Essay explores the subject of publicly constructed memory in modern America, something that historians have seldom examined, and suggest some of the fundamental issues and debates that it entails. o Public memory: system of beliefs and views that is produced from a political discussion that involves the fundamental issues relating to the entire existence of society: its organization, structure of power, and the very meaning of its past and present. It is a body of belifs and ideas about the past that help a public or society understand both its past and present, and, but implication, its future. "Rooted in the quest to interpret reality and connect the past with the present, the ideas, and symbols of public memory attempt to mediate the contradictions of a social system: ethnic and national, men and women, young and old, professionals and clients, leaders and followers, soldiers and their commanders. The competing restatements of reality expressed by these antinomies drive the need for reconciliation and the use of symbols, beliefs, and stories that people can use to understand and to dominate others. Thus, the symbolic language of patriotism is central to public memory discussions in nations like the United States because such language has the capacity to mediate both vernacular loyalties to local and familiar places and official loyalties to national and imagined structures" § "It is fashioned ideally in a public sphere in which various parts of the social structure exchange views. The major focus of this communicative and cognitive process is not the past, however, but serious matters in the present such as the nature of power and the question of loyalty to both official and vernacular cultures. Public memory speaks primarily about the structure of power in society because that power is always in question in a world of polarities and contradictions and because cultural understanding is always grounded in the material structure of society itself. Memory adds perspective and authenticity to the views articulated in this exchange; defenders of official and vernacular interests are selectively retrieved from the past to perform similar functions in the present" o Adherents of official and vernacular interests demonstrate conflicting obsessions § Cultural leaders orchestrate commemorative events to calm anxiety about change or political events, eliminate citizen indifference toward official concerns, promote exemplary patterns of citizen behavior, and stress citizen duties over rights § Ordinary citizens react to the actions of leaders in a variety of ways · Acceptance at times of the official interpretations of reality · Offering alternative renditions of reality · Putting official agendas to unintended uses, reinterpreting symbols to demand political rights, for example. o In Cleveland, two factors altered political framework that had supported the first state of commemoration: WWI and massive immigration § "The patriotic mobilization of World War II diminished the power of ethnic interests in public commemoration." § Promotion of patriotism · Elaborate dedication ceremonies suggest interests in: patriotism, entertainment, civic order, antiradicalism, and local pride. o "The patriotic mobilizations of World War II and the early Cold War added political weight to the official dimensions of commemoration and severely weakened vernacular ones during the 1940s and 1950s. By the late 1960s, however, the contest between official and vernacular memory was weakened by a decline in political exchanges overall. In fact, the assertion of patriotic and ethnic memory appeared only episodically. The assortment of commemorative programs in 1976 suggested that official interpretations of the past could compete with but not dominate vernacular interests such as celebrations of ethnic or racial pride. It was this overall decline in the cultural power of official symbols after the 1960s that would help to ex plain the powerful emergence of vernacular interests in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial itself" § Chapter 5: Museums in Iraq · Considering the relationship between the museum and the state. o "Under the Iraqi Ba'th, the museum remains, at its most basic level, a form of social control. Whether relating to "high culture" in the form of the Iraqi Museum or the 'Abbasid Museum, or "low culture" in the form of the Costume and Folklore Museum or the House of Popular Culture, the regime has used the representation of the past to diffuse very well-defined ideological messages to the populace at large. These messages are that Iraqis are hewn from a similar cast and that any expression of cultural difference that challenges the regime's power in any way will not be tolerated. While the past is glorified, it is simultaneously denigrated. Aspects of Iraqi culture contained in museums are to be praised and perhaps even trotted out for certain rituals and national holidays. However, by being placed in the museum, they are deemed no longer appropriate for everyday life. Those who persist in adhering to culture as represented in the museum, especially elements of tribal or religious culture that can be mobilized symbolically by oppositional groups, oppose the progress of the nation toward greater technological development and modernity. They are thus enemies of the state. In this manner, traditional sectors of the shic i, Kurdish, and even sunni communities, as well as other minorities, the left, and the poor, find themselves marginalized and outside the economic and political mainstream unless they submit to the culturally hegemonic dictates of the state" § Chapter 6: invented tradition and collective memory in Israel · Concept of "historical legend," which attempts to mediate between history and legend. It's a blurry distinction. Noting the impact that fiction has on the construction of history. When history provides the stiff from which legends are made, the historical narrative can adopt the familiar structure of legendary tales and use it for enhancing its rhetorical impact. § Chapter 7: Kirk Savage's Black emancipation and the civil war monument · The standing figure and the kneeling slave o Shaw memorial, pg. 136 § Immediately no sure who the monument is for: Shaw if we read the front of the monument, the regiment if we read the back of the monument. it has distributive commemorative focuses all in one coherent piece. § Originally the sculptor wanted a more conventional, hierarchical treatment like Mercie's Lee—a freestanding equestrian statue of Shaw raised on a pedestal that could be decorated with low-relief panels of soldiers. Shaw's family vetoed this idea. § Portrays black "rank and file" and felt a sense · "Eventually Saint-Gaudens devised an ingenious synthesis of statue and pedestal in one huge panel in high relief showing the commander on horseback marching next to his troops on foot, all arranged rigorously parallel to the relief plane and therefore seen in profile. The figure of Shaw retains the formal preeminence Saint-Gaudens wanted, positioned at the center and in highest relief, without leading the march or guiding the narrative. The exceptional and much-observed rhythm of the march—created formally by organizing a jumble of overlapping packs, canteens, guns, legs, and faces into legible repeating patterns that nevertheless defy geometric regularity—manages to control the scene to such an extent that it begins to overcome the formal interruption of the horse and rider. The equestrian neither overpowers nor collapses into the file of troops behind. There is a tension between the foreground and the back ground that is never quite resolved, a tension that inevitably takes on a racial charge because it springs from the competing claims to memory of the officer and the troop" § So, opposing readings of commemorative intent is facilitated by the monument. § Chapter 8: memory and naming in the great war · "the names and headstones are like shadows of the dead, standing in one-to-one correspondence with the fallen, representing them to the living in their ungraspable quantitative specificity. They are like the army of the living, both democratic and individual in their singularity, mere numbers in their aggregate. But their precise meaning was neither defined nor definable. Each of the living was free to remember as he or she chose. As with the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, the sources of modern memory in World War I derive their meaning from their intrinsic lack of it and bear testimony to their own artifice" § Chapter 9: American commemoration of the first world war · Examines how political and military leaders in the US joined their European counterparts in seeking to nationalize the war dead in creating an official memory of this conflict. o American leaders looked to make the war dead a central symbol of a national identity divorced from the often divisive ties of class, ethnicity, religion, and religion. They wanted the commemoration of the fallen to exemplify the willingness of males to serve and die for their country. § "At the same time, American national leaders envisioned creating a series of cemeteries and memorials in Europe that would reflect the power and prestige of the United States, which had been greatly enhanced during the conflict. Since it delayed entering the war until 1917, the United States was spared the enormous casualty rolls that had afflicted the other combat ants. American economic and military power had proven decisive in defeating Germany. In the postwar era, a bankrupt Europe owed billions to the American government and private bankers. Efforts to press the war dead into further national service required the consent or at least the compliance of their parents and widows. As this essay will show, many parents and widows in the United States refused to make an additional sacrifice to the nation and demanded the return of their loved ones for burial in their local communities. In effect, many Americans rejected a vision of nationalism that saw individuals as servants of the state. Moreover, the opposition to maintaining American cemeteries in Europe mirrored the ambivalence of the United States toward Europe. Although President Woodrow Wilson authored the League of Nations, the United States never joined this international organization. During the interwar years, it refused to enter into any formal political or military alliance with Europe" § Chapter 10: Art, Commerce, and the production of memory in France After WWI. Pg. 186 · Local war memorials, overlooked artifacts of public art · Don't have coherent theoretical framework to study these items. To start one begin with a conception of collective memory as a socially constructed discourse. o "as culturally specific beliefs about a historical event merge with individual memories and take on visible and legible form, collective memory emerges as a construct of the political, social, and economic structures that condition, if they do not determine, the production of those forms" § "construction of monuments takes place at the conjunction of a variety of discourses and practices: local and national, commercial and artistic, high and low, and, ultimately perhaps, history and memory." · Examine war memorials, focusing on France after the Great War · History of war monuments: o "Although societies since antiquity have erected monuments to their military exploits, historians trace the origins of a new, democratic style of commemoration to the period of the Napoleonic wars, when large citizen armies began to replace mercenary troops. Whereas Roman monuments took the form of arches of triumph, with bas-reliefs celebrating the achievements of rulers or generals, the modern nation-state has felt the need to pay tribute to the ordinary soldiers, whether volunteers or conscripts, who sacrifice their lives in its defense.3 Although various groups and regimes proposed monuments to citizen soldiers from the late eighteenth century on, Maurice Agulhon and June Hargrove have argued that such monuments emerged in France only after the Franco-Prussian War finally re moved the sovereign as a potential focus for commemoration. Besides their democratic spirit, monuments to the mobiles, the volunteer armies of 1870, broke with past traditions in two other ways that would prove durable: their location in soldiers' hometowns and their frequent recourse to the reproduction of standard models." o WWI gave rise to a vast number of monuments! § Not self-evident that even widespread grief should so rapidly—within only a few years of the war's end—find monument relief · What Americans call war memorials the French call monuments aux morts, monument to the dead, and with inscriptions dedicating them to the dead of a particular town, they evoke a community unified in mourning and in tribute. o Noting a dialectic between memory and forgetting, which afford a context at once poignant and revealing for the single most consistent feature of these monuments, their inscription of names. § Chapter 11 Historic preservation and identity in 20th century Germany · Hold a critical perspective on the attempts of any group to create something as elusive as collective identity, and it is skeptical about scholars deployment of analytical categories that deal with such problems in anything more than a provisional way. But don't do away with notions of collective memory, history, and identity, at least not for conducting scholarly research of the 19th and 20th century Western history, the homeland of such concepts. Instead, this chapter insists that historical actors as well as scholars need a more self-consciously reflective language that underscores the subjective nature of their practice, the limits on their understanding, and the nontransferability of such concepts to peoples, times, and places whose central historical experience has included other, less "Western" notions of individual and group identity. § Chapter 12: creatin the authentic France: struggles over French identity in the first half to eh 20th century. § Chapter 13: Between memory and oblivion: Concentration Camps in German Memory · Nazi atrocities must remain at the core of a shared public memory, even as we confront the complex heritage that shapes out post-war world. To accomplish this, the camp memorials must both commemorate the Soviet role in the Allied liberation of the camps and recognize that some Germans died unjustly in the "special camps." The enduring legacy of the camps, however, must be to serve as warnings against all forms of political terror and racial hatred.

1) Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory

o Describes memory in relation to matter—"memory...is just the intersection of mind and matter. § Bergson broke from neo-Kantian tradition that was dominant in his day. His first book were the elementary forms of consciousness, which developed into Matter and memory. · Argues in this book that we missed the boat to talk about time because we are always spatializing it, breaking it into countable units - which is as misrepresentation of time and the experience of time. He then provides us with this new idea of duration, through groping with this point. And the way he articulates this, he is still concerned with the problem of mental representation., but really how we experience time as beings in the world - a phenomenological and ontological question. And his answer is that we experience it through duration. He is struggling to find a vocabulary to capture this idea of duration, but there is an idea that at any moment in the present, whenever that might be, that present is always already an outgrowth of the past, and a becoming of the future - not in terms of categorization. This is an essential translation that has endured, undergoing an essential transformation from the first book to the second. In the matter and memory book (2nd book) he more sharply connects duration (what he thinks of it as time) to action. In fact, memory, and body, and action are linked up in the second book. Say in acting in the world we perceive it, in terms of images (not ideas, which is a Kantian way of explaining ideas in the world). It is a sensation still connected to the body - an image. The image in turn is selected for their significance in action depending on the interest of the actor. It is goal directed, the act is leading somewhere, it is not just a substantiation of ideas. The body and movement them become deployed. Asks, how do you select those images that will motivate you through the world? It is the rotating of the cone of memory in such a way that the images seem to line up well with the act and the goal, and the images become the salient problem of memory in action. Not questioning materiality or ontology but becoming in a way that is hopeful and joyful in the world. An extremely dynamic interpretation of memory in the world. o Chapter 1 § "All seems to take place as if, in this aggregate of images which I call the universe, nothing really new could happen except through the medium of certain particular images, the type of which is furnished me by my body." · Body is the center of action: it receives and return movements; this is to say that if the body is truly an object destined to move other object, it is then a center of action; it cannot give birth to a representation. It is a privileged image, providing for the exercise of choice among possible reactions. The brain is an image. o "How is it that the same images can belong at the same time to two different systems, the one in which each image varies for itself and in the well- defined measure that it is patient of the real action of surrounding images, the other in which all change for a single image, and in the varying measure that hey reflect the eventual action of this privileged image?" · Perception has a wholly speculative interest; it is pure knowledge. Perception means eventual action—intermediate action. Conscious perception is but our power of choice, reflected from things, as though by a mirror. Images are formed and perceived in the object, not in the brain. But an injury to the brain diminishes perception by lessening the appeal to activity. The body is not a mathematical point in space. Its virtual actions are complicated by and impregnated with real actions. · Affection is thought to be entirely unextended. · Perception is less objective in fact than in theory because it includes a share of memory. Pure perception and pure memory constantly intermingle. "These two acts, perception and recollection, always interpenetrate each other, are always exchanging something of their sub- stance as by a process of endosmosis." o "Hence the capital importance of the problem of memory. If it is memory above all that lends to perception its subjective character, the philosophy of matter must aim in the first instance, we said, at eliminating the contributions of memory."

1) Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will

o Describes, with numerous references to Kant, just how we are forced by language to establish between our ideas the same sharp and precise distinction, the same discontinuity, as between material object, because the words we use and think with are in terms of "space." § This gestures to the problem of free will o Consider the following: § Can there be quantitative difference in conscious states · Consider joy and sorrow à we divide the day into intervals which separate successive forms of joy/sorrow, which gradually transition from one to the other and makes them appear in their turn as different intensities of one and the same feeling, which is thus supposed to change in magnitude o The emotions of joy and sorrow. Their successive stages correspond to qualitative changes in the whole of our psychic states · Consider music, rhythm and measure suspend the normal flow of our sensations and ides by cause in our attention to swing between fixed points, and they take hold of us with such for that even the faintest imitation of a groan will suffice to fill us with the utmost sadness/joy o "We find in architecture, in the very midst of this startling immobility, certain effects analogous to those of rhythm. The symmetry of form, the indefinite repetition of the same architectural motive, causes our faculty of perception to oscillate between the same and the same again, and gets rid of those customary incessant changes which in ordinary life bring us back without ceasing to the consciousness of our personality even the faint suggestion of an idea will then be enough to make the idea fill the whole of our mind." § The feeling of beauty: art puts to sleep our active and resistant powers and makes us responsive to suggestion § Such differences applicable to magnitudes but not to intensities § Alleged distinction between 2 kings of quantity: extensive and intensive magnitude. § Attempt to distinguish intensities by objective causes. But we judge of intensity without knowing magnitude or nature of the cause § Attempt to distinguish intensities by atomic movements, but it is the sensation which is given consciousness and not the movement § Different kinds of intensities · 1) deep-seated psychic states · 2) muscular effort o Intensity is more easily definable in the former case § Conscious states connected with external causes or involving physical symptoms § Muscular effort seems at first sight to be quantitative § The feeling of effort. We are conscious not of an expenditure of force but of the resulting muscular movement. Intensity of feeling or effort proportional to extent of our body affected · Consciousness of increase of muscular effort consists in the perception of a great number of peripheral sensation and a qualitative change in some of them § The intensity of violent emotions as muscular tension § No difference between intensity of deep seated feeling and that of violent emotions. Magnitude of sensations. Affective and representative sensations. · Pleasure and pain as signs of the future reaction rather than psychic translations of the past stimulus. Intensity of affective sensations would then be our consciousness of involuntary movements tending to follow the stimulus

1) Paul Connerton, The Spirit of Mourning

o How is the memory of traumatic events, such as genocide and torture, inscribed within human bodies? In this text, Connerton discusses social and cultural memory by looking at the role of mourning in the production of histories and the reticence of silence across many different cultures. He looks at how memory is conveyed in gesture, bodily posture, speech and the sense—how bodily memory, in turn, becomes manifested in cultural objects such as tattoos, letters, buildings, and public spaces. Argues that memory is more cultural and collective than it is individual. § Chapters 1-3 · 1: recount dark times of genocide, world war, and totalitarian regimes that characterized the last century and whose shadows reach deeply into the present, while it also contains substantial forays into earlier history o It is above all the opening of state archives that made history the memory, and so the legitimation, of the state. This happened in the nineteenth century (pg. 2). Before this time, those who wrote history of their own ages had for hundreds of years produced the original narrative which their successors were for a long time happy to copy in broad outline: in this way they produced for their own lifetime legitimating histories which later generations of historical writers would adhere to, handing on in their turn the legitimating narrations which they had themselves received. Law and religion, between them, furnished the foundation on which could be grounded nearly all forms of authority. Adam Smith believed that the crucial difference between ancient historiography and modern historiography lay in the fact that the latter, unlike the former, reconstituted past states of authority and constructed narratives around them with the intention of substantiating contested claims to authority in the present. § Legitimation thesis: o claim that histories legitimate a contemporary order of political and social power · Proponents of this thesis include Foucault § Often intertwined with legitimation and mourning and have acknowledged the existence of real or symbolic wounds in narrative of the past. Concluding, then, that the legitimation thesis remains persuasive only in so far as it can co-exist with an acknowledgement that many histories are generated also by a sense of loss, grief, and mourning. · The claim that histories legitimate a contemporary order of political and social power is a persuasive one. But is suffers from at least one significant deficiency. It is blind to the birth of histories from the spirit of mourning. · 2: on the topic of forgetting, argues that there are at least seven ways to forget, three of which are constructive and even necessary, while four are forced upon human beings again their will or interest · The three constructive forgettings o 1) prescriptive: § This is precipitated by an act of state and is believed to be in the interests of all the parties to the previous dispute; it can therefore be acknowledged publicly. Its aim is to prevent a chain of retribution for earlier acts from running one endlessly. aim is thus to prevent a chain of retribution for earlier acts from running on endlessly. o 2) constitutive in the formation of a new identity: § When a new identity is in process of formation some of these older narratives may fall into abeyance. The forgetting which is entailed in the formation of a new identity is not so much the loss involved in being unable to retain certain things as rather the gain that accrues to those who know how to discard memories that serve no practical purpose in the management of one's current identity and ongoing purposes. Forgetting then becomes part of the process by which newly shared memories are constructed because an new set of memories is frequently accompanied by a set of tacitly shared/patterned silences. o 3) annulment: § response to a surfeit of information. Paradoxically we live in a throwaway society and in one where memory is archival. No epoch has deliberately produced so many archives as ours, with our museums, libraries, depositories, and centers of documentation. Old stories slowly become effaced. There are a number of reasons for this change, but one at least may be the wish to circumvent the problems of informational overload which flow from a sheer excess of knowledge. · The four forced forgettings o 4) repressive erasure: § Most brutally occurs following the history of totalitarian regimes, where the struggle of man against power it's the struggle of memory against forgetting. Paradoxically, the explicit purpose of casting the memory of a person into oblivion has the effect of drawing attention to them, as so of causing them to be remembered. The requirement to forget ends in reinforcing memory, having the effect not of destroying memory but of dishonoring it. It can be employed to deny the fact of a historical rupture as well as to bring about historical break. · It can also be encrypted covertly and without apparent violence o 5) structural amnesia: § a person tends to remember only those links in his or her pedigree that are socially important. o 6) planned obsolescence: § It is built into the capitalist system of consumption; given the limits to the turnover time of material goods, capitalist have turned their attention form the production of goods to the production of services. Because of this shift, the turnover time of capital is accelerated. The evolution of a product from its first design and development to its eventual obsolescence—a time span referred to in marketing as the 'product life cycle' becomes shorter. Vital to this production of obsolescence, forgetting is an essential ingredient in the operation of the market. o 7) humiliated silence: § manifest in a widespread pattern of behavior in civil society, and it is covert, unmarked, and unacknowledged, a matter of covert activity on the part of a state apparatus. · "perhaps it is paradoxical to speak of such a condition as evidence for a form of forgetting because occasions of humiliation. Yet few things are more eloquent than a massive silence. And in the collusive silence brought on by a particular kind of collective shame there is detectable both a desire to forget and sometimes the actual effect of forgetting.

3) Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History"

o Important Quotes: § "To see how this particular synthesis came apart under the pressure of a new secularizing force would be to show how, during the crisis of the 1930s in France, the coupling of state and nation was gradually replaced by the coupling of state and society-and how, at the same time and for the same reasons, history was transformed, spectacularly, from the tradition of memory it had become into the self-knowledge of society. As such, history was able to highlight many kinds of memory, even turn itself into a laboratory of past mentalities; but in disclaiming its national identity, it also abandoned its claim to bearing coherent meaning and consequently lost its pedagogical authority to transmit values. The definition of the nation was no longer the issue, and peace, prosperity, and the reduction of its power have since accomplished the rest. With the advent of society in place of the nation, legitimation by the past and therefore by history yields to legitimation by the future. One can only acknowledge and venerate the past and serve the nation; the future, however, can be prepared for: thus the three terms regain their autonomy. No longer a cause, the nation has become a given; history is now a social science, memory a purely private phenomenon. The memory-nation was thus the last incarnation of the unification of memory and history." § "What we call memory today is therefore not memory but already his- tory. What we take to be flare-ups of memory are in fact its final consumption in the flames of history. The quest for memory is the search for one's history. § Of course, we still cannot do without the word, but we should be aware of the difference between true memory, which has taken refuge in gestures and habits, in skills passed down by unspoken traditions, in the body's inherent self- knowledge, in unstudied reflexes and ingrained memories, and memory trans- formed by its passage through history, which is nearly the opposite: voluntary and deliberate, experienced as a duty, no longer spontaneous; psychological, individual, and subjective; but never social, collective, or all encompassing. How did we move from the first memory, which is immediate, to the second, which is indirect? We may approach the question of this contemporary metamorphosis from the perspective of its outcome." § "What we call memory today is therefore not memory but already his- tory. What we take to be flare-ups of memory are in fact its final consumption in the flames of history. The quest for memory is the search for one's history. Of course, we still cannot do without the word, but we should be aware of the difference between true memory, which has taken refuge in gestures and habits, in skills passed down by unspoken traditions, in the body's inherent self- knowledge, in unstudied reflexes and ingrained memories, and memory trans- formed by its passage through history, which is nearly the opposite: voluntary and deliberate, experienced as a duty, no longer spontaneous; psychological, individual, and subjective; but never social, collective, or all encompassing. How did we move from the first memory, which is immediate, to the second, which is indirect? We may approach the question of this contemporary metamorphosis from the perspective of its outcome." · Modern memory is, above all, archival. Archives are like prosthesis-memory § "it is memory that dictates while history writes;" § "Memory attaches itself to sites, whereas history attaches itself to events." § "Contrary to historical objects, however, lieux de memoire have no referent in reality; or, rather, they are their own referent: pure, exclusively self-referential signs. This is not to say that they are without content, physical presence, or his- tory; it is to suggest that what makes them lieux de memoire is precisely that by which they escape from history. In this sense, the lieu de mémoire is double: a site of excess closed upon itself, concentrated in its own name, but also forever open to the full range of its possible significations."

1) Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Religion as a Chain of Memory

o Uses memory to confront the sociological definition of religion, looking for a constructive way out of the ongoing, and increasingly fruitless, confrontation between relatively narrow, substantive definitions of religion and more inclusive (but difficult to limit) functional approaches § The chain which makes the individual believer a member of a community, a community which gathers past, present and future members, and the tradition (or collective memory) which becomes the basis of that community's existence. Hervieu-Léger goes on to argue that modern societies (and especially modern European societies) are less religious not because they are increasingly rational, but because they are less and less capable of maintaining the memory which lies at the heart of their religious existence. They are amnesic societies. § She argued in an earlier book that modern societies are by their veery nature corrosive of the traditional forms of religious life and exemplifies this argument with the kind of data commonly presented in support of the secularization thesis, notably the fall in the hard indicators of religious activity. This is not all thought. Modern societies may well corrode their traditional religious base; at one and the same time, however, the same societies open up spaces or sectors that only religion can fill. o Defines religion as a specific mode of believing o Introduction: § Question of the transformation of religion—surviving as private option for peoples— under the impact of modernity tended to merge into that of the gradual dissolution of different religious traditions in the societies and cultures which they had helped to model but in which they could no longer reasonably hope to play an active or significant role. · Principal question for sociology of religion is how modernity continually undermines the plausibility structures of all religious systems and that by which it gives rise to new forms of religious belief o In the text · Religion as the subject matter of sociological investigation, treated as a social phenomenon and explain in terms of other social phenomena = sociology of religion § Durkheim notes precedence for the decline of religion in modern societies—the Church's loss of temporal power, its separation from the state, the restriction of religious groups to the voluntary sector, the inability of these same groups to make the civil authorities enforce their moral teaching, and, more generally, their inability to regulate the lives of individuals, the disaffection felt towards them by the intelligentsia and their failure to produce their own intellectual elite, and so on. § Marxist view of the withering away of religion as a function of the realization of a communist society, at the same time postponing tis extinction to the end of time, and the view of Durkheim whereby in the religion of mankind the social necessity of faith is maintained in spite of the triumph of science—both views, in totally different, event contradictory, ways recognized the impossibility of treating the rationalist hypothesis of the end of religion in sociological terms—the first, to a certain degree, against its own presuppositions; the second, explicitly and according to the logic of the definition given of religion as the very expression of society. · Trouble of defining religion o "religion in itself is not an empirical observable reality. All we can grasp are expressions and carriers: gesture, word, text, edifice, institution, assembly, ceremony, belief, place, time, person, group—anything may designate it, but it is not to be pinned down. Religion is by nature a composite, inseparable from the design that animates it, not uniformly stable; when it is broken down, only the objectifiable element remains the own that manifested it." o Argument § Consider the problem of how to distinguish religion from other systems of meaning in modern Western society. · Crucial point is the chain of memory and tradition which makes the individual deliver a member of the community. From this point of view, religion is the ideological, symbolic, and social device which individual and collective awareness of belonging to a lineage of believers is created and controlled. Modern societies are not more rational than past societies, but rather suffer from a kind of collective amnesia. They are less and less capable of maintaining a living collective 'chain' of memory as a source of meaning. However, as major religious traditions decline, a range of surrogate memories appears, which also permit the contraction of collective identities. These 'small memories' are creating an upsurge of 'emotional communities' and the affirmation of ethno-religions within Europe and elsewhere.

3) Paul Connerton, The Spirit of Mourning

· 6: looks at tattoos, scarifications, and the use of masks as these arise across multitude of cultural settings, seeking to demonstrate that these arise across a multitude of cultural settings, seeking to demonstrate that these skin signs are not merely decorative, but highly expressive of certain cultural interest and values they literally embody, on the surface of the skin, matters that are normally considered to exist at the level of institutions, governments, and family genealogies o Distinguishes between makes of honor and marks of shame. As memory codes, tattoos obey the same principles as the loci memoriae of which Cicero and Quintilian speak, the difference being that the places of the latter are found upon sone whereas those of the former are found upon flesh. Moreover, They are political loci. Condillac and Rousseau argued that the coming of graphism accompanied the institutions of political and pedagogic power; it has been persuasively argued that Marquesan tattoos are signs that 'multiplied vision and knowledge,' and that they are part of the technology for the creation of political subjects and so far, the reproduction of political relations. · 7: in light of thesis about bodily actions, traces into the realm of the habitats that surround the human subject: buildings and public spaces, as well as natural environments. Argues that these are not, as is too often assumed, simply prior in status but can be considered as projects of bodily states and attributes in three major forms: empathic, mimetic, and cosmic. o Empathic: § In empathic projection, spectators identify with pars of a building or with areas of unbuilt terrain by projecting onto them an experience of aspect of their own bodily stats. Buildings or other topographical features are conceived as an amplification of the body's experience, as opportunities for the trans-position of our interior states onto inanimate forms. o Mimetic: § Whereas the mnemonic function of empathic projection is implicit, the mnemonic function of mimetic projection is explicit. For the mimetic mode, unlike the empathic, is a projection not of bodily states but of bodily attributes. In mimetic projection, the human body and its parts provide an overt system of reference, a set of organizational terms for what is not the body; the image and organization of the human body provide a set of coordinates for thinking about their articulated wholes, a system of spatially distributed attributes which can be transferred to other spatial distinctions. o Cosmic: § In passing from empathic and mimetic to cosmic projection, we pass from one type of memory to another: from the implicit workings of habitual bodily memories and the explicit workings of mimetic bodily memories to the explicit organization of cognitive memories · Cosmic projection operates as a memory schema not by producing a narrative of past events which can be stored and so retrieved by association with particular places, but by taking the elements of nature as the leitmotif for encoding the experience of place, for a mode of cognitive mapping. § In speaking of empathic, mimetic, and cosmic projection, I have sought to highlight the significance for cultural memory of the affective investment in life-spaces. But, as I indicated earlier, the distinction between empathic, mimetic, and cosmic projection was not intended to suggest the existence of mutually exclusive categories, but rather to signal where in any particular instance, the priority lay. o Empathic and cosmic projection may be viewed as situated at two opposite ends of a continuum. In empathic projection, topographical features are conceived, not as the site of a basic assimilative oneness, but as an amplification of the body's experience, as opportunities for the transposition of our interior states onto the inanimate. In empathic projection, the existence of an inanimate sphere is presupposed; in cosmic projection, the existence of an inanimate sphere is unthinkable.

2) Andrew Valls, "Justice, Acknowledgement, and Collective Memory"

· Consider Rawls in contemporary liberal theory o "In contemporary liberal theory, the importance of equal respect is exhibited in John Rawls's affirmation that "perhaps the most important primary good is that of self-respect" (Rawls 1999, 386). Although Rawls focuses on self-respect, he believes that the basic structure of society and the political regime have a great deal to do with whether individuals have self-respect and are accorded respect by others. While of course self-respect cannot be distributed (equally or otherwise) in a straightforward way, social and political institutions can publicly convey the equal status and worth of all citizens, and thereby provide what Rawls calls "the social basis of self-respect" (see generally Doppelt 2009; Eyal 2005; Thomas 1977-78). o Rawls, operating within ideal theory, focuses on the features of the basic structure of society, as regulated by his principles of justice, to provide the social basis of self-respect. Indeed, he thinks that his theory's capacity to underwrite this important good is a significant argument in its favor. But of course, in the context of a history of injustice, where that injustice was (p.47) often justified by denying the equal status of members of a subordinated group, the generic equality of basic liberties is insufficient to provide the social basis of self- (and other-) respect. Justice requires that those whose equal status has been systematically denied should be reassured that the present political regime is committed to it. This is important not only for members of the oppressed group, but also for all members of society, especially those who harbor nostalgia for the prior order or who merely retain attitudes and beliefs associated with that order." § "in the context of a history of denial of equal citizenship, particularized means of publicly conveying the equal status of all is required so that all citizens know, and are assured of, their equal status. It is not enough for the policies to change; what is needed is specific expressions of assurance by the state. In the absence of assurance, and, even worse, the presence of state symbolic expressions that send the opposite message, members of the historically oppressed group may reasonably believe that the political regime is not committed to their equal status. Under nonideal conditions, then, affirming the equal status of all citizens requires affirmative expressions to counter the historically dominant narrative of unequal status and subordination. This, in turn, requires the past to be acknowledged and remembered, which points to the importance of collective memory. In recent years a number of philosophers and political theorists have explored the moral requirement to remember and the importance of memory in the wake of past injustice." · "The demand that past injustices be forgotten does not address this loss of self-esteem. Indeed, it inflicts further damage. . . Proper remembrance alone restores dignity and self- respect to the victim." § Justice requires certain kinds of state expression, and prohibits others. · "I agree with Corey Brettschneider (2012) that a liberal, democratic state may and should endorse the view that citizens are free and equal. It should promote this view, and should attempt to persuade all citizens to it, especially those who hold incompatible views. Some observers see a danger in the state performing this role. For example, Ruti Teitel (2000, chap. 3) worries that a state's attempt to establish an "official" truth about the past (p.49) may have illiberal consequences. It may quash alternative interpretations or perspectives. Yet the state may, through memorialization, endorse a view of the past, and still leave plenty of room for differing interpretations. And even while it rejects views of that past that, say, glamorize those who defended racial hierarchy, it need not violate the rights of those who hold those views. The state can and should try to persuade citizens that such views are wrong without prohibiting them from being expressed." o truth commission: § officially sanctioned temporary institutions that focus on a pattern of abuses in the past and submit a report at the end of their investigation. § Idea is that after a period of systematic abuses, merely ceasing the harms is not enough. Justice requires an explicit confrontation with the past, and truth commissions provide a process through which this can be done. · Expose and acknowledge the past, promote reconciliation, and reduce the number of lies that can be circulated unchallenged by public discourse o The most popular is South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) o "Even today, African Americans and whites have markedly different understandings of the past, with the former being well aware of its impact on the present, while the latter, by and large, have factually inaccurate beliefs about the past and present regarding issues of race. Building support for remedies to address the legacies of our racist past, McCarthy suggests, requires "a serious upgrading of public memory to provide the necessary background for public justification of a historical sort. From this perspective, then, there is a political need for historical enlightenment." § US need public confrontation with its racist past to end distortion of public debate on racial issues · Since there has been too little public acknowledgement of the past and only halfhearted as best commitment to undo its legacies, African America can reasonably conclude that the conditions for a just reconciliation have not been created, and at the same time, whites may wrongly feel entitled to their privileged position. o There are commission-like institutions that have already contributed - hearing of the Civil Rights Commission and of administrative agencies and congressional committees may be thought of as playing roles akin to truth commissions. o Apology: § "it acknowledges that certain events took place; the apologizer accepts responsibility for his or her actions and expresses regret about them" § Appropriate when one apologizes for actions one has actually performed or failed to perform—not on behalf of those from prior generations · Perhaps greater emphasis should be placed on acknowledgement than apologies. Do apologies actually lead to moral repair? Perhaps! o Civil Rights Memorials and Museums § In a regime transition, or a post conflict context, memorials and museums can play an important role in publicly establishing a historical record. · Truth commission and apologies are limited by time; monuments, memorials, and museums are ongoing and have long been means by which collective memory is created and with it (sometimes) a shared national identity. o They can honor victims and create heroes, endorse values and norms and condemn others, play an important and public role in symbolically rejecting the wrongs of the past and affirming the equal dignity § Blacks were historically ignored in most American memorials. Now, with civil rights memorials, they are more popular. But, there is a troubling narrative: a triumphalist one: Jim Crow defeated, racial equality achieved. It's a sanitized past.

1) Jay Winter, Remembering War

o Book offers and interpretation of the "memory boom" of the twentieth century—the efflorescence of interest in the subject of memory inside the academy and beyond it—in terms of a wide array of collective meditation on war and on the victims of war. And it argues for the need to attend to, to acknowledge the victims of war and the ravages it causes as at the heart of the memory boom in contemporary cultural life. § The images, languages, and practices which appeared during and in the aftermath of the Great War shaped the ways in which future conflicts were imagined and remembered. For this reason, the book refers to the survivors of the Great War as the first (though not the last) "generation of memory" in the twentieth century. § The Second World War and the Holocaust drew upon and transformed the iconographic and programmatic character of remembrance in striking and enduring ways. · Urges, alongside Emanuel Sivan, to shift from the term "memory" to the term "remembrance" as a strategy to avoid trivialization of the term "memory" through inclusion of any and every facet of out contact with the past, personal, or collective." To privilege "remembrance" is to insist on specifying agency, on answer the question who remembers, when, where , and how? And on being aware of the transience of remembrance so dependent on the frailties and commitments of the men and women who take the time and effort to engage in it. o Individual memory is more process than product · Collective memory o "Most of the time, collective memory—a term the cavalier use of which I criticize in this book—is not the memory of large groups. States do not remember; individuals do, in association with other people. If the term ''collective memory'' has any meaning at all, it is the process through which different collectives, from groups of two to groups in their thousands, engage in acts of remembrance together. When such people lose interest, or time, or for any other reason cease to act; when they move away, or die, then the collective dissolves, and so do collective acts of remembrance. This is what Maurice Halbwachs meant when he wrote his seminal work on Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire in 1925" § Prefers collective remembrance: it points to time and place and above all, to evidence, to traces enabling us to understand what groups of people try to do when they act in public to conjure up the past. · History vs. Memory o History is a profession with rules about evidence, about publication, about peer review. Memory is a process distinct from history, though not isolated from it. All historians leave traces in their work of their own past, their own memories. And many laymen and women who engage in acts of remembrance read history and care about it. Sometimes they reshape their own memories to fit with history; at other times, they are certain that they have the story right, and historians who say otherwise—whatever the evidence they produce—are wrong. History and memory overlap, infuse each other, and create vigorous and occasionally fruitful incompatibilities. In this book I take the writing and teaching of history to be an act of collective remembrance, of a different order than other such acts, because of the rules which govern it. History is not simply memory with footnotes; and memory is not simply history without footnotes. In virtually all acts of remembrance, history and memory are braided together in the public domain, jointly informing our shifting and contested understandings of the past. · Witnesses and the Victims of War o "The subject of war has dominated the memory boom for a host of reasons. It is not just the injuries of war, but its drama, its earthquake-like character, which has fueled the memory boom. The story of war has been narrated by a host of institutions and media whose audiences have never been larger nor more varied. War museums attract very large populations in France, Britain, Australia, and elsewhere. Television series on war have reached millions. Internet sites abound. So have biographies and other publications on war, many written by authors outside the academy. In this part of the memory boom, as in all others, historians are fellow travelers and not pacesetters. Narratives of war have changed during the memory boom itself in ways which help to account for its spread. It is no longer the generals and admirals, or even soldiers and sailors, who dominate the story of war. It is the victims, more and more of whom have been civilians. If initially the memory boom focused on serving or fallen men, it no longer does. Women are now at the heart of acts of remembrance because war has moved out of the battlefield and into every corner of civilian life. War brings family history and world history together in long-lasting and frequently devastating ways. That is why women as well as men now construct the story, disseminate it, and consume it. Women join men in forming a new class of historical actors—what we now term ''witnesses,'' people who were there, people who have seen war at close range, people whose memories are part of the historical record. Their testimony documents crimes they have seen, but their stories and their telling of them in public are historical events in their own right." o Witnesses were there before war crimes trials gave them a chance to tell their story, but the proliferation of such tribunals since the Second World War has legitimated them. Together with prosecutors and judges, they have created a new theater of historical remembrance—the tribunal. The proceedings have gone beyond the framework of military justice, through which soldiers continue to be prosecuted for violating regulations or the laws of war. § "Not only have innovations been made in the form in which such trials have taken place, but in some cases—the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission for instance—testimony by perpetrators of crimes has absolved them from the penalties those crimes would have incurred in a court of law. In a literal sense derived from religious traditions, the truth has set them free. Memory, if honestly recalled in public, has been defined in this special case as the path to repentance, to reconciliation, and perhaps even to forgiveness." · "Even more than the perpetrators, the victims needed to find a kind of solace, a way to live with their memories. It is for this reason that there is a very broad and varied therapeutic community at work today in the field of memory. Psychological and psychiatric practices and cultures have many sources, but one in particular is related to the memory of war. Many of the witnesses, victims of war and repression, bear traces of their injuries in subliminal ways. Some psychologists and cultural workers refer to these wounds as ''traumatic memory.'' In the Great War, army physicians termed such disabilities ''shell shock''; their successors in the 1939-45 war termed them ''combat fatigue.'' After the Vietnam war, the syndrome was officially recognized as post-traumatic stress disorder. The population affected by these injuries has grown: first it was frontline troops under artillery bombardment, then it included anyone in combat; then it reached anyone afflicted by traumatic events of a life-threatening kind, whether or not they were soldiers" o They have involuntary historical remembrance that is triggered by trivial things that bring about memories of horrors.

1) Daniel Levy, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age

o Brings the study of collective memory into the era of globalization. Can we imagine a "cosmopolitan" memory that not only fosters supranational political identities, they ask, but that does so in open, non-exclusionary ways? It is an Andersonian project, analyzing the imagining of community in a context where supranational entities like the European Union are chipping away at state sovereignty. The text argues compellingly that collective memory remains key to the articulation of political identity in this new context. The emerging global community in the West is indeed a community of memory. In contrast to the past invoked to support nationalist claims, however, today's remembrance is done not in the heroic mode but the penitential. § "Since the end of the Cold War, the Holocaust has become the new founding moment for Europe," the abyss from which its post-nationalist politics emerge. Remembrance of "the fanatic attempt by ethnonationalist Germany to eliminate transnational Jewish cultures" becomes the ground for an increasingly transnational society to curtail national sovereignty in the name of human rights. · Tracs holocaust memory from 1940s through the 1990s in Germany, Israel and the US. The national memories borne by the perpetrators, victims, and witnesses have increasingly been transformed by what Levy and Sznaider call "cosmopolitan memory." This de-territorialized remembrance does not supplant national memories but interacts with them in a process of "globalization." Whereas national memories had been torn between a vision of the Holocaust as a particular tragedy of Jewish victims and German perpetrators or a universal tragedy of humanity or of modernity or of nationalism, cosmopolitan memory transcends the dichotomy. Personalization of the Holocaust through mass media representations fosters an identification with the victim that helps people generalize from the particular case to other situations deemed "analogous." The universal is perceived through the particular, not in place of it. Evidence for the potency of such memories is found in NATO's military intervention in Kosovo, justified in terms of the "lessons of the Holocaust." § -Faulkner "The past is not dead. It is not even past" · Sums up collective memory studies: that groups are constituted by what and how they remember, that contemporary identities and representations of the past are mutually informing—observations developed primarily through examinations of nationalism. o Failure to cover things like 9/11 and its aftermath, the Iraq War and the Genocide in Darfur are notable shortcomings for the text. § What about Holocaust memory in the Islamic world? · For factions seeking to articulate an anti-western discourse, explicit rejection of Holocaust remembrance serves as one important means of accomplishing this. o Rejection of Holocaust memory, including explicit Holocaust denial, has emerged as a potent political force in recent years. It is the mirror image of cosmopolitan memory, rejecting the universal through a rejection of the particular. o My notes: § Globalization causes anxiety because it is steadily dissolving the coordinate we have been using to make sense of experience. We fear that because all human attachments are particular, globalization will standardize and destroy everything in our collective life that is worth having and destroy everything in our collective life that tis worth having · Collective memories persist as a bulwark against encroaching globalization. They are a foundation for stabilizing group and national memories that are linked to a particular place and time. After all, it is a integral component of the fixed national and ethnic sense of identity that people have of themselves. § The book examines the distinctive forms that collective memories take in the age of globalization. The conventional concept of "collective memory" is firmly embedded within what the authors call the 'container of the nation-state.' The book argues that this container is in the process of slowly being cracked. It is commonly assumed that memories, community, and geographical proximity belong together. · Book pursues thoughts on the transition from "national to cosmopolitan memory cultures. Cosmopolitan refers to a process of "internal globalization" through which global concern become part of local "internal globalization' through which global concerns become part of local experiences of an increasing number of people ( Ulrich Beck 2004)." o Cosmopolitanization relates to processes that take place within national societies. The internationalization of globalization takes roots as global concern provide a political and moral frame of reference for local experiences. § Future-oriented memories emerge very slowly and compete continuously with national and ethnic memories. In the process, debates arise about the "right" memories. Who were the perpetrators? Victims? How guilty can and should a country be? How long can a sovereign state define itself in terms of 'victimhood'"?

3) James Young, At Memory's Edge

o Jay Winter's evaluation in his book review: § In The Art Bulletin, Volume 83, 2001—Issue 2 § "The study of memory is one of the most fashionable branches of scholarly inquiry in a wide variety of disciplines. The problem remains, though, that the avalanche of work in this field moves at a speed much greater than the advances registered in the conceptual framework needed to control the subject. Consequently, we have a dazzling array of inquiries into memory, postmemory, counter- memory, traumatic memory, collective memory, collected memory, national memory, testimonial memory, witnessing, repressed memory, distorted memory, underground memory, deep memory, cultural memory, and so on. No pair of these terms can be equated; indeed, there is no consensus at all on even the rudimentary elements out of which some kind of conceptual ordering of memory studies could be built." · "Part of the problem is that those working in history, literature, and art history have little patience for or much familiarity with the literature arising out of research in cognitive psychology and allied disciplines. Some scholars working in the humanities offer the objection that the study of cognitive psychology takes the individual mind as the unit of analysis, and though it is important to know how an individual's memories are encoded and retrieved, our social and cultural lives are never lived in isolation, one person at a time. Facets of social psychology raise further problems. The experiments reported by some psychologists are bound to be limited to particular cultures and social milieus, and the findings of these "objective" studies of configurations of memory suffer from all the defects of positivism. Consider but one example. A recent survey shows that memories of past events are frequently affected by our current situation; in other words, we are bound to paint our individual past as more difficult than it was, since this difficulty puts our current situation in a more favorable light. Perhaps this is true, but can anyone really argue that it is true everywhere? What of the notion of a "golden age"? The same objection has been made to both scientific and cultural configurations of trauma: Is it the case that those undergoing life-threatening violence for an extended period are subject to biochemical or other physical changes in their brains? The state of knowledge of neuro- science makes it unsafe to say yes, and the same can be said for research into the recovery of populations clearly injured by military action. Cultural differences matter to such an extent that we must remain skeptical of the claims of scientists about "memory" as a universal and "trauma" as a physical state shared by victims from Guatemala to the Gulag archipelago" o This can be viewed from a different angle. There is an equal and opposite danger to simply rejecting scientific definition of memory: it is to treat uncritically any and all uses of the term memory as an umbrella term for thinking about the past. We surely can do better than that. Skepticism about science must not lead to apartheid in this area of scholarly work. The best path forward appears to be a kind of tolerant pluralism, in which "memory work" of many kinds goes on with the messiness of an ill- defined but exciting field. To say, "Let a thousand flowers bloom" appears to be both inevitable and judicious, for no discipline can assert proudly that it has found the key to the meaning of "memory." § Believes Young's piece gathers together a series of pieces d'occasion, some drawn from exhibition catalogues, others from personal interventions, to examine the subject of "postmemory," or the response of those artists, writers, and architects who did not have direct experience of the Holocaust but who create sites or objects dealing with it. The general theme of book is the rejection of aesthetic redemption in Holocaust commemoration. Whereas national political leaders, especially but no only in Germany still seek symbols of healing and closure, artist undermine that enterprise. They offer countermonuments," in which the key space consists not in the design or object but the space between the object and the viewer. · Memory then always remains in the eye of the beholder, and the members of each generation must interrogate themselves about what memory is and what they are doing when they gaze at an object or a monument. o Essays on Attie's Libeskind's work are most compelling · The term memory should never be taken as a fixed entity. In this book it functions as a metaphor. For what is not clear—melancholy, nostalgia, the "uncanny," etc. § "In the exploration of "postmemory," cultural studies can profit from cognitive approaches. The notion that memory is plastic, that it reflects current circumstances as well as prior experience, is central to much scientific discussion of the subject. The idea that the brain is a computer with memories stored and retrieved just as they were when first recalled is no longer tenable. We are all in search of ways of approaching this protean subject; neither metaphor alone nor purely mechanistic interpretations take us very far. Working on a broad front, memory studies can be greater than the sum of their parts." · "A good example of what can be done is the collection of essays edited by Elaine Scarry and Daniel Schacter, Memory, Brain, and Belief (Harvard University Press, 1999)"

2) Paul Ricœur, Memory, History, Forgetting

o Let us begin summarizing: § Part 1: · "The putative "duty of memory" (pp. 285, 347) to "not forget" (pp. 30, 90, 413, 418) relegates forgetting to a via negativa, the "reverse side of memory" (p. 443). Ricœur, however, raises the prospect of a "right of forgetting" (p. 92), "a positive meaning" (p. 443) for forgetting that entails the "spirit of forgiveness" (p. 459) and "reconciliation" (p. 495). By reconsidering forgetting, Ricœur (1) moves toward the praxis of forgiveness beyond epistemological reflections, including the phenomenology of memory (pp. 91, 135, 493) and totalizing, Hegelian philosophies of history (pp. 91,159, 291)?and utilitarian ethico-politics (pp. 91, 456), and (2) redresses lacunae in Time and Narrative and Oneself as Another (p. xv)." · It begins with its "common problematic," the "representation of the past" (p. xvii). The paradox of the past—it "is abolished" yet "no one can make it be that [it] should not have been" (pp. 280, 442)?combined with the ever looming "threat" forgetting poses to the duty of memory to represent the past (as) faithfully and exhaustively (as possible) (p. 412), reveals the following enigma in the notion of the eikon used in philosophical accounts of memory: the "entanglement of memory and imagination" (p. 7). In the spirit of Husserlian phenomenology (p. 3), Ricœur critically surveys the traditional philosophical accounts of memory. With impressive range, he reviews Plato's, Aristotle's, Augustine's, Locke's, Kant's, Bergson's, and Husserl's various answers to the questions for example: What distinguishes memory from perception, imagination, recognition, and recollections? What are the distinctions and relations between memory's pairs (for example, mnême and anamnesis, cognitive and pragmatic memory, declarative and habitual memory)? And how does one account for self-identity over time and one's faithful ness to one's past??tied to the aporias of the icon's representing of "an absent something that once happened" (p. 136) o He goes on to specify memory's duty by using intentionally moralizing language of "faithfulness:" "to do justice, through memories, to an other than the self" (p.89), an insight that takes him "beyond a simple phenomenology of memory" (p. 86) § Sections 2 and 3 of part 1, then, confront "the idealist prejudice" in the phenomenology of individual memory with the collective memory of sociology (p. 128). While complimenting the constraints imposed by perceptual/cognitive approaches to "the phenomena of representation" (p. 131), collective (socio-political) memory carries the threat of "thwarted, manipulated memory" (pp. 129, 87). To mediate "between... individual... collective memory" (p. 131), Ricœur suggests in part 2 a critical understanding of history, rejecting facile under standings of history's intention to "represent the past just as it happened" (p. 136) in favor of Michel de Certeau's three-phase "historio graphical" epistemology: testimony/documentary, explanation/understanding, and writing/representation (p. 136) § Part 2 · "History's documentary phase, notes Ricœur, begins with witness testimony (pp. 147, 180). "Discordant testimonies," however, produce a "crisis of belief," the veracity of which historical criticism purports to "reinforce" by putting "competing" testimonies in dialogue (p. 181). Yet, Ricœur claims, the problem of credulity remains after written history. Against the pernicious impunity of the historian's objectivity, which renders dubious "history's own self-awareness" (p. 135), Ricoeur maintains that written history is a narrative, an "icon" (p. 280) that selectively rep resents the past, thereby revealing history's entanglement with "Plato's pharamakon." The case of "history-writing [as] a remedy or poison" remaining open (pp. 135, 145), history "repeats" the aporia that afflicted "the phenomenology of memory" (p. 238). While philosophy must critique and dispense with aspects of history's epistemology, it "cannot abstract from the historical conditions in which the duty of memory is re quired, namely, those of Western Europe . . . after the horrible events of the mid-twentieth century" (p. 86)" § Part 3: · Part 3 advances a provocative thesis based on the paradox of the past, arguing that the "authority" to determine what legitimately "stands for the past" belongs to neither the historian's insistence on faithful representation, nor a particular political body's edict, but to the human historical condition. Developing Bergson's ontology of the past, Ricœur submits that "the positivity of the [past's] 'having been' intended across the negativity of [its] 'being no longer'" enjoys the final authority of "standing in for," representing, the past (pp. 274-80). On the one hand, the past "is abolished"; the equivalent to forgetting occurs with the passing of witnesses and the "destruction of archives, of museums, of cities" (p. 284). On the other hand, "no one can make it be that the past should not have been" (pp. 280, 442); forms of forgetting exists only where "there had been a trace" (p. 284). Ricœur thus argues that the past exists just as unperceived objects in space exist and forgetting positively denotes "the unperceived character of the perseverance of memories [removed] from the vigilance of consciousness" (p. 440). The expired past absent from our grasp "underscores...an anteriority that preserves" and "makes forgetting the immemorial resource offered to the work of remembering" (pp. 432-443). Reinterpreting Heidegger's theory that Dasein's temporality makes it historical and allows it to construct histories, Ricœur founds a positive meaning of forgetting upon this ontology of the past that benefits memory and history rather than leaving it speechless. o Against forced forms of forgetting (for example, amnesty, political edicts) and excessive commemorations (pp. 91, 452-4), the "duty to forget," Ricœur concludes, must not command into oblivion past events and deem them reconciled in the name of "social therapy . . . [and] utility" (p. 456). The "right of forgetting" entails not the citizen's obligation to remember to forget evil, but a "wish in the optative mood to...state [evil] in a pacified mode, without anger" (p. 456). This pacified mode translates into the work of mourning by which the victim may separate agent from act (p. 460) and create space for reconciliation (p. 495) by offering" the gift of "forgiveness" in Derrida's sense (p. 468). · "With this suggestion, the thesis of the work "to which [Ricœur is] most attached" comes into relief: "There . . . exists a reserve of forgetting which can be a resource for memory and for history" (p. 284)."

2) James Young, The Texture of Memory

o Memorials ritualize remembrance and mark the reality of ends. It is a special precinct, extruded from life, a segregated enclave where we honor the dead § In fact, the traditional monument (the tombstone) can also be used as a mourning site for lost loved ones, just as memorials have marked past victories. A statue can be a monument to heroism and a memorial to tragic loss; an obelisk can memorialize a nation's birth and monumentalize leaders fallen before their prime. Insofar as the same object can perform both functions, there may be nothing intrinsic to historical markers that makes them either a monument or a memorial. § There are memorial books, activities, days, festivals, and sculptures. Monuments are a subset of memorials: the material objects, sculptures, and instillations used to memorialize a person or thing. All memory sites are memorial, the plastic objects within these sites are monuments. A memorial may be a day, a conference, or a space, but it need not be a monument. A monument is always a kind of memorial. § Monuments are challenged lately, coming to be regarded as displacements of the memory they were supposed to embody, since the effectively mediate memory, even as they seek to inspire it. And by insisting that its memory was fixed as its place in the landscape, the monument seemed to ignore the essential mutability in all cultural artifacts. · Lewis Mumford: The notion of a modern monument is veritably a contradiction in terms. Says the monument defied the very essent of modern urban civilization: the capacity for renewal and rejuvenation. "stone give a dales sense of continuity, and a deceptive assurance of life." He goes on to declare "that is it usually the shakiest of regimes that installed the least movable monuments, a compensation for having accomplished nothing worthier by which to be remembered." · Martin Broszat: monuments may not remember events so much as bury them altogether beneath layers of national myths and explanations. · Rosalind Krauss: modernist period produces monuments unable to refer to anything beyond themselves as pure marker or base. · Pierre Nora: The less memory is experiences from the inside, the more it exists through its exterior scaffolding and outward signs o "In this age of mass memory production and consumption, in fact, there seems to be an inverse proportion between the memorialization of the past and its contemplation and study. For once we assign monument form to memory, we have to some degree divested ourselves of the obligation to remember. In shouldering the memory work, monument may relieve viewers of their memory burden." § We divorce ourselves from the act of remembering and return when it suits us. As we encourage monuments to do our memory-work for us, we become that much more forgetful. To memorialize may actually spring form an opposite and equal desire to forget them! § By creating common spaces for memory, monuments propagate the illusion of common memory. As in any states' official use of commemorative spaces, this function of monuments is clear most of all to the government s themselves. Though the utopian vision may hold that monuments are unnecessary as reminders when all can remember for themselves, Maurice Halbwachs has argued persuasively that it is primarily through membership in religious, national, or class groups that people are able to acquire and then recall those memories at all. That is, both the reasons for memory and the forms memory takes are always socially mandated, part of a socializing system whereby fellow citizens gain common history through the vicarious memory of their forbears' experiences. If part of the state's aim, therefore, it to create a sense of shared values and ideals, then it will also be the state's aim to create ethe sense of common memory, as foundation for a unified poli. Public memorials, national days of commemoration, and shared calendars thus all work to crate common loci around which national identity is forged. § A monument become as point of refence amid other parts of the landscape, one node among others in a topographical matrix that orients the rememberer and creates meaning in both the land and our recollections. It necessarily transforms an otherwise benign site into part of its content, even as it is absorbed into the site and made part of a larger locale. · American monuments, in particular, are placed often to maximize opportunities for symbolic meaning: the Us Holocaust Memorial museum on the Mall in Washington DC, necessarily resonate to other nearby national monuments...A new Holocaust memorial in Boston, whatever shape it finally takes, will derive further American meaning from its place on the "Freedom Trail."

1) Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember

o Opposite of Halbwachs § "In treating memory as a cultural rather than an individual faculty, this book provides an account of how practices of a non-inscribed kind are transmitted in, and as, traditions. Most studies of memory as a cultural faculty focus on inscribed transmissions of memories. Connerton, on the other hand, concentrates on incorporated practices, and so questions the currently dominant idea that literary texts may be taken as a metaphor for social practices generally. The author argues that images of the past and recollected knowledge of the past are conveyed and sustained by ritual performances and that performative memory is bodily. Bodily social memory is an essential aspect of social memory, but it is an aspect which has up till now been badly neglected." o Considers collective or social memory, in light of the French Revolution, it and focuses on how the memory of groups—"small face-to-face societies (such as villages and clubs) and territorially extensive societies most of whose members cannot know each other personally (such as nation-states and world religions)"—are conveyed and sustained. § Won't address social memory as a dimension of social power, or the unconscious elements in social memory. · It does recognize that he control of a society's memory largely conditions the hierarchy of power o The argument: § Memory as such: our experience of the present very largely depends upon our knowledge of the past—past factors tend to influence, or distort, our experience of the present. § "Thus we may say that our experiences of the present largely depend upon our knowledge of the past, and that our images of the past commonly serve to legitimate a present social order. And yet these points, though true, are as they stand insufficient when thus put. For images of the past and recollected knowledge of the past, I want to argue, are conveyed and sustained by (more or less ritual) performances." · Sustaining and conveying the memory of groups involves bringing together recollection and bodies in a way that might not have thought of doing o "If there is such a thing as social memory, I shall argue, we are likely to find it in commemorative ceremonies; but commemorative ceremonies prove to be commemorative only in so far as they are performative; performativity cannot be thought without a concept of habit; and habit cannot be thought without a notion of bodily automatisms. In this way I shall seek to show that there is an inertia in social structures that is not adequately explained by any of the current orthodoxies of what a social structure is." o Chapter 1: Social Memory § Base our particular experiences on a prior context in order to ensure that they are intelligible at all; that prior to any single experience, our mind is already predisposed with a framework of outlines, of typical shapes of experience objects. § French Revolution: failure of "political theology" · "The existence of past injustice and the continued memory of that injustice raises the question of the rectification of injustices. For if past injustice has shaped the structure of a society's present arrangements for holding property in various ways - or analogously if it is held that past injustice has shaped the structure of a society's arrangements for founding its sovereignty - the question arises as to what now, if anything, ought to be done to rectify these injustices. What kind of criminal blame and what obligations do the performers of past injustice have towards those whose position is worse than it would have been had the injustice not been perpetrated? How far back must you go in taking account of the memory of past injustice, in wiping clean the historical record of illegitimate acts?" § The attempt to establish a beginning refers back inexorably to a pattern of social memories. Noted, historical reconstruction is not dependent on social memory, and it is necessary even when social memory preserved direct testimony of an event. · "Despite this independence from social memory, the practice of historical reconstruction can in important ways receive a guiding impetus from, and can in turn give significant shape to, the memory of social groups. A particularly extreme case of such interaction occurs when a state apparatus is used in a systematic way to deprive its citizens of their memory. All totalitarianisms behave in this way; the mental enslavement of the subjects of a totalitarian regime begins when their memories are taken away. When a large power wants to deprive a small country of its national conscious- ness it uses the method of organised forgetting." o "What is horrifying in totalitarian regimes is not only the violation of human dignity but the fear that there might remain nobody who could ever again properly bear witness to the past. Orwell's evocation of a form of government is acute not least in its apprehension of this state of collective amnesia. Yet it later turns out - in reality, if not in Nineteen Eighty-Four - that there were people who realized that the struggle of citizens against state power is the struggle of their memory against forced forgetting, and who made it their aim from the beginning not only to save themselves but to survive as witnesses to later generations, to become relentless recorders: the names of Solzhenitsyn and Wiesel must stand for many. In such circumstances their writing of oppositional histories is not the only practice of documented historical reconstruction; but precisely because it is that it preserves the memory of social groups whose voice would otherwise have been silenced." § Political records different than political memory. Political records of the ruling group are far from exhausting its political memory. o "After all, most people do not belong to ruling elites or experience the history of their own lives primarily in the context of the life of such elites. For some time now a generation of mainly socialist historians have seen in the practice of oral history the possibility of rescuing from silence the history and culture of subordinate groups"

2) James Young, At Memory's Edge

o Second half of the book focuses on a grouping of monument and museum designs that may be labeled as "counter monuments" or "negative monument," that are non-redemptive and simply not edifying. § Chapter 4 · Included among the counter/negative monuments is Horst Hoheisal's plan to demolish the Brandenburg Gate at Germany's memorial to the missing Jews. § Young initially opposed the monument then changed his mind, though he does not explain why o The logic of this was that no monument could capture the idea of Jewish extermination. The artist argued that it was better to remove something that the German people treasure as an icon that might cause some national mourning, but also reflection on missing people who cannot be replaced. He has other countermonuments at Buchenwald and for the Aschrottbrunnen Memorial (inverted fountain in Kassel Germany)as well that are analyzed for their uniqueness, and also for the complex memories such as memorials can engender. § Chapter 5 · Talks about how Jochen Gerz succeeds in making Germany's fraught relations with its past a painfully public event. In half a dozen memorial projects and installations between 1972 and 1998,he has also opened a new generation's eyes to the essential incapacity in conventional public institutions like the museum or the monument to serve a wholly adequate sites for Germany's tortured memory of the Holocaust. § Chapter 6 · Also had Daniel Liebeskind's completed design for the Berlin Jewish Museum, the form of a scar or even a lightning bolt on the landscape, suggests the importance of memory and its intrusion on a museum addition. It also suggests how dramatic the Holocaust has been in public discourse, so much so that it overwhelms attempts to tell the story of European Jewish history before the catastrophe. § Whose memory is he considering? o "As Historian Reinhart Koselleck has brilliantly intimated, even the notion of history as a 'singular collective'—that is, an overarching and singularly meaningful History—is a relatively modern concept. Alois M. Müller has elaborated, 'until the 18th century the word had been a plural form in German, comprising the various histories which accounted for all that had happened in the world. History as a singular noun had a loftier intent. In future, not only individual minor historical episodes were to be told. History suddenly acquired the duty to comprehend reality as a continuous whole and to portray the entire history of humankind as a path to freedom and independence. History was no longer to be 'just' the embodiment of any histories. History as a unity sought to make them comprehensible." And as Müller also makes quire clear, this project of historical unification had distinctly redemptive, even salvational aims, the kind of history that its tellers hope would lead to a 'better world.'" § Chapter 7 · Considers the Berlin memorial project—a tortuous, decade-long project, and whether the Peter Eisenman design for the 4.1-acre site in the unified German capital will work. Young notes debates about this project, involving the public to such a degree that he hoped the debate would continue so as itself to be the memorial. o "Other plans also materialized, such as Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock's Memorial to the Deported Jewish Citizens of the Bayerische Viertel, or their remarkable idea for Bus Stop—The Non Monument from 1995. Young considers these important designs, as they integrate memory "into the rhythms of everyday life.""

1) Paul Ricœur, Memory, History, Forgetting

o Surveys reciprocal relationship between remembering and forgetting, showing its effect on perception of historical experience & production of historical narrative. · His central thoughts: connects the school of phenomenology (Husserl) to the more recent post-structuralism/-modernism school. He does so through, noting the connection between text and experience. Text can reflect experience and influence experience. He has three central ideas o 1) Self as a construction (The Rule of Metaphor) à we crate narratives of self in the frame of time (Time and Narrative). This is to say that we construct ourselves in the narratives of self that we wish to put together and create out lives around and we frame these narrative sin terms of past/present/future time. So, we create a self that reflects who we are in the past, present, and who we would like to be in the future. The text leads into this. The stories we read, the ideas that filter through our lives, etc. o 2) I am me as body, reference in the world (Oneself as Another). He says we are not defined by our minds; we are in the world as bodies that references us to the world/out dependency to the world. § Bios: biological frame § Logos: transcendence, or while we are encased in a bio frame, we dream of something more and imagine something more. And in this sense, metaphor becomes the way in which we move to this transcendence of another world/person/way that we wish to be. Dreaming into this future is the notion of Logos. o 3) The self is contingent to the collective social memory (Memory, History, Forgetting): § This is to say that we are not just alone, but contingent and constructed by what has been/gone before. So, this collective social memory constructs us, not just in the fact of memory itself, but also in what is forgotten. We are part of a larger memory, and we are constructed in the part of a large memory. Think about being an academic/graduate student. There's a larger memory that first the whole notion of research and how you construct yourself as an academic. That's part of social memory, but also about forgetting. What do we choose to forget? What do we choose to remember? Important for looking at the way doctoral students are looking forward to what they would like to be, and looking back to what they were, and remembering the bits that are important to them. o The work has three focuses that flow in the following way: "he phenomenology of memory begins deliberately with an analysis turned toward the object of memory, the memory (souvenir) that one has before the mind; it then passes through the stage of the search for a given memory, the stage of anamnesis, of recollection; we then finally move from memory as it is given and exercised to reflective memory, to memory of oneself." Notes a positive representation of forgetting § 1) devoted to memory and to mnemonic phenomena, and placed under the aegis of phenomenology in the Husserlian sense of the term § 2) dedicated to history, and comes under the scope of an epistemology of the historical sciences § 3) focused around a meditation on forgetting, and framed within a hermeneutics of the historical condition of the human beings that we are · Part 1: On Memory and Recollection o Questions of focus: of what are there memories? Whose memory is it? § More directly, the underlying question here is how a memory of present can be of something absent, the past. o It begins with its "common problematic," the "representation of the past · Part 2: History, Epistemology o This section addresses recent work by historians by reopening the question of the nature and truth of historical knowledge. He explores whether historians, who can write a history of memory, can truly break with all dependence on memory, including memories that resist representation. · Part 3: The Historical Condition o Considers the necessity of forgetting as a condition for the possibility of remembering, and whether there can be something like happy forgetting in parallel to happy memory.

3) Jay Winter, Remembering War

o The collective remembrance of old soldiers and the victims of wars is a quixotic act. It is an effort to think publicly about painful issues in the past, an effort which is bound to fade over time. All war memorials have a shelf life, a bounded period of time in which their meaning relates to the concerns of a particular group of people who created them or who use or appropriate them as ceremonial or reflective sites of memory. That set of meanings is never permanent; but it is also rarely determined by fiat. § "Those who initiated war memorials were almost always personally linked to the events themselves. In this sense they were witnesses. They had, of course, a variety of motives. Many were deeply personal. They acted in order to struggle with grief, to fill in the silence, to offer something symbolically to the dead, for political reasons. In most of their immediate concerns, they tended to fail. The dead were forgotten; peace did not last; memorials faded into the landscape. It is a moot question, at the very least, as to whether healing at the personal level followed." · Aversion to national war memorials: o "In this sense, the smaller the canvas, the more continuous is the thread connecting topoi and experience, connecting sites of memory and the agents of remembrance. Once we leap to the national level, such organic links are almost always stretched to the breaking point and beyond. There are exceptions; the initial two-minute silence is one of them; Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial, is another. But by and large only local activity, and small-scale activity at that, can preserve the original charge, the emotion, the conviction which went into war memorial work. Once we arrive at the level of the nation, we encounter politics of a different kind. Monumentality is never the language of the small social solidarities described here. My argument should not be construed as a set of comments on the truism that ''small is beautiful.'' Local politics can be as divisive and disturbing as national politics. I simply want to urge that when we speak of collective remembrance, we return to the original notion of Halbwachs, and recognize that different collectives, within the same state, socially frame their memories in very different ways. The nation is not the place where collective remembrance begins, though the local, the particular, and the national frequently intersect" · Conclusion: this chapter illustrates the need to approach the history of collective memory from the angle of small-scale, locally rooted social action. o Insist "that remembrance is an activity of agents who congregate on the borderline between the private and the public, between families, civil society, and the state.≤≠ This form of small- scale collective memory—the thought-process of kinship, both fictive and filial—was both powerful and brittle. At the time, it gave men and women a way to live on after the horrors of war. But as those agents of remembrance grew tired or old, developed other lives, moved away, or died, then the activity—the glue—which held together these cells of remembrance, atrophied, and lost its hold on them." § Desire for memorialization after the Great War: · "A final word about the relevance of these instances of commemoration, bounded by the tragedy of the First World War, for our consideration of monuments in the later twentieth century. After the Second World War, the same flaring up of older languages ap- propriate to a period of mass mourning did not take place. In general, commemoration was muted, a hardly surprising development in France or in Germany. In Britain, the names of those who died in the war of 1939-45 were simply added to those of the Great War. In part, this was a reflection of failure. The warning inscribed in war memorials—never again—was not heeded. In addition, there was a clear preference on the local level for utilitarian war memorials, useful donations or projects, fitting at a time when national reconstruction was the order of the day. The same body of opinion reflected in the Labour Party electoral victory of 1945 is to be found in the widespread discussion of commemoration in hospitals, schools, scholarships, and in the Land Fund. Statues, as one survey of 1944 disclosed, were not wanted. There was a change too in artistic opinion as to forms of public statuary. Henry Moore stuck to the human figure, but many other artists turned to abstraction. Their work was thus both more liberated from specific cultural and political reference and less accessible to a mass audience. Whether or not these abstract images have the same power to heal as did older symbolic forms is a difficult question; my answer is probably not." § Chapter 7: War, migration, remembrance · Halbwachs say that social groups frame the memory they share. That is, when collective come together to recall significant events, events which tell them who they are as a group, then they create something he termed "collective memory." And when they no longer form a group, or when other life events intervene, and people age or move away or simply find other things to do, then the collective changes or disintegrates, and with it goes "collective memory." This sense of socially constructed nature of "collective memory" is vital to historical study, since it preclude talking about memory as if it exists independently of the people who share it. · Commemoration o When a phenomenon passes away, its shadow become fixed through commemorative practice. What the French historian Pierre Nora call milieux de mémoire re replaced by lieux de mémoire. At times, this act is manipulative. Elites create traditions to justify their own hold on power. But at other times, and imperial commemorations are a case in point, they also reflect broader cultural forces. o Part 3 § Discusses film, television, museum, and war crimes trials as sites where, at times, long after the cessation of hostilities, groups and individual negotiate the distance between history and memory in their representations of war. These are spaces where those who were not there see the past not in terms of their own personal memories, but rather in terms of public representations of the memories of those who came before. § Chapter 8 · War film, and collective memory o Tragedy of memory boom: tendency of commentators to term any and every narrative of past events as constituents of national memory or collective memory, understood as the shared property of the citizenry of a state. Quite obvious in film which creates what people assume to be a straight line linking imagery and memory on the national scale. This is a grand illusion! § "Never adding up to something as grandiose as national memory, processes of historical remembrance are nonetheless crucial elements in the way individuals and groups perceive the past, and place their own lives within it" § Chapter 9 · Between history and memory is television, public history, and historical scholarship. o Television in this chapter. · The development of the field of historical work expanding rapidly toward what is termed public history, history outside of the academy, linking historians to the broad population interested—sometimes passionately—in historical inquiry, has created spaces in which the overlap and difference between history and memory arevisualized § Chapter 10: War Museums · Mediate between history and memory in particular ways. The ideas about war, and the forms in which they are expressed here, somehow manage to synchronize with or even to capture other intellectual movements in the field of history. o The museum challenges us to question, how is it possible to represent battle? How is it possible to represent war? · Representing war: o How is the set of representiaotn so war offered by the Historical different? § 1) Its simplicity, its use of clear, straight lines and arcs, its purity wwere clearly distancing devices · "No pseudo-realism here; no sounds, no voices, no mimetic recreation, no appeals to the familiar and the comforting. Instead we have a museum which enables people quietly to contemplate the past—a cruel and violent moment in the past— without being told that they can share the ''experience.'' The beauty of the museum disturbs and disorients in a museum on war." § 2) explicitly comparative framework § 3) use of space § 4) Lastly, the museum challenges the viewer by developing different forms of representations of war in its displays · Chapter 11 o Witness to a time. § "In the aftermath of war, there is a tendency for those who create representations of the conflict to wear the mantle of consolation. Tolerable or sanitized images of combat and violence against civilians are seductive and politically useful, since they present observers with elements of hope. They make war thinkable, even in the after- math of terrible carnage. At times these positive narratives become intolerable to some of those who lived through these events. Such men and women then decide to take a stand. They speak with what Joan Scott has termed ''the authority of direct experience,''∞ and aim to strip away from our understanding of war and repression roman- tic or heroic readings of the past" § Part 4 · Chapter 12: o Controversies and conclusions § "'Language,' wrote Walter Benjamin, 'shows clearly that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past, but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.'"

1) Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory

o Discusses his thoughts concepts such as space, time, collective memory as well as fruitful definitions and applications of the differences between individual, collective, and historical memory. § Former Bergsonian, then Durkheimian as he converted from philosophy to sociology. Died in the Buchenwald concentration camp · Bergson's influence: o For Bergson, the notion of time was at the very core of philosophical reflection. Intuitive and subjective perception of inner time is the source of knowledge about the self. Compares the richness and variety of inner "subjective time" to "objective time," as it is measure by scientist and positivist philosophers. Believes the major source of philosophical reflection is immediate experience. § "mechanistic, objective clock time cannot cope with human creativity and spontaneity. Only 'duration,' the intuitive perception of inner time, provides access to philosophical and spiritual knowledge. Only intuition and contemplation, though Bergson, rather than science or reason, can unravel the riddles of human existence. § Left this thinking to go on and dialogue with Durkheim. § Collective memory, as he shows, is not a given but rather a socially constructed notion · There are many collective memories as there are groups and institutions in a society. Social classes, families, associations, corporations, armies, and trade unions all have distinctive memories that their members have constructed, often over long periods of time. It is, of course individuals who remember, not groups or institutions, but these individuals, being located in a specific group context, draw on that context to remember or recreate the past. o Every collective memory requires the support of a group delimited in space and time § Connects to Durkheim's most inspired pages devoted to "collective effervescence" as the seedbed of human cultural creativity. · Also, physical props, be they works of art or totemic figures, that can, as it were, assure continuity between the active and passive phases of collective life. o Apparent void between periods of effervescence and ordinary life are, in fact, filled and fed by collective memory, in the form of a variety of ritual and ceremonial acts of heroic actors, and commemorated in bardic and epic poetry that keep alive the memory during otherwise dull routines of everyday life. · Determined to demolish Bergson's stress on subjective time and individualistic consciousness, at the very beginning of the sociological study of memory, leads his reader to accompany him on a survey of the principal locations of memory from the religious to domestic sphere, from memory in the area of stratification to various other group memories. § Distinction between historical and autobiographical memory · 1) historical: reaches social actor only through written records and other types of records, such as photography. The person does not remembered events directly; it can only be stimulated in indirect ways through reading or listening or in commemoration and festive occasions when people gather together to remember in common the deeds and accomplishments of long-departed members of the group. In this case, the past is stored and interpreted by social institutions. · 2) autobiographical: memory of events that we have personally experienced in the past. tends to fade with time unless it is periodically reinforced through contact with persons with whom one shared the experiences in the past. it is always rooted in the people. § Collective memory, as an intermediate variable so to speak, that both commemorates the events through calendar celebrations and is strengthened by them. Collective memory in symbolic display, or simply kept alive through transmission by parents and other elders to children and or ordinary men/women § Halbwachs also completed a study of the legendary topography of the gospels in the holy land. · "Going through the accounts of Judea-Christians, of crusaders, and of foreign Christian believers, Halbwachs shows in splendid detail that these observers, on their visits to the Holy Land, imposed what was in their own eyes on the land they thought they were only describing" § In his view, a nation's or society's memory is a reconstruction of the past and the present situation affects the selective perception of past history. · He insists that out conceptions of the past are affected by the mental images we employ to solve present problems, so that collective memory is essentially a reconstruction of the past in light of the present."

1) Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History"

o French historian who insists in this text that there is very little left of memory. Believes that what we call memory, which is spontaneously occurring, today is not memory, but already history. Memory is merely archival and anxious reconstitution of a recorded past that would be impossible to remember. True memory only exists in the skills passed down by unspoken traditions, in body's inherent self-knowledge, in unstudied reflexes and ingrained memories, which is the opposite of history/what we ask memory to do today § "The notion of place of memory means, for the Commission, all the cultural landmarks, places, practices, and expressions resulting from a common past. These landmarks can be concrete and tangible, like objects or monuments, but they can also be intangible, like history, language, or traditions. Places of memory are not only objects of knowledge but must also prove to be sources of emotion. The traces of the past take on a new meaning when they become Memory by relying on living and contemporary supports. Memory comes to life when it reaches the citizen." o Memory à the acceleration of history: "An increasingly rapid slippage of the present into a historical past that is gone for good, a general perception that anything and everything may disappear-these indicate a rupture of equilibrium." o Lieux de mémoire is where memory crystallizes and secretes itself, "sites of memory" where the embodiment of memory in certain sites takes place, where a sense of historical continuity persists. § This is because there no longer milieux de mémoire, real environments of memory. · "We have seen the end of societies that had long assured the trans- mission and conservation of collectively remembered values, whether through churches or schools, the family or the state; the end too of ideologies that pre- pared a smooth passage from the past to the future or that had indicated what the future should keep from the past-whether for reaction, progress, or even revolution" § Memory vs. history · "Memory and history, far from being synonymous, appear now to be in fundamental opposition. Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. It remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived. History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer. Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history is a representation of the past. Memory, insofar as it is affective and magical, only accommodates those facts that suit it; it nourishes recollections that may be out of focus or telescopic, global, or detached, particular or symbolic-responsive to each avenue of conveyance or phenomenal screen, to every censorship or projection. History, because it is annual and secular production, calls for analysis and criticism. Memory installs remembrance within the sacred; history, always prosaic, releases it again. Memory is blind to all but the group it binds-which is to say, as Maurice Halbwachs has said, that there are as many memories as there are groups, that memory is by nature multiple and yet specific; collective, plural, and yet individual. His- tory, on the other hand, belongs to everyone and to no one, whence its claim to universal authority. Memory takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images, and objects; history binds itself strictly to temporal continuities, to progressions and to relations between things. Memory is absolute, while history can only conceive the relative. At the heart of history is a critical discourse that is antithetical to spontaneous memory. History is perpetually suspicious of memory, and its true mission is to suppress and destroy it. At the horizon of historical societies, at the limits of the completely historicized world, there would occur a permanent secularization. History's goal and ambition is not to exalt but to annihilate what has in reality taken place. A generalized critical history would no doubt preserve some museums, some medallions and monuments-that is to say, the materials necessary for its work-but it would empty them of what, to us, would make them lieux de memoire. In the end, a society living wholly under the sign of history could not, any more than could a traditional society, conceive such sites for anchoring its memory." o Memory good, integrated, dictatorial, unself-conscious, commanding, all-powerful spontaneously actualizing, without past and ceaselessly reinventing tradition, linking the history of its ancestors to the undifferentiated time of heroes, origins, and myth § "Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. It remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived" o History, sifted and sorted bits/traces of memory § "History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer." § All history is critical

3) Paul Ricœur, Memory, History, Forgetting

o From the reviews: § Ricœur begins with individual memory—a special kind of image, one always related to a past experience. We may feel sure of out memories, but because they are images, it is always possible that they have been distorted or even invented by imagination. Yet, we must rely on them. Moreover, memory depends on other people-we do not remember alone (12l). Personal memory widens into collective memories, but they too can be distorted and used destructively, as we have seen too often. · Historians: o "The historian is in a complex relation to collective memory, often correcting it but also wanting his or her account to be widely acknowledged. History is written, through and through, as Ricœur repeatedly stresses. The historian depends on documentary traces, however critical of sources he must be. History writing uses the resources of internal organization-story telling, rhetorical patterning, style and recognition of that ineluctability has led to suspicion about its claim to reveal the past. Yet the historian does indeed aim to let the voices of the past speak. At the same time, there must be limits to remembering. We write history because we are historical beings. The past endures even when it does not stand out distinctly as a memory. The phenomenon of recognition points to a reserve of forgetting memories not conscious but not effaced either. Yetit is important that memory not be blocked or manipulated-the danger of all "official" histories. Amnesty is an officially commanded forgetting, whose justice is questionable. Real forgiveness is something else. Some crimes are unforgettable and unforgivable. Yet some acts we can and do forgive, which means unbinding the agent from his act and enabling a new beginning. We must do justice to the dead and care about the past-what has been but is no longer-without being determined or crushed by it. Ricoeur closes with Kierkegaards "praise of forgetting as the liberation from care" (505)" § "The one figure whose absence I regret is Josiah Royce, whose unjustly neglected Problem of Christianity includes a rich analysis of the way shared memory and hopes can constitute what he called an "interpretive community" o "Can history tell us the truth? To say a historical account simply states the facts is vulnerable to the critique of any correspondence theory of truth. The past is mediated in historical representation-the very means of our access to it stand between us and it. This is no ground for despair. The absence of the past is a function of its no longer being but equally of its having been. We need to get away from a picture theory of history writing and ask why we write history, what do we want to do with it?" § he past seems at first an enigma-knowledge without recognition. But it contains an appeal to the reader of history, an appeal to acknowledge and to do justice to the dead through a self-recognition that is also recognition of a claim and the payment of a debt. The historian is not just stating facts but bearing witness to the testimony of those who were there; and however rigorous the criticism of sources must legitimately be, ultimately testimony is our only assurance of what happened. The past is not a collection of facts; it testifies. The truth history calls us to is faithfulness to the past, and that is never a given but rather a wish, a task, and a responsibility. I hope that these remarks may give the flavor of the kind of reflection Ricœur's thinking nourishes, even if I cannot be sure he would endorse all of them. · Expanding Ricœur to Christianity: o "But it is to be hoped that someone who has fully absorbed his thinking will extend it in an explicitly Christian reflection on history-and on the history at the core of Christianity. Ricœur does not speak in directly Christian terms, but perhaps only a Christian perspective could reconcile human beings as creatures of memory-rooted in the past and therefore owing a duty to it-with our being as creatures of hope who look toward a new creation in which the sins of the past will be forgiven and the tears of mourning will be wiped away. No human being and no human collectivity, has the right or the power to do either. Dante has already shadowed forth this reconciliation accomplished in the transcending of time by a God who does not forget yet in mercy forgives." § In first part, considers the pervasive, central problems in memory, cause by the nature of its lack of concreteness, it curiosu border/nnon-border with imagination and possible subconscious acting-outs. He emphasizes the "work" aspect of remembering and mourning. It was not jus the act of remembering and mourning, by the active sense of the 2 words—a struggle, if you will. · Mourning is the self's demand of oneself to withdraw all libido attachment to the lost object, the result of which is opposition. "In an effort to mourn, one moves towards melancholia since the 'work' of mourning is likened to the concept of the ego, free and uninhibited. Ichgefuhl is the idea of an empty and impoverished world; retracting one's love from a lost object can contribute to original narcissism." o Freud § "Freud alludes to going beyond the psychoanalytic. Mourning behaviors can be about more than the internal. Ricoeur takes Freud's allusions further and posits that mourning behaviors are actually made of private and public expressions, and how the collective memory are bipolar to both personal and community identity.' · Founding events are problematic because they are legitimized acts of war. Memory serves a role here, in that too much memory dedicated to an event can cause compulsion to repeat. The cause for this transformation from memory to repetition is that the society lacks from doing the work of remembering. o Ideology: § "ideology goes unacknowledged; unbeknownst to the practitioner of ideology, the ideology inverts itself, and is aggressively against others for their ideology. Ideology distorts reality, provides legitimation of the existing system of power, as well as help make the world communicable through communal symbolic systems. In a way, ideologies are like identity — -can be shaped two ways: the past, which is tradition, as well as the bureaucratic, which is the present and future of those in charge and will stay in charge because they know better." o The narrative helps shape the memory, since narrative presents a single perspective, and can choose to be favorable to the protagonist; the selectiveness of a narrative contributes to the manipulative possibilities of the narrative-serving memory. We must remember the victim's position. The victims have the right to protest and make demands

2) Pierre Nora, "From Lieux de Memoire to Realms of Memory"

o Three types of national history: § 1) "The first type was the creation of Michelet: his goal was to integrate all the material and spiritual facts in an organic whole, a living entity, to present France "as a soul and a person." Here, post-Revolutionary romanticism achieved its culmination." § 2) "second type of national history is typified by the work of Lavisse: his goal was to test the entire national tradition against the documents in the archives. Lavisse's work stands as a monument to the age of republican positivism." § 3) "third type of national history was created by Braudel, who unfortunately died before his work was complete: His goal was to use the results of the social sciences to characterize the various stages and levels of durée; to integrate the geography of Vidal de La Blache into history; to extrapolate from economic cycles; and to make Marxist concepts less rigid and adapt them to the French climate."

2) Paul Connerton, The Spirit of Mourning

o The different types of forgetting have different agents as well as different functions and values. The agents of repressive erasure and prescriptive forgetting are states, governments, or ruling parties and, in the case of the art museum, the gallery's curators as bearers of Western culture or a national or regional inflection of it. The agents of the formation of new identity and structural amnesia are more varied; they may be individuals, couples, families, or kin groups. The agents of annulment, as a reaction to information overload, are both individuals and groups of various sizes (for example, families and large corporations) and societies and cultures as a whole. The agents of planned obsolescence are the members of an entire system of economic production. The agent of humiliated silence is not necessarily bit most commonly civil society. · 3: reticence in its many practices o "The distinction between intentional silence and imposed silences is a contrast between ideal types. It follows that in any particular case of we may encounter mixed or hybrid forms. This is particularly so in the case of intentional silences. Australian Aboriginal sign language is intentional; but since the primary circumstance promoting the elaboration of such sign language is found in the existence of extended speech taboos, the language contains an impositional component. Just remember the difference between silence and silencing § Types of intentional silence · Use of alternative sign language and pre-eminently, of course, the practice of silent worship · Tactful silences acknowledge that ought to be said in non-cultic contexts and so what helps to avoid offensiveness § Imposed silences, or silencing: · Most blatant and brutal form of imposed silence consists in the exercise, or threat, of physical coercion gains the person, a coercion which effectively silences them. · censorship · More painful and profound that the significant silences of damnatio memoriae are traumatized silences: more painful and profound because a crucial feature of traumatic experience is the element of delay · Closely related to traumatized silences are others, sometimes difficult to discriminate from them, in the sense that they originate in deeply shocking and painful experiences. We might term these narrative silences, since they signify the refusal or inability to tell certain narratives · The refusal or inability to reconstruct certain narratives often leaves its mark in what might be called terminological silences · The silence of dying · 4: establishes that what it conventionally called 'cultural memory' occurs as much, if not more, by bodily practices and postures as by documents and texts. This memory takes place on the body's surface and in its tissues, and in accordance with levels of meaning that reflect human sensory capacities more than cognitive categories. Shows that culture happens as and in the live body o What happens when experience of one's body and its surrounding is one of disorientation is that one is memorably reminded of how important orientation is in order to be able to remember where one is. Somewhat similarly, as sense of disembodiment is possible through traumatic historical experience, and this make surrounding places harder to represent and remember; this absence demonstrates the importance of what is normally present, if taken for granted, in everyday experiences of embodiment; and that shows, once again, how essential our embodiment is for representing and remembering the places that surround us. However much the life-spaces we inhabit may change, we never lose this ultimate ground of the differentiation of regions in space. Whatever the nature of my perceptive field, my body is the stable center within that field. My body has the privilege position, because it is always experienced by me as "here." And form this is follow that the true stability of place—and therefore the guarantee of place's memorability—is not so much located in enduring spatial landmarks as rather situated in myself. · 5: deconstructs Gadamerian hermeneutics as failing to take account of the corporeal roots of interpretation and understanding, showing this approach to be a sophisticated by insistent logocentrism of verbal language and text. Claims the body must be operative in the dynamics of oral speech and the actual pronunciation of words: building on the pioneering work of Parry and Havelock, stressing the importance of the continual re-enactment of certain basic motions of tongue, lips, and hands. o Looks at one way I which the body is treated as a memory, in which it is entrusted in mnemonic form with the fundamental principles of the content of a culture, when the principles embodied in this way are placed beyond the grasp of consciousness. § Long before the level of "tradition" in Gadamer's sense is reached, therefore, the body must be operative in the dynamics of ral speech and the actual pronunciation of words, in the continual re-enactment of certain basic motions of the tongue, lips and hands. In this sense, at least traditions more a matter of bodily re-enactment than it is a matter of conducting a conversation with texts of the past.

2) John Gillis, Commemoration

§ The creation of national mother's days in America and Europe on the eve of the First World War simply underlined the gendered nature of national commemorative practice, of if was for their deeds but for their being that women were remembered. Women and minorities often serve as symbols of a "lost" past, nostalgically perceived and romantically constructed, but their actual lives are most readily forgotten. o It is also one of the peculiarities of the national phase of commemoration that it consistently preferred the dead to the living. § "The old regimes felt more comfortable with honoring both because before the Enlightenment had thoroughly disenchanted the world, the dead and the living were perceived as inhabiting the same space and time. In an era when there was less finality about death, the dead haunted the living, who seem to have felt a greater need to forget than to remember. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, the living had begun to haunt the dead, interring them in elaborately maintained cemeteries, visit ing their graves, even attempting to communicate with them through spiritualist mediums. Middle-class Victorians were the first generation to deny death and have trouble letting go of the dead. But by the end of the nineteenth century the cult of the dead had become democratized, and in the course of the First World War resort to spiritualist mediums became a mass phenomenon. Europeans adopted the American notion of military cemeteries, where officers and men would finally lie side by side. Post- World War I memorials were qualitatively as well as quantitatively different from anything that had gone before. As Thomas Laqueur's essay demonstrates, nations now felt the need to leave a tangible trace of all their dead either through graves or inscriptions. The effort to preserve a trace of every fallen soldier reached its limits in the interwar period with the monument building in France during the 1920s described here by Daniel Sherman. The scale of death was so massive and so many mortal remains were missing that all the major combatant nations eventually resorted to erecting the so-called tombs of unknown soldiers, thereby remembering everyone by remembering no one in particular. This was the only way that memory of this terrible period of time could be materialized in a single place." · Yet, as national memory practices became more democratic, they also became more impersonal. Kurt Piehler describes how American families refused to surrender their sons' bodies to foreign soil. In Europe, where the state was stronger, even death did not release a man formational service. In the interwar period the spirit and image of the fallen were repeated mobilized on film as well as in political rhetoric to serve a variety of causes, left as well as right. o Women were not commemorated after the World Wars. In the era of Nazism and Fascism, when nations tried to suppress class if not ethnic differences, the gender division of memory became even more pronounced. Women remembered the men, while their own contributions were represented largely in terms of sacrifice, a traditional female ole that only reinforced gender stereotypes. o Constructing a new Japan and two new Germanies demanded forgetting rather than remembering. Even Jews focused more on the present than the past in the first years of the new state of Israel. § The memories of individual survivors were vivid enough, but it was not until the late 1950s that they found expressionin a collective memory of "Holocaust," a concept that came into popular circulation in Israel only after the new state was firmly established and Jews could begin to reflect on the pastness of the European past. · "When the memory of those terrible events could no longer be taken for granted, there was suddenly a powerful reason to commemorate, to save both individual and collective recollections from oblivion" § After World War II: following this second round of total war, more civilian than military deaths, and it was no longer possible to ignore the contributions made at the home front. · "Military cemeteries were constructed, but so too were so-called living memorials—churches, sports stadiums, parks, and hospitals—which had begun to be erected in America in the 1920s and 1930s and now began to fill the bombed-out spaces of Europe as well. The cult of the fallen soldier was replaced by a new emphasis on veterans, who were immensely better treated than any of their predecessors. This time around the promise of a land fit for heroes would not go unfulfilled. The fact that the returning soldiers could actually find a place in the present reduced considerably the pressure to memorialize them. Parades replaced cemetery pilgrimages as the typical memorial day activity. Now it became possible for women, even those who had not been mobilized, to feel that they too had been a part of history, not just as widows and war mothers, making sacrifices through husbands and sons, but in their own right. While the memory of women war workers was not to gain public recognition until the 1970s, the door to national memory was now ajar, not only for them but for racial and sexual minorities." · Cold War: o "The Cold War contributed in its own way to shifts in the forms and location of memory. The blurring of the old distinction between war and peace meant that it was very difficult to define the beginnings or endings that had previously been the focus of memory. The Korean, Algerian, and Vietnam conflicts proved extremely difficult to commemorate, except on a private basis. The Korean conflict has yet to receive a national monument; and the Vietnam Memorial, with its wall of names, is generally agreed to represent a turning point in the history of public memory, a decisive departure from the anonymity of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and a growing acknowledgment that everyone now deserves equal recognition at all times in wholly accessible place" § Arlington and the Mall belong not just to two different sides of the Potomac, but two different eras in the history of commemoration, the national and the post-national. · At Arlington it is the honor guard that preforms the rites of remembering, limiting the spectators largely to the role of audience. Most visitors confine their activity to picture taking, thus further distancing themselves from the event itself. By contrast, the monument on the Mall is an event, demanding that everyone who passes by do his or her duty to memory in one way or another. To visit both place is to move not just in space, but in time. · National comemoriation drawing to close around late 1960s o But, left being for later generations a plethora of monuments, holidays, cemeteries, museums, and archives that still continue to function today. These remain very effective in concentrating time in space, in providing many people with a sense of common identity no matter how dispersed they may be by class, region, gender, religion, or race. Millions still make their secular pilgrimages to places like Gettysburg, Auschwitz, and Hiroshima, but no longer in quite the same compulsory, ritualized manner. § "We are more likely to do our "memory work" at times and places of our own choosing. Whereas there was once "a time and a place for everything," the distinctions between different kinds of times and places seem to be collapsing. As global markets work around the clock and the speed of communications shrinks our sense of distance, there is both more memory work to do and less time and space to do it in. As the world implodes upon us, we feel an even greater pressure as individuals to record, preserve, and collect. Again, Pierre Nora : "When memory is no longer everywhere, it will not be anywhere unless one takes the responsibility to recapture it through individual means." o "In past two decades memory has simultaneously become more global and more local. Events and places with international meaning such as Hiroshima, Chernobyl, Auschwitz, and Nanjing capture the world's attention even when the nations responsible may wish to forget them.4 6 At the same time, people now prefer to devote more time to local, ethnic, and family memory, often using the old national calendars and spaces for these new purposes." § "As John Bodnar notes, the experience of the American bi centennial celebrations suggests that people now find much more meaning in local than in national commemorations, forcing the latter to acquiesce to a new pluralism of celebrations. The fact that family genealogists now outnumber professional historians in the archives of France and elsewhere is yet further evidence of the same tendency toward the personalization of memory. Yet the recent proliferation of anniversaries, memorial services, and ethnic celebrations suggests that, while memory has become more democratic, it has also become more burdensome.4 8 Today, time takes no prisoners. Pockets of pastness—ethnic neighborhoods, rural backwaters, the intact family—are fast disappearing. Those who were once perceived as our connection to the past—old people, women, immigrants, minorities—are now swimming in the same flood of change that previously created such a profound sense of loss among elite males. Grandparents are no longer doing the memory work they once performed. In particular families, it is wives and mothers who pick up the slack. Every attic is an archive, every living room a museum. Never before has so much been recorded, collected; and never before has remembering been so compulsive, even as rote memorization ceases to be central to the educational process. What we can no longer keep in our heads is now kept in storage." · Simply put, as collective forms of memory decline, and incrading burden is placed on the individual. o "Today, it is as if we have all suffered Funes's fall, for we are under obligation to remember more and more, due in large part to the fact that in modern society every one belongs simultaneously to several different groups, each with its own collective memory. Finding ourselves in this demanding situation, we rely on a multitude of devices—calendars, Filofaxes, computerized memory banks—to remind ourselves of that which we as individuals cannot master. Our problem stems not from the brain's inability to remember, but rather from the fact that, as individuals, we cannot rely on the support of collec tive memory in the same way people in earlier periods could. Dependent on several collectivememories, but masters of none, we are only too aware of the gap between the enormous obligation to remember and the individual's incapacity to do so without the assistance of mechanical reminders, souvenirs, and memory sites" § ""Modern memory," Nora observes, "is, above all, archival. It relies entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image." On one hand, the past has become so distant and the future so uncertain that we can no longer be sure what to save, so we save everything. It seems that every historic dwelling, every species, every landscape is destined to have its own preservation order because "no one knows what the past will be made of next." On the other hand, never has the past been so accessible on film, on tape, and in mass-produced images" · 'The scale of collecting increases in inverse proportion to our depth perception. Now that old is equated with yesterday, we allow nothing to disappear. A n d surrounded by a forest of monuments and souvenirs so dense that it makes it virtually impossible to decipher their historical references, so burdened by current compulsion to remember the birthdays and anniversaries of family, schoolmates, and fellow workers that "birthday books have become a standard household item: one's memory is inadequate to record the festivities for which one is responsible." o Life can no longer be lived sequentially along a sting timeline; and even elite males can no longer expect the kind of continuity that we used to call a career. § Capitalism increasing numbers of persons are forced to contend with multiple identities and multiple memories, as they are moved from place to place, time after time. It is no wonder that these new conditions have produced a new self-consciousness about identity and memory. o "Yoked together by their common past, memory and identity now undergo the same scrutiny."

2) Patrick Hutton, "Collective Memory and Collective Mentalities"

· 2) memory is inherently paradigmatic. It does not resurrect the past rather it reconstructs it as a coherent, imaginative pattern. The act of remembering is "a hermeneutical process through which images of the past are integrated into a present-minded conceptual framework. work. The tendency of memory is to reinforce larger cultural conceptions by "localizing" them in particular images of space and time. These places of the memory serve as concrete reference points for a group's understanding of its living values and custom Memory, therefore, lends coherence to collective understanding by clarifying the structure of cultural traditions. · 3) the relativity of memory to the changing patterns of group consciousness. Memory selects from the flux of images of the past those that best fit its present needs o Memory colonizes the past by obliging it to conform to present conceptions. It is a process not of retrieval but of reconfiguration, for memory bends the data it selects to its conceptual schemes. Vividness of memory is closely tied to the influence of the conceptions of power. While memories may seem to be inalterable, they are continually if imperceptibly being modified as the nature and activities of the group change. When one group supplants another as the arbiter of cultural power, memory-images identified with the displaced group often become part of unrelated conceptual configurations devised by the newly dominant one. § The adaption of specific memories to the design of a general cultural scheme o Like Carl Becker says! Or close to Claude Lévi-Strauss' notion of bricolage: the same artifacts may be appropriated for unrelated purposes different cultural milieux. § Traits of memory are put to use culturally in commemoration: a mnemonic technique for localizing collective memory. · It revives the deep traditions of a community that might otherwise be modified over time, as impressions of the past grow vague and drift into oblivion. o Commemoration transposes the skill of individual mnemonist to the community at large. In it rites and rituals as in its monuments and shrines, it externalizes the memory palace on a geographical plane where it may visually fix and affirm collective beliefs. § Collective memory is not history for Halbwachs, which was thoroughly positivistic in conception. Collective memory and history are antinomies/incompatible o "Whereas collective memory seeks to confirm the similarities between past and present, history prefers to establish a critical distance between them. Memory evokes deep emotion, whereas history prides itself on its dispassion. Memory deals in eternal repetition, while history identifies singular events that happen once and for all time. The past that converges upon a focal point of present consciousness in memory is delineated by the historian in a chronological pattern." · He shows how unreliable memory is as a guide to the realities of the past. o Patrick's counterargument: collective memory might be a mode of understanding in which we mold our recollections of the past to fit our present conceptual designs is not opposed to the method of the historian. Memory could thus be incorporated into literacy and has a residual influence upon historical understanding. Collective memory can show us the route to a different kind of historical understanding. o Ariès: does work on histories of childhood and family. Memory is his point of departure.

3) Pierre Nora, "From Lieux de Memoire to Realms of Memory"

o "a new kind of history: a history less interested in causes than in effects; less interested in actions remembered or even commemorated than in the traces left by those actions and in the interaction of those commemorations; less interested in events themselves than in the construction of events over time, in the disappearance and reemergence of their significations; less interested in "what actually happened" than in its perpetual reuse and misuse, its influence on successive presents; less interested in traditions than in the way in which traditions are constituted and passed on. In short, a history that is neither a resurrection nor a reconstitution nor a reconstruction nor even a representation but, in the strongest possible sense, a "rememoration"-a history that is interested in memory not as remembrance but as the overall structure of the past within the present: history of the second degree."

3) James Young, The Texture of Memory

§ War-related memorials were perceived generally as intended to valorize the suffering in such a way as to justify it historically. This aim was best accomplished bey recalling traditional heroic icons in order to invest memory of a recent war with past pride and loyalties, which would also explain the recent war in ways visible and seemingly self-evident to the public. Figurative imagery seemed best to naturalize the state's memorial message. IT was clear to those in position in memorialize WWI that the primary aim of modern sculptors the war was to repudiate and lament—not to affirm—both the historical realties and the archaic values seeming to have spawned them. o The specificity of realistic figuration would see to thwart multiple messages, while abstract sculpture could accommodate as many meaning as could be projected onto it. On the other hand, in its hermetic and personal vision, abstraction encourages private visions in views, which would defeat the communal and collective aims of public memorials. § "it is as if figurative sculpture were needed to engage viewers with likenesses of people, to evoke an empathetic link between viewer and monument that might be marshaled into particular meaning · Most states are not ready to abide memorial edifices built on foundations of doubt instead of valor. § There's a difference between avowedly public art—exemplified in public memorials—and art produced almost exclusively for the art world, its critics, other artists, and galleries. We might now concern ourselves less with whether this is good or bad art, and more with what the consequences of public memorial art are for the people. · "there is nothing in this world as visible as a monument," Robert Musil once said. o A monument turns pliant memory to stone. § How do memorials emplot time and memory? How do they impose border on time, a façade on memory? What it the relationship of time to place, place to memory, memory to time? How does a particular place shape our memory of a particular time? How does memory of the past time shape our understanding of the present moment? o Public memory is constructed, understanding of events depends on memory's construction, and there are worldly consequences in the kinds of historical understand generated by monuments. § Consider the conflation of private and public memory, in the memorial activity by which minds reflecting on the past inevitably precipitate in the present historical moment. o Chapter 1 § Though some, like the Greens, might see such absorption in the process of memorial building as an evasion of memory, it may also be true that the surest engagement with memory lies in its perpetual irresolution. Perhaps the never-to-be-resolved debates are the best memorials. o See ch. 3 § Harburg's Monument against Fascism, designed by Johchen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz (the sinking monument.) · It reflects back to the people and contests authoritarian tendencies in monuments § Negative-form monument to the Aschrott-Brunnen is built to extend underground. · Inverted fountain o Chapter 2 § How does a nation mandate the memory of those it victimized? Citizens had to remember their own as victims—even as victims themselves. o Chapter 3 § Imagine a series of annual competitions, whereby the proposed designs and jury debates are exhibited in lieu of an installed winner. Visitors to such a memorial installation would be invited to submit their own evaluations of designs, which would in turn be added to the overall memorial text. Instead of a fixed figure for memory, the debates itself—perpetually unresolved amid ever-changing conditions—would be enshrined. o Chapter 4 § Austria ambivalent about Nazi occupation/Holocaust o Chapter 5 o Polish romanticism extolled the memory of national martyrs so effectively as to turn it into a central pillar around which national identity would rebuilt and defined. § When the killing stopped, only the sites remained, blood-soaked but otherwise mute. · Without people's intention to remember, the ruins remain little more than inert pieces of the landscape, unsuffused with the meanings and significance created in our visits to them. Without the will to remember, Nora suggests, the place of memory, "created in the play of memory and history...becomes indistinguishable from the place of history. o Chapter 6 § Israel, with a sort of perverse debt to the Holocaust, would be a nation condemned to defining itself in opposition to the very event that made it necessary. o Remaining chapters are specific to commemoration, concerning a day, and the last chapter talks about the American Jewish context.

2) Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory

o Chapter 2 § Usually unaware of the channels by which we share memories with others. But some instances are different—like 9/11. · "Flashbulb memory" o "With regard to dramatic events, we are aware of the channels through which we were plugged into the shared memory. The significance of the event for us depends on our being personally connected with what happened, and hence we share not only the memory of what happened but also our participation in it, as it were. It is not surprising that blacks in the United States have much better flashbulb memories than whites of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., while whites have better flashbulb memories of John Kennedy's assassination.3" Two events had a difference in significance for the two communities. · Whether good or bad as mnemonic devices, complicated communal institutions are responsible, to a large extent, for our shared memories. § So "Our notion of shared memory is based on the idea of a mnemonic division of labor. So far it has meant a synchronic division of labor, a division that takes place at a given point in time. But the idea of division of mnemonic labor can be extended diachronically as well." § History, critical history, differs from shared memory in its reluctance to rely on closed memories, that is, in its commitment to looking for alternative lines that connect a past event to its present historical description. o "Nostalgia distorts the past by idealizing it. People, events, and objects from the past are presented as endowed with pure innocence." § Living myth: lives within a community when members of the community believe the myth as a literal truth, or when a community is deeply impressed by the mythical story even if it is perceived as a "noble lie," or it is primordially fresh, vital, full of energy, vivid to the imagination and vivid in its images. · A myth is living if it plays a role in a ritual that intends to revivify events and heroes. § Christian Project: · "The Christian project is an effort to establish, in historical time, an ethical community based on love. This community, ideally, should include all of humanity, and it should be based on the memory of the cross as an ultimate sacrifice for the sake of humanity. The memory of what led to the cross is brought to life either by a sacramental act of revivification (among Catholics) or by commemoration (among Protestants). The idea in both cases, however, is that, with a little helping of grace, humanity can and should be established as an ethical community of love." § Jewish Project: · "The Jewish project retains the double tier of ethics and morality at least for historical times, and postpones the idea of a universal ethical community to the messianic era. Jews are obligated to establish themselves as an ethical community of caring. The force of the obligation is gratitude to God for having delivered their ancestors from the "house of slaves" in Egypt. The crucial role of memory for the Jewish community is to serve as a constant re- minder of this debt of gratitude. In distinction from ethics, morality, in the Jewish view, is based on a different source. It is based on the debt of gratitude all of humanity owes God for having been created in His image. (I find it interesting that the term used in the Koran for the infidel, kafir, was used originally to mean ingratitude, a use that can be found in the Koran itself.)" o "the candidates for memory in the case of humanity as a moral community are negative ones, mostly of terrible acts of cruelty. Such memories do not inspire gratitude. Instead, they ignite an appetite for revenge." § Nation: "we think about a nation as a paradigmatic ethical community of the modern era, then the contrast is very pronounced. A nation has famously been defined as a society that nourishes a common delusion about its ancestry and shares a common hatred for its neighbors. Thus, the bond of caring in a nation hinges on false memory (delusion) and hatred of those who do not belong." · "Memory is too tied to the idea of immortality to expect that anonymous humanity can serve as a community of commemoration when it fails miserably as a community of communication." § "The source of the obligation to remember, I maintain, comes from the effort of radical evil forces to undermine morality itself by, among other means, rewriting the past and controlling collective memory." o Chapter 3: Are there things we ought to remember? § Morality is a basis for disqualifying ethical relations. § Memory related to our attitude toward leaving traces after death o Were want to avoid oblivion at all costs. Fear that our relations won't amount to much! · More often than not, elites "put a spin on collective memories because they believe in them. They believe that their story is basically sound and all they do is give it some color to make it more evocative." o Why do elites, who according to this account are supposed to know so well the nature of the manipulation, are willing to send their own sons to get killed in national wars? § "So, ought we to remember ethically? My answer is yes—if we are, and want to be, involved in thick relations. For the goodness within the relation, memory is crucial. It is crucial both as a constitutive part of our typical thick relations and as an affirmation of the relation. This is at- tested to by the expectation to be remembered after death. But it is not just for the goodness within the relation that memory is vital. It is also vital for the goodness of the relation. And I use the rather vague term vital advisedly, since memory, unlike shared history, is not a necessary condition of thick relations and yet it is tied up with caring— the ethical element that makes the relation good. So we ethically ought to remember on two counts: for the sake of the goodness within the relation and for the sake of the goodness of the relation. · "The relation between a community of memory and a nation is such that a proper community of memory may help shape a nation, rather than the nation shaping the community of memory. A nation is a natural candidate for forming a community of memory not because of the temporal priority of the nation. It is in the contents of the shared memories, such as a common origin or a shared past, that nations are interested in"

3) James Fentress, Social Memory

o Chapter 3 § Considers the context in which conversations about the past can have a particular meaning for particular group. · "They refer to all expressions of social memory as acts of commemoration, and thus draw attention to the need of political communities to affirm present solidarity in a selective and public recall of the past. From this perspective, homage to the fallen, stereotypic stories and public statues all flow from the same impulse. The mistake in modern western societies is to suppose that all this is articulated only on the national stage. In the central chapter of the book, 'Class and group memories in western societies', Fentress and Wickham analyse national memory alongside three other sources of social memory: the peasantry, the working class and women. They are therefore able to explore the complex interplay between genuinely popular forms of memory and the very deliberate constructions of national memory so evident in bourgeois culture." o "On both the peasantry and the working class, Fentress and Wickham stress how wrong it is to imagine that social memory is composed of cyclical events of family, workplace and seasons. Clearly the political purchase of social memory is derived from a linear consciousness of events over time, often molded into a compelling narrative; whatever its fabrications or omissions, this is what enables the community to assert its own interpretation of current circumstances and to act according" § Oral history as protest is a clash between elite culture and popular culture. o Chapter 4 & 5 § Explores the linkage between groups and conversations, focusing on Western Europe and modern Sicily. o Conclusion: § Images of unbroken continuity is usually an illusion. The transmission of social memory is a process of evolution and change. If memory cannot be taken either as the faithful bearer of knowledge or even as the record of past experience, can it be any further interest to the historian? Answer: behind the display of knowledge and the representation of experience, behind the facts, emotion, and images with which memory seems to be filled, there is only we ourselves. It is we who are remembering, and it is to us that the knowledge, emotions, and images ultimately refer. · Only by making memories part of us, first, can we share them with others. Historians are thus right to display little interest impurely theoretical accounts of memory in itself. Memory becomes vital to them only when it is in context; for it is at this point that their story begins. The only spirit of theoretical account likely to be of use to historians is, therefore, one that describes what happens when memory comes to the surface, and what happens when we think, articulate, and transmit out memories. · Social memory seems indeed to be subject to the law of supply and demand. Memories must be supplied; they must emerge at specific points. Yet, to survive beyond the immediate present, and, especially, to survive in transmission and exchange, they must also meet a demand—they must fit, sociologically, culturally, ideologically, and/or historically. o The history of social memory is also the history of transmission. o Memories die, but only to be replaced by other memories. In attempting to explain what the images and stories in social memory really mean, we saw a tendency to slide from one topos to another, or else to rationalize the images and stories by recontextualizing them into other forms. We may sometimes, it seems, only be deluding ourselves when we think we are 'debunking' social memory by separating myth from fact: all we may get is another story. This does not mean that we must accept social memory passively and uncritically, We can enter into dialogue with it, examining its arguments, and testing its factual claims. But this interrogation cannot uncover the whole truth. It is a mistake to images that, having squeezed it for is facts, examined its arguments, and reconstructed its experiences—that is to say, having turned it into 'history—we are through with memory. · This book attacks several ideas o The dales idea historian's task it to detach the kernel of historical truth from the accretions of rhetorical excess, political bias or personal hindsight § "social memory is not stable as information; it is stable, rather, at the level of shared meaning and remembered images." · At the stylistic level, the very mnemonic devices which make a story memorable and seem to vouch for its reliability may serve to detach it from its historical context. o Real focus of this book is the relationship between memory and social identity.

2) Reinhart Koselleck, "War Memorials"

o "The process of functionalization and democratization thus characterizes the historical succession of war memorials. They are supposed to attune the political sensibility of surviving onlookers to the same cause for whose sake the death of the soldiers is supposed to be remembered. This can certainly only be described as a long-term process, which is ramified in many different ways according to national and denominational patterns and can only be shown with many Christian overtones, accoutrements, signs of renewal, or relics." § Hard to distinguish the Christian and the national elements from one another · "The recourse to the classical and Egyptian arsenal of forms, customary since the Renaissance, and later the use of natural and geometrical signs, gains a claim to exclusiveness in the late Enlightenment, figuratively countermanding the Christian interpretation of death. If, in the nineteenth century, numerous Christian symbols sur- face again, this iconographic finding can nevertheless refer to a context that is to be read differently in iconological terms. The context of classical figural elements in the baroque period is usually purely Christian, while the context of Christian figural elements in the nineteenth century can point in a different direction, primarily at the safeguarding of identity for a national future. In other words, the iconographically visible finding permits no immediate conclusion with regard to its iconological interpretation. In any case, war memorials themselves are already a visual sign of modernity (Neuzeit)" o "War memorials refer to a temporal vanishing line in the future in which the identity of the particular community of agents who had the power to commemorate the dead with monuments was supposed to be safeguarded." § William Wood said ""the ordinary feelings of men are not adequate to the present crisis." To extricate the population from its lethargy and egoism, the casualties of war would need to be trans- ported into an earthly immortality so as to secure 'unceasing fame, long duration') for them. The only means for doing so would be a gigantic memorial serving to delight, astonish, elevate, or sway the minds of others through the medium of their senses.'" o "Finally, it becomes clear (something which after 1945 has become obvious) that defeat disposes one more toward remembering death as such than toward loading it with additional meanings. This also betrays the end of a long chain of national identifications. Today, a figural memorial for war cemeteries on foreign soil is often rejected for political and moral reasons, motto mention the costs involved. o Motifs of war memorials (regardless of the causes and the enemies) has remained surprisingly inform since the French Revolution, tis betrays a common visual signature of modernity. Its found throughout European countries whose memorials have emerged from the pregiven requirement of forming or preserving nation-states. Some are so similar, only can tell them apart with transcription. There are some formal similarities that last over time but jump from country to country. Diachronic series of analogous almost identical war memorials, Germany 1871, via England 1902 and 1918, and France 1918. · Guardian spirits, heroines, eagles, cocks, or lions emerge along with palms, torches, helmets, and trophies of every sort. They don't all recall the victory and the victims is cost bit are at the same time supposed to establish an intuitive pattern of political education § "Stylistically, too, time seems to have almost come to a standstill." o Victory monuments facilitate the identification radiating from them. Enemies are not remembered, unless as the defeated, and then their defeat is mostly concealed behind allegorical attributes or general platitudes. Even the death of one's own relatives is swallowed in which cases: "Death is swallowed up in victory," as it says in c Corinthians 15:45 on victory memorials in British town and villages after 1918. § "A double function of war memorials becomes clear, namely to continue the history of the victors in such a way that they become the protectors of the defeated, consigning their former status to oblivion." o "To be sure-and this is true of all countries-different social and political groups make use of memorials to safely preserve their own particular tradition by laying claim for themselves to the meaning of the death which has taken place. Thus the gray ossuary at Fort Douaumont, an amalgam of crypt and bunker, expresses the hagiography of the Catholic church that figuratively assures fallen soldiers of their ascension to heaven." o "it cannot be denied-across all national differences and in spite of the distinction between triumphant and non-triumphant war memorials-that no monument is completely absorbed by its political function. No matter how much dying for a cause is thematized in order to de- rive a particular group identity, dying itself is also always a major additional theme." § "Viewed generally, it is striking, however, that the process of dying is often omitted on memorials. Objections may be raised that memorials are directed precisely against a sculptural rendition of the transitional; how- ever, for numerous memorials, it can be surmised that the memory of the "dying for ... ," of having to die, provokes stylistic self-restraints. There is always a general legitimation of the soldiers' death, which transcends the death of the individual, even though the dying itself is rarely, if at all, recorded on the memorial. For most of the time, death is transfigured but not as the death of individuals; rather, it is their death in great numbers, numbers that are placed in a politically functional context. So and so many set out into battle and so and so many did not return home again. This is how the inscription was often stylized in Germany after 1918, particularly on regimental memorials erected with the intention of preserving an additional identity that was military in nature." § "When at the beginning of modernity (Neuzeit)—in the sense of the experience of a new time-the desire arose for war memorials that were supposed to commemorate the pioneers of the future, Goethe had already formulated the 'demands on modern sculptors.' He pointed out how earlier memorials were considered to have been intelligible so long as the front lines and the viewpoints of the opponents stirred clear partisanship. For instance, to see a Christian victorious over a Turk would only reinforce justified hatred for slaveholders. However, this would become difficult in modernity (Moderne), in present-day Europe, where conflict is said to have originated in industrial and trading interests but where the equality of both sides in terms of religion and morals could hardly be denied. In cases where the two sides could barely be differentiated by their uniforms, as with the French and the Germans, the representation of the fighting opponents could not be expected to have an unambiguous sense anymore. Eventually, when represented without any clothing-it is the sculptors' right to represent their fighters in this way-both sides become 'completely the same: there are handsome people murdering each other, and the fateful group of Eteocles and Polynices has to always be repeated like destiny-only becoming meaningful with the presence of the Furies.'"

3) Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Religion as a Chain of Memory

o "What is specific here resides in the fact that the relationship to the chain of belief is constructed - one might say, deduced - from the quality of the emotive relationship pertaining between members of a similar group. It is not recognition of common ancestry that determines the relationship between brothers, but the experience of brotherhood justifying the invention of common ancestry. An elective fraternity corresponds to a certain community of values and references which has developed through shared interests, experience, and hardships. Elective fraternity is a relationship that is both willed and ideal in the sense that it is presumed to bring into being what ties of blood are so often incapable of ensuring between members of a family - real solidarity, transparency of thought and communication, and common values and memories." o "The problem which confronts the major religions because of the crisis in the institution of the religious, itself a product of high modernity, occurs outside their various differences about how the relation- ship with the truth is to be managed. It has to do with the possibility that the capital of memory each one constitutes may continue to create tradition, in other words that it may take on lasting representation as a chain of belief, transcending the different communities in which the chain has been and is made actual. The cultural demise of the comprehensive memory which historically provided the dominant religions with their legitimacy is a consequence of the tendency to uniformity and fragmentation in modern societies. It nurtures a dual process of reconciling the different ethical traditions, on the one hand by extracting a number of universal values, on the other through the spread of community-based small memories which absorb the need for identity, itself suppressed by the modern culture of uniformity masquerading as universality." § "The problem which confronts the major religions because of the crisis in the institution of the religious, itself a product of high modernity, occurs outside their various differences about how the relation- ship with the truth is to be managed. It has to do with the possibility that the capital of memory each one constitutes may continue to create tradition, in other words that it may take on lasting representation as a chain of belief, transcending the different communities in which the chain has been and is made actual. The cultural demise of the comprehensive memory which historically provided the dominant religions with their legitimacy is a consequence of the tendency to uniformity and fragmentation in modern societies. It nurtures a dual process of reconciling the different ethical traditions, on the one hand by extracting a number of universal values, on the other through the spread of community-based small memories which absorb the need for identity, itself suppressed by the modern culture of uniformity masquerading as universality."

2) Paul Connerton, How Modernity Forgets

§ "If giving monumental shape to what we remember is to discard the obligation to remember, that is because memorials permit only some things to be remembered and, by exclusion, cause others to be forgotten. Memorials conceal the past as much as they cause us to remember it. This is evidently so with war memorials. They conceal the way people lived: where soldiers are directly represented in war memorials, their image is designed specif- ically to deny acts of violence and aggression. They conceal the way they died: the blood, the bits of body flying through the air, the stink- ing corpses lying unburied for months, all are omitted. They conceal the accidents of war: the need to make past actions seem consolingly necessary impels people to make sense of much that was without sense. And they conceal the way people survive." · "The Great War had undone so many: the International Labor Organization estimated in 1923 that about ten million soldiers from the German, Austrian, British, and French armies peopled the streets of their nations. Care of the war wounded went unrewarded, often unnoticed, in millions of households who rarely received the material assistance they needed. The war dead were annually commemorated; the maimed and mutilated were forgotten as far as possible.44 The war-wounded and war widows were routinely neglected because they provided the wrong kind of memory. But we are endlessly devious in expressing to our- selves the intolerable in a tolerable form. The gigantic gymnastic performances so fashionable in Germany and Central Europe during the 1920s and 1930s, regimented displays of fit, young, healthy, athletic bodies, was, literally, a massive denial of the fact that at the same time ten million mutilated war survivors haunted the streets of Europe, dismembered men many of whom were subject to chronic depression, succumbed to alcoholism, often went begging in the street simply to survive, and frequently ended their days in suicide. To notice them, still more to reflect upon their circumstances, was too disquieting. They themselves had no option but to confront their condition every day in the mirror. For others, the sight of them was not unpalatable, it was an indigestible fact. The annual incantation at war memorials, ritually intoned, - 'lest we forget' - did not apply to them." · What is it, by contrast, that makes the locus, in its far more inexplicit reference to memory, such an effective carrier of cultural memory? Part of the answer applies particularly to a historically particular type of culture, to the world before the age of mechanical reproduction—a handmade world; also, it applies to all different kinds of historical settings, effective encoding power in place o "There is, in other words, a certain matter-of-factness, a taken for 'grantedness,' which distinguishes our experience of a locus from our experience of a memorial. A memorial has something in common with a work of art, in the sense that we assume that a work of art, a painting or piece of sculpture, is a more or less demanding message, explicitly addressed to us, something that asks of us a focused interest, a degree of concentration, even absorption. A glance, a transient registering of its mere existence by our peripheral vision, would never do justice to a well-executed painting, and a war memorial of which we were entirely oblivious would have failed of its purpose. Many war memorials, as a matter of fact, do precisely that. As Musil once said, nothing is more invisible than a memorial. But we experience a locus inattentively, in a state of distraction. If we are aware of thinking of it at all, we think of it not so much as a set of objects which are available for us to look at or listen to, rather as something which is inconspicuously familiar to us. It is there for us to live in, to move about in, even while we in a sense ignore it. We just accept it as a fact of life, a regular aspect of how things are. This is the power of the locus. That is why the locus is more important than the memorial - whose construction is so often motivated by the conscious wish to commemorate or the unavowed fear of forgetting - as a carrier of place memory."

3) Daniel Levy, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age

§ Notes about Halbwachs: Halbwachs distinguished between social memory and historical memory · Social memory: the memory of things that one has experience personally and that the group of which one is a part has experienced. It is history before it becomes history, the present experience through a group and then remembered. For example, the social memory of the Holocaust is limited to the generation who lived through the war. · Historical memory: memory that has been mediated by films, books, schools, and holidays. For most people in most countries, national experience is overwhelmingly based on such represented memories. In the case of the Holocaust, only a small minority of people who experience Nazism firsthand is alive. Most people's experience on a national scale—in the sense of extraordinary, history-making events—is based on representative memories. Thus, the Nazi eta is not part of most people's lived experience, and memories of the Holocaust are base d exclusively on representations. § Notes about Nora: · He distinguished between the social environments, or milieux, of memory and the sites that have been set up to preserve the memory of events. He sees the latter as a substitute for living traditions. "Memorial sites exist because the social environment of memory exist no longer, the surrounding in which memory is an essential component of every day experience. This distinction between authentic memories and their substitutes is a necessary precondition to a view such as Smith's that global culture is producing an "eternal present" (Smith 1995: 21). o Critique against Nora's implicit normative claim and the fixation on the nation-state as the sole possible (and imaginable) source for the articulation of collective memories. § The national-building process parallels what is happening through globalization at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The national was the global when compared with the local communities that preceded it. However, this did not render the nation inauthentic o Conclusion · Hannah Arendt and the "politics of forgiveness," which she upheld as a political principle at the end of the 1950s as a way to render politics more pragmatic, is now emerging into the limelight. § The security of a future that grows out of a homogenous past no longer exists; the future can no longer be thought of using the old model of the past. Through their "imagined" security, national and ethnic memories sparked resistance and thus led to new insecurities. The cultural foundation of Second Modernity is built on the institutions of First Modernity. Cosmopolitan memory, which is establishing itself in Europe as the new "European remembrance," grows out of a plurality of national and ethnic memories. Immediately after the WWII, the war and its atrocities were downplayed in the public culture of remembrance. Modernization means, among other things, conceiving of a new future, and the view was forward-looking. We have shown how these processes have played our under different circumstances, albeit with some similarities, in German, American, and Israeli society.

2) Daniel Levy, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age

§ The book is about the historical linked between memories of the Holocaust and the emergence of a moral consensus about human rights. To note: even in times of terror and the fight against it, human rights cannot be done away with. Even a superpower such as the US must take aspects of 'soft power' into consideration, and the struggle for international legitimacy remains a central element for political success. o Collective memory is based on representation that need to be understood in temporal and spatial terms. Space and time are the coordinate that people use to organize their experiences. Specifically, cultural representation enables social groups to develop historical self-awareness and thereby also determine their relationship to other groups. Representation of memory are particularly important in this context. Different eras develop distinctive mnemonic forms and content. While these representations were previously determined almost exclusively through the community of the nation-state, processes of globalization, in their concrete manifestations as well as in their ideological aspirations, have greatly contributed to the reconfiguration of memory cultures. The following questions are central to our inquiry: how does globalization influence the circumstances and conditions necessary for the production of meaningful images? How are these images related to the experience of space and time? What influence do these images have on collective identities, and how do the changes effect memories that were originally produced in local context? Can global images emerge in new arenas that are challenging the nation-state from below and from above. § Globalization transforms culture and the vocabulary used to produce meaning. This transformation becomes most evident when the particularities that make up a culture are ripped from their original spatial (i.e., local and national) contexts. Culture can no longer be understood as closed national space, because it now competes constantly with other spaces. Transnational media and mass culture such as film and music are loosening the national framework without eliminating it entirely. In the process, conception and ideas about the world come into conflict with conceptions and idea about the national. · Place, as a also loses it meaning and specificity. o In additional, temporality of the nation-state, of ethnic groups—indeed , of memory per se—is accelerated through global process. The connection of past, present, and future to a particular place is loosened. The presence of transnational migrants, a view ship drawn together by globally televised spectacles are shared consumption of mass culture, has become pervasive; "our" past suddenly is also "their future. In an age of globalization, social and cultural differences become more apparent and start to influence the way memories are formed. We are thus dealing with self-aware, reflexive outlooks that recognize the world as an arena of experiences and involves an awareness of the welfare of others an of global conditions rather than actual contact with others.

1) James Fentress, Social Memory

o In considering oral sources, this book builds on Halbwachs' "collective memory,"—which claims that all memory is structed by group identities—noting that memory is attached to membership of social groups of one kind or another. It is primarily concerned with the more public and social side of memory—commemoration, which the book defines as the action of speaking or writing about memories, as well as the formal re-enaction of the past that we usually mean when we use the word. § ". What began as the enthusiasm of a handful of young scholars working in African universities, and was taken up a little later by social historians on the margins of academia in western Europe, now occupies a significant place in current historical debates about community, memory and social consciousness." § Case studies range from Cahnson de Roland to the brothers Grimm. Could have made more example of the cricual afrinca material that sarted everything. § Principle concern: thought that explicitly refers to past events and past experience (whether real or imaginary); for recalled past experience and shared images of the historical past are kinds of memories that have particular importance of the constitution of social groups in the present. o Memory as action and memory as representation o "Memory is infinite; all consciousness is mediated through it." o The social meaning of memory, like its internal structure and its mode of transmission, is little affected but its truth; all that matters is that it be believed at least at some level—for one should not neglect folk-tales, which are commemorations of the past as well, although they are often not even told as strictly believable. Social memory is, in fact, often selective, distorted, and inaccurate. Nonetheless, it is important to recognize that it is not necessarily any of these; it can be extremely exact, when people have found it socially relevant from that day to this to remember and recount an event in the way it was originally experienced. The debate about whether it is inherently accurate or not is thus sterile; and it will remain so as long as memory is treated as a 'mental faculty' whose working can be described in isolation form social context. · Halbwachs was part of Emile Durkheim's school, and, like many of Durkheim's followers, put what might seem excessive emphasis on the collective nature of social consciousness, relatively neglecting the question of how individual consciousnesses might relate to those of the collectivities those individuals may have. § Halbwachs rightfully claims that social groups construct their own images of the world by establishing an agreed upon version of the past, and to emphasize that these versions are established by communication, bot by private remembrance. Indeed, one's private memories, and even the cognitive process of remembering, contain much that is social in origin. o Challenge then: how to elaborate a conception of memory which, while doing full justice to the collective side of one's conscious life, does not render the individual a sort of automaton, passively obeying the interiorized collective will. It is for this reasons that they use the term "social memory" rather than "collective memory". § Fentress et al. say eosical memory to include oral tradition, whether epic or folktale or free recitation, as well as traditions that have long crystallized into written from like the sagas of Iceland, and the recent reminiscences of "ordinary" people.

1) Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory

o Is there an ethics of memory? § "Are we obligated to remember people and events from the past? If we are, what is the nature of this obligation? Are remembering and forgetting proper subjects of moral praise or blame? Who are the "we" who may be obligated to remember: the collective "we," or some distributive sense of "we" that puts the obligation to remember on each and every member of the collective?" · "I reach the conclusion that while there is an ethics of memory, there is very little morality of memory." This has to do with two types of relations: thick(grounded in attributes like parent, countryman, friend) and thin (backed by attribute of being human.) and the difference between ethics and morality o Ethics à gratly concerned with loyalty and betrayal, manifested among those who have thick relations § Short on geography and long on memory o Morality àattitudes that manifest themselves among those who have thin relations. § Long on geography and short on memory § Humanity is not a community of memory—though it may be one day. So who should carry the "moral memory" on behalf of humanity as a whole? · Religions can make a bid on the moral memory of humanity as a whole o "Religion is of relevance here in part because the whole enterprise of an ethics of memory, as well as the politics of memory, is under a cloud of accusation that it is merely a disguised form of religion. The suspicion is that the key notions of an ethics of memory, such as forgiving and forgetting, get their sense and justification only in the religious context of a forgiving God. And the same suspicion holds with regard to the politics of memory, which is viewed as no more than political theology. The most superficial controversy over erecting a public memorial monument adds to this suspicion" § Ethics of memory should not be conflated with religion or traditionalism · Three worries: religion conflation, traditionalism conflation, and moralism § Legitimacy: "The counter-Enlightenment thinker Ralph Inge, "the gloomy dean of St. Paul," wrote memorably: "A man may build himself a throne of bayonets, but he cannot sit on it."2 The way I understand Inge's shrewd dictum is that even the most brutal regime seeks legitimacy, knowing all too well that in the long run terror—which is the sit- ting on bayonets—is, at the very least, uncomfortable and eventually unbearable. Mythmakers, epic poets, and chroniclers of the royal court are kept busy trying to provide legitimacy for regimes whose entitlement to govern is anchored in events of the past. Hence the urgent need and the ardent desire of authoritarian, traditional, and theocratic regimes to control collective memory, because by so doing they exercise monopoly on all sources of legitimacy. Thus, there is an intimate relation between traditionalism and nondemocratic regimes." · Democratic regimes anchors its legitimacy not in the remote past but in current election. o Definition of democracy: a technique for changing the government without violence, and also a full-fledged way of life. · Moralism: the disposition to cast judgments of a moral kind on what it unsuitable to be judged § "Memory, then, is knowledge from the past. It is not necessarily knowledge about the past." · Consider the ethics, politics, and theology of memory o Chapter 1 § "are there special obligations to remember people's names, or at least some names in certain situations?" · Remembering the name is remembering the soldier, but the obligation, if it is an obligation, it to remember the soldier and not necessarily to remember his name. o Two biblical killings: the name and the body § "It is this strong desire for immortality that religion ex- presses so forcefully. The source of the wish for an immortal name is not mere vanity. Nor is it merely the desire to "make a name for yourself" in the sense of achieving glory. It is rather a horror of extinction and utter oblivion. The human project of memory, i.e., commemoration, is basically a religious project to secure some form of immortality" · Consider why do we not erect monuments of the unknown social democrat or the unknown liberal, as well as for the unknown soldier? § Relation between memory and caring is not inherent. Caring confers importance (and not the other way around). Caring is a selfless attitude. It is a way of living in time, that includes planning for another. It is greater than sympathy, which is freely given and includes responsibility § Because memory is enmeshed with caring, memory belongs primarily to ethics, not to morality. · Christin project of turning morality into ethics and Jewish project of keeping morality and ethics apart. · "Moreover, isn't the victim morally entitled to impose— if he only could—his memory of what happened to him on his tormentors, that is, on the robbers, as well as on the priest and the Levite who passed by without even a gesture of concern? By extension, are not the Korean "com- fort women" morally entitled to impose on the Japanese people their memory of horrific violations at the hands of Japanese soldiers during World War II? Are not the Jews morally entitled to impose the memory of their destruction not only on their German tormentors but also on those that knew and yet did nothing to help? These questions, in the context of communal memory, will be ad- dressed in Chapter 2"

3) Reinhart Koselleck, "War Memorials"

· Equality in death of those who were killed in action became a motif received with less and less favor. During the Wars of Unification, there were still memorials—such as the one in Kissingen in 1866—that commemorated both sides together. since 1918, however, join burial only occurred sporadically. After 1945, the separations of the dead have, in general, remained customary—to the point of exhuming all fallen Americans from German soil. § It is well known that the egalitarian tendency does not preclude the cult of the leader that emerges from the tradition of military rank in the hierarchical series of memorials to individual heroes. § "To what extent both war graves and the soldiers' entitlement to a memorial owe their origin to a revolutionary impulse initially directed against the estates-monarchic tradition can be shown by literary examples." o "Therefore, already the functionalization of war memorials tends toward a religion civile in Rousseau's sense, and helps to establish democratic legitimacy. In the memorial, such a legitimacy creates an equality of those who died for the fatherland which is directed inward but not outward. Compared to the feudal past, the position of individuals on war memorials is transformed on the basis of the nation-state." § "The tombs of the "unknown soldier"-one for all-are the last step in this democratization of death. Some of the visual documents testifying to this path will be traced below." · "By and large, it becomes customary, especially after the Wars of Unification, to list commissioned officers, noncommissioned officers, and soldiers separately on regimental and municipal memorials- but on the same plinth. The use of depictions of officers to represent common soldiers is a stylistic device that comes to emphasize this equality." Thus, the upper ranks participate in the glory of everyone, a glory that they at the same time represent and exemplify. o "In the war cemeteries themselves, an absolute equality is certainly introduced. The rule that officers are to be buried individually is generalized for everyone. The idea that every soldier deserved his own grave and gravestone was for the first time legally instituted by the North in the American. Civil War, even though Southerners remained, at first, excluded from the commemorative ceremonies. This democratic norm, anticipated by the Peace of Frankfurt of 1871, was generally followed in World War I by the Western and Central powers. The individual "right to rest in peace" has, in the meantime, become a norm of international law? however, Russia would not endorse it for reasons whose ideological and realistic components are hard to distinguish. But at the same time that this democratic rule was instituted to individually memorialize every soldier, it became impossible to comply with it. For the dead who were each supposed to have their own grave were often times not found or they could no longer be identified." § "The technical means of annihilation had been perfected to such an extent that it was no longer possible to find the dead or lay them to rest, as the law stipulated. Individuals were swallowed up by mass death." This fact evoked two kinds of responses, both expressed in the commemorative monuments. · 1) first was that the sites of death were simply transformed into memorials themselves by leaving them as they were found after the armistice took hold. · 2) The second response was to erect massive monuments, such as those at Ypres, Vimy (figure 17.24), Thiepval, or Navarin, to mention only a few. On these monuments, the names of all the fallen who could never have a grave but whose names were never to be forgotten were written. "Their name liveth for evermore," as the biblical saying chosen by Kipling goes. Promising earthly immortality, the saying is engraved on monuments in all British cemeteries. § "The nation, which had previously shored up its identity by way of victory monuments, now remembered all the dead individually so as to let a uolonte generale-in Rousseau's sense-arise from a uolonte de tous. Additionally, the formerly Christian judgment metaphor does not allow any souls to escape and guarantees a fatefully enriched earthly eternity now." o WW1: memorials distinguished themselves by fact that the compensate for helplessness by pathos. Death of hundreds of thousands on a few square miles of contested earth left an obligation to search for justifications that were hard to create with traditional metaphors and concepts o WW2: transformation in the iconographic landscape of memorials that also changed political sensibility. The simple expansion of memorial by the addition of plaques for those who died between 1939-45 was still a fresh and generally customary tradition § "The annihilation not only of the living but also of physical bodies during air raids and even more in the German concentration camps necessitated the renunciation of the old arsenal of forms for war and victory memorials. Victims condemned to senselessness required, if at all, a kind of negative monument." · "Their political function boils down, if at all, to the question of their mean- ing, without being able to sensibly convey a visual answer. Certainly, the formal language of resurrection often remains preserved here, but in the words of Max Imdahl, it is no longer a metaphor of resurrection, but rather a metaphor of this metaphor." § "Finally, during the Vietnam war, Edward Kienholz created the anti- memorial, a parody of the victory monument in Arlington. He constructed an ordinary scene within which a portable war memorial is placed. Next to it there is a plaque upon which, depending on the new beginning of a war, the dead can be recorded with chalk so that the memorial is not blamed for the oblivion of death but rather human beings who shirk the memory of the dead." o "Hence the identities that a memorial is intended to evoke melt away-in part because sensory receptivity eludes the formal language presented and in part because the forms, once shaped, begin to speak another language than the one from which they were initially fashioned. Memorials, like all works of art, have a surplus potential to take on a life of their own. For this reason, the original meaning of countless memorials is no longer recognizable without recourse to inscriptions or other empirically comprehensible reference signals." § Since the French revolution, the historical experience begins to emerge that war memorial lose their original emphasis with the passing of the generation responsible for their construction. Numerous memorials from the nineteenth century have not only acquired an external patina; they have fallen into oblivion, and if they are maintained and visited, then only rarely is it to reassert their original political sense. · Memorials are taken down when they are felt to be a threat or when a tradition that is still living is intended to be suppressed. It is intended to annul political demands for identification o Memorials long outlast their immediate occasion may be preserved for historical and traditional reasons, but, even then, their expressive power gradually changes. They move together structurally. It is, then, only victory as such, no longer any particular victory, that is brought to mind.

3) Amin Shahid, Event, Metaphor, Memory

· So what system is being implicitly privileged? Ultimately, he is a Marxist! there is a reason why Amin talks about the railroad, the steamboat, roots of shipments of goods to the market, peasants enmeshed in larger economic work—all things privileged in the analysis of the context. · The surprise is his discussion of Hindus and Muslims, noting that a notion of sectarianism may not be as relevant as the class relations that are really occupying his imagination throughout the work. He is trying to situate ethics town in a larger set of political, economic systems in which these people are dominated § The role of the courts trying participants in the event? § What does Amin mean by historical fieldwork? Why is it necessary? Why interviewing women adds to old narratives? · Wants to say that the Gandhian narrative had complete control across the Indian subcontinent. He contradicts by saying there are in fact local realities, in which these men are enmeshed in, and as a result, they act out as volunteers in ways that are distinctive form the script § Writes Amin, "The subalterns make their own memories, but they do not make them just as they please" (p. 118) Why is that? And if that is the case, what, then, is the point of going back to "the remembrance of lost time" at the end of the book? · It's a reference to Marx: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living" § The national Gandhian movement for independence through non-violence distracted itself form the Chauri Chaura episode. How does Amin's history/ethnography force reconsideration of this distancing maneuver? o Important Quotes: § "The triumph of such histories lies not only in making people remember events from a shared past: the nationalist master narrative also induces a selective national amnesia in relation to specified events which would fit awkwardly, even seriously inconvenience, the neatly woven pattern.' These awkward events are recounted so as to embellish another, and rather more edifying, tale. The exclusion of such events and the marginalized references to them serve the purpose of distinguishing authentic popular protest from `crime'. The organization, unity, discipline and morality of the nationalist public are thereby underscored." § "It would be a naive historiography which would expect to find subaltern recollections untouched by the prose and procedures of punishment: judgment was, quite literally, a matter of life and death for Abdullah and 171 others." § "At a general level, the story of the riot suggests how a particular event is excised from a series in terms of its denouement and consequence, even though it belongs to a set of events similar in almost all respects."

2) Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will

§ Sensation of pressure and weight measured by extent of the organism affected. The sensation of light—qualitative change s of color interpreted as quantitative changes in intensity of luminous source. § In Delboeuf's underlying postulate, it's the case that differences of intensity in sensations of light. Fechner's psychophysics—all revolves in a vicious circle. Weber's Law § Sensations should not be regarded as magnitudes, as psychophysics makes the mistake of doing. · Intensity: judged in representative states by an estimate of the magnitude of the cause and in affective states by multiplicity of psychic phenomena involved o New chapters § Can't form an image or idea of a number without accompanying intuition of space. Consider unity—act of the mind. Units divisible only because regraded as extended in space · Number is actually thought of as a juxtaposition in space. Two kinds of multiplicity: o 1) material objects counted in space o 2) conscious states, not countable unless symbolically represented in space § Homogenous time à medium in which conscious states from discrete series. This time is nothing but space, and pure duration is something different · Time, in so far as it is a homogenous medium, and not concrete duration, is reducible to space! o Pure duration is wholly qualitative. It cannot be measured unless symbolically represented in space § Succession cannot be symbolized as a line without introducing of space of three dimensions · Time, as dealt with by astronomer and physicist, does indeed seem to be measurable and therefore homogenous. But what we call measuring time is nothing but counting simultaneities. The clock taken as an illustration. § 2 elements in motion: the space traversed which is homogenous and divisible; and the act of traversing indivisible and real only for consciousness. · Space alone is homogenous; duration and succession belong not to the external world, but to the conscious mind. § Duration vs. conscious life: eliminate the superficial psychic states, and we no longer perceive homogenous time or measure duration, but feel it as a quality

2) Jay Winter, Remembering War

· "Since 1945 wars have been transformed from conflicts be- tween states into conflicts within states or between groups which do not operate at the level of the state. The proliferation of these new forms of conflict has brought warfare into every part of the world." o "Remembering its victims—in Northern Ireland or in Palestine or at the World Trade Center—is everybody's business." § It is primarily for this reason that the fireld of memory is such a crowded one. There is a lot to commemorate, and much to do to help the victims of war who are all around us. · Historical remembrance: overlaps with personal or family remembrance on the one hand and religious remembrance, so central to sacred practices, on the other. it is a way of interpreting the past which draws on both history and memory, on documented narratives about the past and on the statements of those who lived through them. o Smithsonian debate = collision between "history" and "memory," a collision arising out of the different subject positions of those involved in the exhibition. § "''Memory'' is a category with its own history, and its own mysteries." § Historical remembrance is a discursive field, extending from ritual to cultural work of many different kinds. It differs from family remembrance by its capacity to unite people who have no other bonds drawing them together. It is distinctive from liturgical remembrance in being freed from a preordained religious calendar and sanctified forms. And yet historical remembrance has something of the familial and something of the sacred in it. When all three are fused, as in some powerful war memorials—Maya Lin's Vietnam memorial in Washington comes to mind— historical remembrance is a phenomenon of enduring power. It is religious. § Struggle against forgetting, mediated in a host of ways in social practices, in literature and the arts. It is not only that much of the violent history of the twentieth century is intrinsically worth remembering, but rather that those who died or who were injured can so easily be forgotten. The memory boom, therefore, may be understood as an act of defiance, an attempt to keep alive at least the names and the images of the millions whose lives have been truncated or disfigured by war. o Part 1 § Chapter 1 · Two essays in pursuit of the primary argument of the paper—the need to attend to, to acknowledge the victims of war and the ravages it causes as at the heart of the memory boom in contemporary cultural life. · We are not the first generation to be obsessed with memory. We are inheriting and working through an earlier generation's fascination with, indeed obsession with, memory. What I would term the first generation of memory in the modern period spanned the years from the 1890s to the 1920s. its focus was on memory as the key to formation of identities, in particular national identities, although social, cultural, and personal identities were also in mind. It also focused around the fallen of the Great War o The second "memory boom; which emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, was in large part a form of remembrance of the Second World War and the Holocaust. · "In recent years many people have come to see in memory a way out of the confusion bred by the fragmentation of the very identities forged by and during the first ''memory boom.'' The term ''memory'' has become a metaphor for ways of casting about in the ruins of earlier identities and finding elements of what has been called a ''usable past,''∞ or what the French historian Pierre Nora calls lieux de mémoire." · "For some the memory boom is nostalgic, a yearning for a vanished or rapidly vanishing world. For others it is a language of protest, seeking out solidarities based on common narratives and traditions to resist the pressures and seductions of globalization. For others still it is a means of moving away from politics, and of re-sacralizing the world, or of preserving the voice of victims of the multiple catastrophes of the last century." Religious! · Some thoughts on Halbwachs: o Social memory: his concept means the memory of the people who form social groups, and whose recall gives those groups coherence and form o Collective memory: his argument is that it is constructed through the action of groups and individuals in the light of day. Passive memory—understood as the personal recollections of a silent individual—is not collective memory, though the way we talk about out own memories is socially bounded. When people enter the public domain, and comment about or commemorate the past—their own personal past, their family past, their national past, and so on—they bring with them images and gestures derived from their broader social experience. As Halbwachs put it, their memory is "socially formed." When people come together to remember, they enter a domain beyond that of individual memory. · Ernest Renan: What is a nation o "A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle..." religious! · Warfare o Warfare in this period moved the cult of memory onto the level of mass production and consumption. Became a universal phenomenon following 1914's avalanches of images and words surrounding the dead of the Great War. The aim was to remember the sacrifice, the suffering, the slaughter, the names of the fallen. § Second Gen appeared in 1970s-1980s. why the delay? In the 1940's and 1950's, collective stories about the war focused on heroic narratives of resistance to the Nazis and their allies. Why idealizing remembrance flourishing? Because intrepid chronicles of Resistance were more useful in the revival of the political culture of countries humiliated by occupation and collaboration. This was done by 1960 and 1970s, but then the student movements arrive, culminating in the events of 1968, aimed to expose the hypocrisy of their parents' generation. · Commemorations of War and Holocaust o Linkage between memory and mourning. · Witnesses o Filming the voice and faces of the survivors of WW!! Played a decisive role in the creation of the postwar memory boom. o Three levels in which it has been central to narratives of remembrance: § 1) The first is legal. Witnesses in war crimes trials, trials of those accused of crimes against humanity, or in tribunals of reconciliation have provided the material testimony central to judicial acts which could not have occurred 50 years ago. § 2) The second is moral. Those who have testified about genocide, terrorism—state-sponsored or not—or persecution speak of particular grievances associated with the tragic history of specific populations § 3) The third is spokesman for humanity as a whole. Witnessing has thus come to take on a kind of categorical imperative which Kant wrote about 2 centuries ago. · Affluence: o "In the West, one important precondition of the ''memory boom'' has been affluence. In a nutshell, rising real incomes and increased expenditure on education since the Second World War have helped shift to the right the demand curve for cultural commodities." § Chapter 2: · Great war reconfigured popular and medical notions about memory. o Appearance of thousands of men with psychological injuries has come to frame what we now term "traumatic memory." § Shell shock § Embodied memory: the body telling the story of what has been done—traces of combat. Etc. · The stories of shell-shocked men, in a host of ways, were disruptive of the linkage between memory and identity. o Part 2 § Presents a variety of signifying practices which have linked history and memory, in particular for those who lived through the upheavals of the first half of the twentieth century. · "What were their modes of collective remembrance, understood as activities shared by collectives, groups of people in the public do- main? Through what means did they trigger their own memories and convey them to those who weren't there? Photography did so; so, did the publications of soldiers' letters, so did poetry, war novels, and plays. These forms of remembrance are discussed alongside commemorative projects more directly associated with war losses—the construction of war memorials of various kinds and the braiding together of family history and national history. And imperial history as well, since imperial populations went to war, and imperial families were tied together for a time by shared patterns of remembrance." § Chapter 3: · Photography and remembrance o Photographs and images trigger remembrance, albeit in selective and frequently nostalgic ways. But there's more. A man with a camera can freeze time by capturing the scene, and by doing so, he engaged in the difficult art of bringing memory and history together. § Chapter 4: cultural memory and the soldier "tale" § Chapter 5: Ironies of war · If it is true that British and French intellectual responses to the Great War were different, why? o Irony rules out certain kinds of certainty. It is a mirror in which the gaze confronts something which is not quite what it seems to be. § Chapter 6 War memorials (pg. 135) · So far looked at photographs, war letters, plays, and novels. But the locus classicus of remembrance in the interwar years and beyond are war memorials: o Sites, statues, and sculptures · Argues that shifting the scale of vision from the national and grandiose to the particular and mundane—shift from high to low politics, from capital cities to obscure towns, from first-order to second- or third-order actors in social life—may help transform out understand of war monuments, and the forms of remembrance which occur surrounding them. Why? o Great national sites of remembrance are exceptional, and their histories provide a misleading impression of thousands of others. o Contemporary cultural history, multivocality is the order of the day. The thrust of much recent work in social and cultural studies has been away from an earlier top-down approach, which emphasized the capacity of dominant groups to ac in effect as puppeteers, pulling the strings of cultural activity. · Memory activists o "fictive kinship groups" § "Memories are both personal and social, and sites of memory are created not just by nations but primarily by small groups of men and women who do the work of remembrance. They are the ''social agents'' of remembrance; without their work, collective memory would not exist. I want to argue that these ''memory activists,'' in Carol Gluck's phrase,∞ frequently constitute powerfully unified groups, bonded not by blood ties but by experience. They share the imprint of history on their lives, and act as kin do in other contexts." · They share what Avishai Margalit terms "thick relations," from large groups, whose relations are "thin," and show identity is much more diffuse and evanescent. The smaller the group, the thicker the relation, and vice versa · Memory, collective memory, and cultural memory o Jan and Aleida Assmann offer some insight here § They use the term cultural memory to mean: · "the re-usable and available texts, images, and rites of each society, with the preservation of which it stabilizes and spreads its self-image; a collective shared knowledge, preferably (but not necessarily) of the past, on which a group's sense of unity and individuality is based. The topoi and narratives which appear in monuments need an institutionalized communication, without which their re-use cannot be organized. Therefore, we do not only inquire into the history, form and meaning of the monuments as artefacts, but also into the history of their use and their re-use" · War memorials o By any definition they are salient elements in the cultural memory of twentieth- century Europe. Some of these monuments are grandiose, self- serving tributes, to be sure; but many go beyond state-sponsored triumphalism to approach the regional, the local, the particular, and the familial realities of loss of life in wartime. § "My argument, therefore, stands at a midpoint between two extreme and unacceptable positions in this field: between those (following Bergson) who argue that private memories are ineffable and individual, and those (following Durkheim) who see them as entirely socially determined and therefore present whether anyone acts on them. With Blondel, I urge that such approaches are best located in ''the gallery'' of useless ''abstractions.''∂ In between is the palpable, messy activity which produces collective remembrance."

2) Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory

o In summary: "Memory needs continuous feeding from collective sources and is sustained by social and moral props. Just like God needs us, so memory needs others. But those who are led to give an account of the past in terms of present guideposts will generally be also aware that history is made of continuity as well as change. Halbwachs could perhaps afford to neglect the first by way of overplaying the second, but a moment of reflection suggests that, especially in periods of history that are better documented than the events dealt with here, the present generation may rewrite history, but it does not write it on a blank page." § It is to the degree that out individual thought places itself in frameworks of the collective and participate in this memory that it is capable of the act of recollection · The study of dreams provides us with serious arguments again the thesis of the subsistence of memories in an unconscious state. But it is necessary to show that, outside of dreams, in reality the past does not recur as such, that everything seems to indicate that the past is not preserved but is reconstructed on the basis of the present. o He dreams is based only upon itself, whereas our recollection depend on those of all out fellows, and on the great frameworks of the memory of society. § No memory is possible outside frameworks used by people living in society to determine and retrieve their recollections. § We preserve memories of each epoch in our lives, and these are continually reproduced; through them, as but a continual relationship, a sense of our identity is perpetuated. § Notes about Bergson: · "Bergson's sense, two kinds of memory-one made of habits and turned toward action, and another which involves a certain disinterest in present life-one would in effect be tempted to think that the elderly, as they turn from the practical aspect of objects and per- sons, and as they are liberated from the constraints imposed by profession, family, and active existence in society in general, develop the capacity to redescend into their past and to relive it in imagination" § "Society from time to time obligates people not just to reproduce in thought previous events of their lives, but also to touch them up, to shorten them, or to complete them so that, however convinced we are that our memories are exact, we give them a prestige that reality did not possess." § What makes recent memories hand together is not that they are contiguous in time: it is rather that they are part of totality of thoughts common to a group, the group of people with whom we have relation at this moment, or with whom we have had relation on the preceding day or days. § So, consider the group in itself as having the capacity to remember, and that we can attribute memory to the family, for example, as much as to any other collective group. · Family recollections in fact develop as in so many different soils, in the consciousness of various members of the domestic group

1) James Young, The Texture of Memory

o In this study of Holocaust memorial, I examine precisely how and why public memory of this era is being shaped by the memorials, museum, and days created to remember events. § Like other representations of events, they juxtapose, narrate, and remember events according to the taste of their curators, the political needs and interest of their community, the temper of their time. · There are thousands of them; some occupy the former sites of destruction, while others are built at great remove from the killing fields. o "In what might be called 'biographies' of Holocaust memorial sites, I hope to reinvigorate otherwise amnesiac stone settings with a record of their own lives in the public mind, with our memory of their past, present and future." § "This is to draw back into view the very process, the many complicated historical, political, and aesthetic axes, on which memory is being constructed. For neither memory nor intention is ever monolithic: each depends on the vast array of forces—material, aesthetic, spatial, ideological—converging in one memorial site. By reinvesting these memorials with the memory of their origins, I hope to highlight the process of public art over its often static result, the ever-changing life of the monument over its seemingly frozen face in the landscape." o "countermonuments," notably the vanishing monument has begun to emblematize Germany's conflicted struggle with Holocaust memory o "A society's memory, in this context, might be regarded as an aggregate collection of its members' many, often competing memories. If societies remember, it is only insofar as their institution and ritual organize, shape, even inspire their constituents' memories. For a society's memory cannot exist outside of those people who do the remembering—even if such memory happens to be at the societies bidding, in its name." § How and what we remember in the company of a monument depends very much on who we are, why we care to remember, and how we see. · "no one can become what he cannot find in his memories" -Jean Amery o Introduction § How does one refer to events in a medium doomed t refer only to itself? § If the aim is to remember—that is, to refer to—a specific person, defeat, or victory, how can it be done abstractly? § Memory is never shaped in a vacuum; the motives of memory are never purse. Both the reason given for Holocaust memorial and the kinds of memory the generate are as various as the sites themselves. Some are built in response to traditional Jewish injunctions to remember, others according to a governments need to explain a nation's past to itself. Where the aim of some memorials is to educate the next generation and to inculcate in it a sense of share experience and destiny, other memorials are conceived as expiations of guilt or as self-aggrandizement. Still others are intended to attract tourists. In addition to traditional Jewish memorial iconography, every state has its own intuitional forms of remembrance. As a result, holocaust memorials inevitably mix national and Jewish figures, political religious imagery. · "America is guided no less by distinctly American ideals and experiences—such as liberty, pluralism, and immigration. o By themselves, monuments are of little value, mere stones in landscape. But as part of a nation's rites or the objects of a people's national pilgrimage, they are invested with national soul and memory For traditionally, the state-sponsored memory of a national past aims to affirm the righteousness of a nation's birth, even its divine election The matrix of a nation's monuments emplots the story of ennobling events, of triumphs over barbarism, and recalls the martyrdom of those who gave their lives in the struggle for national existence—who, in the martyrological refrain, died so that a country might live. In assuming the idealized forms and meaning assigned to this era by the state, memorials tend to concretize particular historical interpretations. They suggest themselves as indigenous, even genocidal outcroppings in a national landscape in which it stands. Indeed for memorials to otherwise would be to undermine the very foundations of national legitimacy of the state's seemingly natural right to exist. § Two-way: on the one hand, official agencies are in position to shape memory explicitly as they see fit, memory that best serves a national interest. On the other hand, once created, memorials take on lives of their own, often stubbornly resistant to the state's original intentions. · New generations visit memorial under new circumstances and incest them with new meanings. The result is an evolution in the memorial's significance, generated in the new times and company in which it finds itself. The result is an evolution in the memorial's significance, generated in the new items and company in which it finds itself. The capacity for change in memorial has not always been so apparent, however. For, traditionally, the monument has been defined as that which by its seemingly land-anchored permanence could also guarantee the permanence of the a particular idea or memory attached to it. In this conception, the monument would remain essential impervious to time and change, a perpetual witness-relic to a person, even, or epoch. Hence, the first monuments mentioned in the Bible: a small pillar and a witness heap of stones (gal-ed) gathered to mark the agreement between Laban and Jacob [Gen. 31:45-48]; the matzevah (tombstone) Jacob created on Rachel's grave [Gen. 35:20]. In both cases, the monuments would suggest themselves as everlasting remnant-witnesses by which subsequent generations would remember past events and people. o Memorials vs. monuments § Memorials don't just recall past deaths or tragic events and provide places to mourn. Monuments aren't just celebratory markers of triumphs and heroic individuals. We erect monuments so that we shall always remember and build memorials so that we shall never forget. o Monuments commemorate the memorable and embody the myths of beginnings. They make heroes and triumphs, victories and conquests, perpetually present and part of life. With monuments, we honor ourselves

3) Patrick Hutton, "Collective Memory and Collective Mentalities"

§ "Ariès was predisposed to reflect upon memory's relationship to history because his personal conservatism made him sensitive to memory's preserving powers." § Memory, as he understands, need not be overshadowed by history's authority but might show the way to a more profound understating of the past. In Ariès' view, history and memory are not mutually exclusive, as Halbwachs suggested. Rather memory can infiltrate history by providing access to hidden domains of the past long since obliterated by the official version of history proffered for public consumption.25 · "Modem historiography, Aries recognized, focused on politics and public life. He therefore set himself the task of investigating aspects of private life that escaped the notice of historians. Ariès was in search of an historical perspective on a sphere of the past whose meaning was still tied to living memory. The realm of the historian, he argued, should not be limited to political events and economic processes, but might through memory be extended to mentalities." § "Ariès' essential point is that history emerge out of memory. As history transcends living memory in its scope and abstractions, it nonetheless maintains its grounding there. The relationship between recollection and historical reconstruction in comprehending the past is always one of inverse proportions, never Halbwachs mutual exclusion." § Two major discoveries: · 1) historical sources of ontogeny provided the underpinning for "discovery of childhood" · 2) unprecedented modern passion for commemoration, was in turn an outgrowth of his research about changing attitudes toward death and dying § Even memory has history: "if memory was a route into historical understanding, that understanding could not help but condition memory. Fra from being unchanging, memory is, like human consciousness generally, an historical reality subject to modification. The memory of modern humankind is invested with historicity—an awareness of the unique and temporally explicit character of the historical event. Memory in our time, he contends, is invoked not as an invitation to repeat the practices of the past but as an inspiration to look toward an unprecedented future. It is our concern about the future that has kindled our current interest in new approaches to history—historiography. By tracing historiography to its origins in memory, he set the course on which many historians writing today have also been permitted to discover the significance of Halbwachs' work on collective memory for historical understanding, a significance obscured by Halbwachs himself by virtue of the dichotomy he drew between the two. This is their connection.

1) Peter Burke, "History as Social Memory"

o A historical review of social memory in different situations o Traditional view of relation between history and memory: "The historian's function is to be the custodian of the memory of public events which are put down in writing for the benefit of the actors, to give them fame, and also for the benefit of posterity, to learn from their example." Now considered much to simple § "book of memory" · There's a process of selection, interpretation and distortion as conditioned, or at least influenced, by social groups. It is not the work of individuals alone o Halbwachs is there first serious explorer of the 'social framework of memory,' as he called it: § "argued that memories are constructed by social groups. It is individuals who remember, in the literal, physical sense, but it is social groups who determine what is 'memorable' and also how it will be remembered. Individuals identify with public events of importance to their group. They 'remember' a great deal that they have not experienced directly. A news item, for example, can become part of one's life. Hence memory may be described as a group reconstruction of the past." · Marc Bloch noted danger of taking psychology terms and adding the adjective 'collective' § Difference between collective memory, which was a social construct, and written history, which he considered - in the traditional manner - to be objective · History as a social memory: term 'social memory', which has established itself in the last decade, has been chosen as a useful piece of shorthand which sums up the complex process of selection and interpretation in a simple formula and stresses the homology between the ways in which the past is recorded and remembered

2) James Fentress, Social Memory

o Chapter 1 § Remembering/commemorating consider as a type of behavior, and memory, considered cognitively, as a network of ideas. Show something of how memory functions. The second is to look critically at the way historians and social scientist have regarded memory and used it as a tool of research, and to suggest a number of ways in which a better appreciation of the character of their material would yield more convincing results. · Must be aware of memory the special nature of memory as a source. It does not rely on texts. Yet, some historians are reluctant to emphasize this, seemingly preferring to treat memory as a set of documents that happen to be in people's heads rather than in the Public Record Office. § Knowledge: 3 types · 1) propositional knowledge, or knowledge about things · 2) sensory and experiential knowledge, or knowledge directly of things · 3) skill knowledge, or knowledge how to do physical things § Memory: often divided into two locations · There is a subjective part, which includes information and feelings that are an integral part of us, and which thus are properly located only within is. It is comparatively passive to the second part—objective part—which is more active: it experiences and recalls to consciousness. o In this way, a distinction between objective fact and subjective interpretation is posited in the structure of memory itself. The textual model is one expression of this conception of memory. § This chapter attempts to rescue memory from the problems of the theory of knowledge, so as to reveal its subjective and conceptual character. Memory is ordered not like a physical text, but for all the difficulties that may ensue from acknowledging this, like thinking itself. It is not a parrisve receptacle, but instead a process of active restricting, in which elements may be retained, reordered, or suppressed. o Chapter 2 § Considers distinction between the particular genres and narrative styles of commemoration · Violent amputations that ethnohistorians occasionally inflict on oral traditions are often undertaken in the belief that these traditions can be used by historians only as the repositories of historical fact. What this notion ignores, however, is that the process of transmission and diffusion of oral tradition is itself historical. It is historical, moreover, regardless of whether the information it contains consists of kernels of true fact, or merely folk motifs. Accompanying the process of transmission of oral tradition is a process of reinterpretation. Every time a context, or to the genre, in which it is articulate. This necessity to reinterpret often lies begins changes within the tradition itself. These changes may be small in scale, or they may be large-scale recontextualization of the entire traditions. This process reflects real changes in external circumstances

2) Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory

o Chapter 2 § The 2 forms of memory: · The past survives as a bodily habit · The past survives as an independent recollection § The recognition of a present object is affected by movement when it proceeds from the object, by representations when it issues from the subject. We pass, by imperceptible stages, from recollections strung out along the course of time to the movements which indicate their nascent or possible action in space. Lesions of the brain may affect these movements, but not these recollections. · Habits formed by represented actions are amassed in the body; these do not represent the past, they merely act it. § True representative memory record every moment of duration, each unique, and not to be repeated. The normal consciousness class up only those memory-images which can usefully combine with the present situation o Carl Becker § Attention is first an adaptation of the body. Negatively, it is the inhibition of movement. § There are different planes of memory; the largest includes all our past and is the plane of dream. While on the plane of action, memory is narrowed down to become one with action o Chapter 3 § Three processes: · 1) pure memory: thought independent in theory, manifest itself as a rule only in the colored and living image which reveals it. · 2) memory-image: partakes of the 'pure memory' which it begins to materialize, and the perception in which it tends to embody itself: regarded from the latter point of view, it might be defined as a nascent perception. · 3) perception: impregnated with memory-images which complete is as they interpret it § Consciousness follow the movement of memory at work. o If we are dealing with perception, we are asked to see in it nothing but the agglomerated sensations which color it, and to overlook the remembered images which form its dim nucleus.

3) Paul Connerton, How Modernity Forgets

o Chapter 3 § Temporalities and forgetting · Many modern material practices are implicated in the process of cultural forgetting. To see, must distinguish between categories of temporality: "institutionalized and organized time schedules which crucially structure a person's experience of time." o 1) the labor process o 2) consumption § Note two things: first, each particular temporality reinforces the others to precipitate a reciprocally interlocking cascade of temporalities; it is their combined effect which generates a systematic form of cultural forgetting. Secondly, none of the temporalities can be understood without comprehending the spatial dimensions which are ingredient and intrinsic to them. · Culturally induced forgetting is reinforced by the temporality of consumption. Contemporary cultural memory is further eroded by the fate of the individual career structure. The temporality of consumption is evidently implicated in a further temporality, and one which is central to the way we experience structures of temporality in our culture, that of the media. · "The investigation of forgetting, as a systematic contemporary cultural phenomenon, thus leads us ultimately and inevitably to the problem of place, and, more specifically still, to the question of place memory." o Chapter 4: § Topographies and forgetting · "If, then, the spatial frameworks of a culture, the way in which we set about the task of producing spaces, occupies a pivotal role in the localization of cultural memory, if it establishes a topography of remembering, then this might lead us on to ask the further question and to return us to the question posed at an earlier stage: what is the effect of the produced spaces of contemporary culture on the trans- mission of cultural memory? Its effect, I want to suggest, is to generate a particular kind of cultural amnesia;" o "We can see, then, that these phenomena are mutually reinforcing and interlocking. The increased scale of human settlement, the production of speed, and the repeated intentional destruction of the built environment, generate a diffuse yet all-encompassing and powerful cultural amnesia; and they are in their turn generated by the capitalist process of production. Modernity, or at least that component of it rep- resented by the economic expansion of the capitalist process of production, produces cultural amnesia not by accident but intrinsically and necessarily. Forgetting is built into the capitalist process of production itself, incorporated in the bodily experience of its life-spaces."

3) Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory

o Chapter 4 § Success of science is due to our ability to work in a disenchanted world in which casual relations are more apparent than in an enchanted world. Wo we want love and we want rationality, but we should be clear about what we get from the one and what we get from the other. In an ethical community it is love, or rather caring, that should reign supreme; in a merely moral community, mere rationality will do. o Chapter 5 § Collective memory has agents and agencies entrusted with preserving and diffusing it. They are concerned with what we should remember and what, if anything, we should forget. · "Given my distinction between ethics and morality as based on the distinction between thick and thin relations (ethics informs our thick relations, morality our thin relations), let me ask, Is what I have here called a moral wit- ness really a moral witness or perhaps an ethical witness? My answer is, he or she is both. The concern with evil as an attack on the very idea of a moral system is indeed a moral concern par excellence. On the other hand, the moral witness as a "witness to the common lot" is most effective and authentic when he or she speaks for the "lot" of victims with a thick identity based on thick relations among them. A moral witness may well give voice to an ethical community that is endangered by an evil force. So, I conclude that we should take the adjective moral in the expression moral witness as systematically ambiguous be- tween ethics and morality." o Chapter 6 § Relation between forgiving and forgetting. · Forgiveness—deeply rooted in religion, and I believe that uncovering these roots is a necessary preliminary step before we can tackle their conceptual analysis. · Are there unforgivable acts? o There is no general duty to forget, not even in the truncated sense of duty to ourselves, since who we are depends on our not forgetting things that happened and that are important in our lives. § The right model for forgiving, both psychologically and ethically, is the covering-up model, not the blotting-out model. What ought to be blotted out is the memory of the emotion in the sense of reliving it, not in the sense of remembering it. · "My last remarks refer to the end-result of a successful course of forgiveness. But the end-result of such a course forgiving and forgetting is not in our hands. Only its beginning is up to us. It de- pends on two elements. The first is adopting, as a policy of behavior, an exclusionary reason to counter reasons for action that are based on the injury done to us. The second element is a second-order desire to overcome our first-order resentment, vengefulness, and insult stemming from that injury."

1) Pierre Nora, "From Lieux de Memoire to Realms of Memory"

o Describes goal of work to study national feeling not in the traditional thematic or chronological manner but instead by analyzing the places in which the collective heritage of France was crystallized, the principal lieux, in all sense of the word, in which collective memory was rooted, in order to create a vast typology of French symbolism. § "a lieu de mémoire is any significant entity, whether material or non-material in nature, which by dint of human will or work of time has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community." · Such as monument to the dead, national symbolism and mythology § In his works, he did a history of France through memory, noting a symbolic unity connecting independent symbolic entities and crafting a national history/memory · Conceived to follow the natural articulations of memory itself, which the historian can only approach by way of its divisions, its real or imaginary continuities, and its symbolic fixations. o "clear distinction between narrative sources, which were viewed as suspect, and archival sources, which were seen as proof positive. For the "methodical" or "positivist" school of historians, this was a critical discontinuity." § Age of historiographical discontinuity

2) Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History"

o History, especially the history of national development, has constituted the oldest of our collective traditions: our quintessential milieu de mémoire. · "History's procurement, in the last century, of scientific methodology has only intensified the effort to establish critically a "true" memory. Every great historical revision has sought to enlarge the basis for collective memory." · "something fundamentally unsettling happens when history begins to write its own history. A historiographical anxiety arises when history assigns itself the task of tracing alien impulses within itself and discovers that it is the victim of memories which it has sought to master" o When history fails to realize that history is memories. The history of history. § "history has entered its historiographical age, consummating its dissociation from memory-which in turn has become a possible object of history." · "The "acceleration of history," then, confronts us with the brutal realization of the difference between real memory-social and unviolated, exemplified in but also retained as the secret of so-called primitive or archaic societies-and history, which is how our hopelessly forgetful modern societies, propelled by change, organize the past." · There has been a move to positivism in history § Les Lieux de Mémoire · Material (demographic content and functionality), Symbolic (since it characterizes), and functional · Created by a play of memory and history, an interaction of the two factors that results in their reciprocal overdetermination. Begins with a will to remember (without it, it would be indistinguishable from lieux d'histoire). o "The lieux we speak of, then, are mixed, hybrid, mutant, bound intimately with life and death, with time and eternity; enveloped in a Mobius strip of the collective and the individual, the sacred and the profane, the immutable and the mobile. For if we accept that the most fundamental purpose of the lieu de memoire is to stop time, to block the work of forgetting, to establish a state of things, to immortalize death, to materialize the immaterial-just as if gold were the only memory of money-all of this in order to capture a maximum of meaning in the fewest of signs, it is also clear that lieux de memoire only exist because of their capacity for metamorphosis, an endless recycling of their meaning and an unpredictable proliferation of their ramifications." · "are simple and ambiguous, natural and artificial, at once immediately available in concrete sensual experience and susceptible to the most abstract elaboration."

1) Amin Shahid, Event, Metaphor, Memory

o Indian intellectual who, in this book, studies one "dramatic" occurrence—the anti-police `riot' of 4 February 1922 in a small market town in north India.` On this violent act hangs my tale of peasant politics and Gandhian nationalism./ · "On 4 February 1922 a crowd of peasants burnt a police station at Chauri Chaura in Uttar Pradesh, killing twenty three policemen. Gandhi's prompt condemnation of this `crime' led to the relocation of this day within the life of the Indian nation.' To be a Gandhian in the spring of 1922, and for some time to come, was to share in an authoritative recollection of this anti-nationalist riot." The police there fired upon a large group of protesters participating in the Non-cooperation movement. In retaliation, the demonstrators attacked and set fire to a police station, which killed all of its occupants. The incident led to the death of three civilians and 22 policemen. Mahatma Gandhi halted the Non-Cooperation Movement on the national level on 12 February 1922 as a direct result of the incident. In spite of Gandhi's decision, 19 arrested demonstrators were sentenced to death and 14 to life imprisonment by the British colonial authorities. o It is typically remembered only as the episode that forced Gandhi to call off his all-India movement of non-cooperation with the British § Elements of this nationalist narration are present in Gandhi's celebrated essay, "The Crime of Chauri Chaura," written soon after the event. Gandhi starts this off by listing the long-standing and immediate provocations behind the riot. In this 'most extraordinary human document his mea culpa, his public confession', Gandhi `thanks God for having humbled him § "Contemporary nationalist tracts have no time for a history of the event, only for its lessons. Authorized post-colonial retellings proffer stereotypical descriptions of colonial violence and nationalist resolve." § He considered crafting an independent narrative, a story that does not have crime for its title. Ultimately, against the dominant nationalist spirit, he was unsuccessful.

3) Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will

o The organization of Conscious States; Free Will § Mechanism, dynamic and free will. For dynamism, faces more real than laws; mechanism reverses this attitude. The idea of spontaneity simpler than that of inertia § Determinism: physical and psychological. Former reducible to latter, which itself rests on inaccurate conception of multiplicity of conscious states or duration. § Principle of conservation of energy implies that a system can return to its original state. Neglects duration, hence inapplicable to living beings and conscious states · Concrete duration vs. abstract time. § The self is not an aggregate of conscious states. Freedom is self-expression, admitting of degrees, and may be curtailed by education § The fundamental error is confusion of time and space. The self-infallible in affirming immediate experience of freedom but can't explain it. § To know completely the antecedents and conditions of an action is to be actually performing it. · Claiming to foresee an action always comes back to confusing time with space o Causality as "regular succession" does not apply to conscious states and cannot disprove free will. § The necessary determination of phenomena implies non-duration; but we endure and are therefore free. Prefiguring, as having an idea of a future act which we cannot realize without effort, does not involve necessary determinism · Freedom is real but undefinable o Conclusions § To understand the intensity, duration and voluntary determination of psychic states, we must eliminate the idea of space. Intensity is quality and not quantity or magnitude. § Our conscious states not discrete multiplicity. Inner duration is qualitative multiplicity. in the external world we find not duration but simultaneity § The idea of measurable time arises from compromise between ideas of succession and externality § As science eliminates duration from the outer, philosophy must eliminate space from the inner world.

2) Peter Burke, "History as Social Memory"

o Two concerns for historians § 1) memory as a historical source, to produce a critique of the reliability of reminiscence on the lines of the traditional critique of historical documents § 2) memory as historical phenomenon with what might be called the social history of remembering. Memories are malleable, and we need to identify how they are shaped and by whom, as well as the limits to this malleability. o Nora 'realms of memory' develop the insights of Halbwachs into the relation between memory and its spatial framework and offering a survey of French history form this point of view. o Memories affected by social organization of transmission and media · Keep in mind, as historians have done, that records are not innocent acts of memory, but rather attempts to persuade, to shape the memory of others. § 1) oral traditions § 2) traditional province of the historian, memoirs and other written 'records' § 3) Images · These include material images constructed in order to assist the retention and transmission of memories—'memorials' such as tombstones, statues, and medals, and 'souvenirs' of various kinds, public monuments—precisely because these monuments both expressed and shaped the national memory § 4) Actions transmit memories as they transmit skill § 5) space—as noted in Halbwachs' study of the social framework of memory · Ex. "The loss of local roots was compensated, to some degree at least, by a more general African · consciousness" o Schema: associated with the tendency to represent - and sometimes to remember - a given event or person in terms of another § Ex. The domination of the second war by the first · Why do myths attach themselves to some individuals (alive or dead) and not others? The existence of schemata does not explain why. In Burke's view, the central element in the explanation of this mythogenesis is the perception (un/conscious) of a 'fit' in some respect(s) between a particular individual and a current stereotype of a hero or villain - ruler, saint, bandit, witch, or whatever.

3) Peter Burke, "History as Social Memory"

o What are the functions of social memory § This includes a relation between place and memory. In addition, the past is used alongside the social memory and myth in order to define identity. § Structural amnesia is the complementary opposite to the concept 'social memory,' so it can be referred to as 'social amnesia' · "Amnesia is related to 'amnesty', to what used to be called 'acts of oblivion', the official erasure of memories of conflict in the interests of social cohesion." o Thus, a multiplicity of social identities, and the coexistence of rival memories, alternative memories (family memories, local memories, class memories, national memories, etc.) it is useful to think in pluralistic terms about the uses of memories to different social groups § Organized oblivion à the official censorship of embarrassing memories o Myths: "differences between past and present are elided, and unintended consequences are turned into conscious aims, as if the main purpose of these past heroes had been to bring about the present - our present. § Writing and print are not powerful enough to stop the spread of myths of this kind. What they can do, however, is to preserve records of the past which are inconsistent with the myths, which undermine them - records of a past which has become awkward and embarrassing, a past which people for one reason or another do not wish to know about, though it might be better for them if they did." Myths are not to be despised but reading them literally is not to recommended.

3) Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory

§ "The essence of time is that it goes by ; time already gone by is the past, and we call the present the instant in which it goes by. But there can be no question here of a mathematical instant...But the real, concrete, live present that of which I speak when I speak of my present perception that present necessarily occupies a duration." · "'my present' has one foot in my past an another in my future." o It is both sensation and movement; and, since my present forms an undivided whole, then the movement must be linked with the sensation, must prolong it in action. It is the materiality of our life; it is unique for each moment of duration—this is to say, a system of sensations and movement, and nothing else. § The difference between actual sensations and pure memory as a mere difference in degree, and not in kind. · "For if the past, which by hypo- thesis is no longer active, can subsist in the form of a weak sensation, there must be sensations that are powerless. If pure memory, which by hypo- thesis interests no definite part of the body, is a nascent sensation, then sensation is not essentially localized in any point of the body." · "Memory actualized in an image differs, then, profound from pure memory. The image is a present state, and its sole share in the past is the memory whence it arose. Memory, on the contrary, powerless as long as it remains without utility, is pure from all admixture of sensation, is without attachment to the present, and is consequently unextended." · "space measured the proximity of a threat or of a promise In time. Thus, space furnishes us at once with the diagram of our near future, and, as this future must recede indefinitely, space which symbolizes it has for it property to remain, in its immobility, indefinitely open. o There is a general idea is always in movement between the plane of action and that of pure memory § Since the body conditions out attention to life, the normal work of the mind must depend on the wholeness of the sensori-motor system o Chapter 4 § The fundamental law of psychical life is the orientation of consciousness towards action o Summary and Conclusion § The body is an instrument of action only · "Memory is something other than a function of the brain, and there is not merely a difference of degree, but of kind, between perception and recollection." · Memory is spirit, not a manifestation of matter

3) Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory

§ Religious Collective memory · The ancient history of people, as it is lied in their traditions, is entirely permeated with religious ideas. o Claim that every religion reproduces in more or less symbolic forms the history of migrations and fusions of races and tribes, of great events, wars, establishments, discoveries, and reforms that we can find at the origin of the societies that practice them. Not the opinion of all scholars of religion § Christianity · It was in effect necessary that Christian morality be guarded and defended by a dogmatic and ritualist armature entirely fashioned of ideas and traditional institutions. Only in this way could it maintain the prestige of a religion. o But religion reproduces the pas tin still another way. Consider the origins or the profound meaning of myths. If we survey the different components of the Christian cult, we realize that each one of them is essentially the commemoration of a period or an event of the life of Christ. § Notable for memory of religious groups: though memories of other groups permeate each other mutually and tend to correspond, the memory of religious groups claims to be fixed § Dogmatics claim to possess and the preserve the meaning and understanding of Christian doctrine because they know how controversial terms, propositions, or symbols have been defined in the past, and also because they possess a general method for defining these today. o In summary, which in Christianity—as within every religion—we must distinguish between rites and beliefs. Rites consist of a body of gestures, words, and liturgical objects established in a material form. From this point of view, the sacred texts have ritual character. They have not changed since the beginning. They are literally repeated during the ceremonies, and they are closely linked to the cult. "although religious memory attempts to isolate itself from temporal society, it obeys the same laws as every collective memory: it does not preserve the past but reconstructs it with the aid of the material traces, rites, texts, and traditions left behind by that past, and with the aid more- over of recent psychological and social data, that is to say, with the present." § In every era, there are projects that society can accomplish better than in any other. o Summary: social beliefs, whatever their origin, have double character. They are collective traditions or recollections, but they are also ideas or conventions that result from a knowledge of the present. Were it purely conventional, social thought would be purely logical. § Social thought is essentially a memory and that its entire content consists only of collective recollection or re-embraces. But only those recollections subsist that in every period society, working within its present-day frameworks, can reconstruct.

2) Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Religion as a Chain of Memory

· "This is not to say that religious memory presents a greater degree of unity and coherence than do other collective forms of memory - family, local, national, and so on. Indeed, Halbwachs has insisted on the highly conflictual character of religious memory, combining, as it al- ways does, a plurality of collective memories in a state of tension one with another. In his opinion, the main cause of conflict lies in the opposition between a rational, dogmatic type of memory (which he calls theological memory) and memory of a mystical nature. The two do not order the relationship with the foundational narrative in which the chain of belief is rooted in the same way. According to Halbwachs, whose position appears to be much influenced by Catholicism, the dogma of a religious group is nothing other than the culmination of a deliberate drive to achieve a unified religious memory:" § "One of the advantages of Halbwachs' analysis of religious memory is to give prominence to the process of rationalization that accompanies the unifying effort of authorized memory. Further, it illuminates the dialectic that develops between the emotive and symbolic evocation of the chain (secured particularly in the liturgy) and the elaboration of a body of belief, adherence to which is the formal condition of access to and participation in the chain. The emotional intensity and symbolic richness in the ritual evocation of the chain may vary considerably, in the same way as does the degree of explicitness and formality of shared beliefs in the community of the faithful in which the chain is actualized. But this dialectic, which one can see as tradition in the act of becoming itself, constitutes in our opinion the central dynamic of all religion."

2) Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember

· Three classes of memory claim: o 1) personal memory: acts of remembering that take as their object one's life history o 2) cognitive memory: covers uses of 'remember' where we may be said to remember the meaning o words, or lines of verse, or jokes, or stories, or that layout of a city, or mathematical equations, or truths of logic, or facts about the future. Different than the first because is not the object of memory be something that is past, but that the person who remembers that thing must have met, experience or learned of it in the past. o 3) habit memory: having the capacity to reproduce a certain performance. § Bergson distinguishes between habit memory and the kind that consists of recollection (knowledge/true memory) · Freud in 1914 essay "remembering, Repeating, and Working Through" o "Freud introduces the topic of transference: a phenomenon which he discusses mainly in terms of the relation between analyst and analysand because, although certainly not confined to this relation, the behavior of acting out is observable directly and in great detail within the analytical space." · Coding: semantic code (hierarchically by topic) verbal (preps for verbal expression), visual code (items translated into images) o "By deploying binary contrasts between heavy/light, rough/smooth, hard/soft, any piece of cloth becomes a particular combi- nation of textural qualities; what is here produced, again, is a set of propositions concerning age, sex, activity, class, time and place" · "There is, as it were, a gap between the two terms which are here analogously employed: a gap between rule and application, and a gap between code and execution. This gap must, I shall suggest, be reclaimed by a theory of habitual practice, and, therefore, of habit-memory" o "The habit-memory - more precisely, the social habit-memory - of the subject is not identical with that subject's cognitive memory of rules and codes; nor is it simply an additional or supplementary aspect; it is an essential ingredient in the successful and convincing performance of codes and rules." o Note Halbwachs contributions: "argued that it is through their membership of a social group - particularly kinship, religious and class affiliations - that individuals are able to acquire, to localize and to recall their memories." § "notice that, most commonly, we appeal to our memory in order to reply to questions which others put to us, or which we imagine that they could ask us, and, in order to reply to them, we envisage ourselves as forming part of the same group or groups as they do" · "Every recollection, however personal it may be, even that of events of which we alone were the witnesses, even that of thoughts and sentiments that remain unexpressed, exists in relationship with a whole ensemble of notions which many others possess: with persons, places, dates, words, forms of language, that is to say with the whole material and moral life of the societies of which we are part or of which we have been part." o This applies to recent and distant memories à though not continuous in time, both they form part of a whole ensemble of thoughts common to a group, to the groups with which we are in a relationship at present or have been in some connection in the recent past. § "He cited Comte's remark that our mental equilibrium is, first and foremost, due to the fact that the physical objects with which we are in daily contact change little or not at all, so providing us with an image of permanence and stability; and he went on to show how no collective memory can exist without reference to a socially specific spatial framework. That is to say, our images of social spaces, because of their relative stability, give us the illusion of not changing and of rediscovering the past in the present. We conserve our recollections by referring them to the material milieu that surrounds us. It is to our social spaces - those which we occupy, which we frequently retrace with our steps, where we always have access, which at each moment we are capable of mentally reconstructing - that we must turn our attention, if our memories are to reappear. Our memories are located within the mental and material spaces of the group" § Thus claims that Halbwachs explicitly rejected the separation of two questions: how does the individual preserve and rediscover memories? Who declares that the ides of an individual memory, absolutely separate from social memory, is an abstraction almost devoid of meaning. · "My point in focussing on this particular example is to emphasise the fact that to study the social formation of memory is to study those acts of transfer that make remembering in common possible. I mean to isolate and consider in more detail certain acts of transfer that are to be found in both traditional and modern societies. In doing this I wish to lay stress on particular types of repetition; whereas some dominant trends in contemporary social theory are often criticized on the ground that they do not address, or address inadequately, the fact of social change, I shall seek to highlight the way in which such theories are often defective because they are unable to treat adequately the fact of social persistence. It is to this end that 1 have singled out, as acts of transfer of crucial importance, commemorative ceremonies, and bodily practices. As we have seen, these are by no means the only constituents of communal memory; for the production of informally told narrative histories is both a basic activity for our everyday characterization of human actions and a feature of all social memory. But I have seized upon commemorative ceremonies and bodily practices in particular because it is the study of these, I want to argue, that leads us to see that images of the past and recollected knowledge of the past are conveyed and sustained by (more or less ritual) performances."