Memory Work: Resources

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This page will contribute to development of this useful concept essential for reconciliation if not forgiveness. I intend to solidly maintain and update relevant webliographic and bibliographic sources using del.icio.us, wink, icerocket for the urls and EndNote authoring software for bibliographies. I am exploring the use of zotero a freeware bibliographic database. I have worked with EndNote since the early 1990s so EN knows me better than I do.

 

Memory work

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Memory work is a process of engaging with the past which has both an ethical and historical dimension (Gabriel 2004). The premise for memory work or travail de memoire is that history is not memory. We try to represent the past in the present through memory, history and the archives. As Ricoeur (1955 [1965], 2000) argued, memory alone is fallible. Historical accounts are always partial and potentially misrepresent since historians do not work with bare, uninterpreted facts. Historians construct and use archives that contain traces of the past. However, historians and librarians determine which traces are preserved and stored. This is an interpretive activity. Historians pose questions to which the archives responds leading them to “facts that can be asserted in singular, discrete propositions that usually include dates, places, proper names, and verbs of action or condition” (Ricoeur 2000:226). Individuals remember events and experiences some of which they share with a collective. Through mutual reconstruction and recounting collective memory is reconstructed. Individuals are born into familial discourse which already provides a backdrop of communal memories against which individual memories are shaped. A group’s communal memory becomes its common knowledge which creates a social bond, a sense of belonging and identity. Professional historians attempt to corroborate, correct, or refute collective memory. Memory work then entails adding an ethical component which acknowledges the responsibility towards revisiting distorted histories thereby decreasing the risk of social exclusion and increasing the possibility of social cohesion of at-risk groups.

The concept of memory-work as distinguished from history-as-memory finds a textbook case in the Vichy Syndrome as described by Russo (1991). His title uses medical lexicon to refer to history-memory as dependent on working consciously with unconscious memories to revise accounts of history. This calls for an expanded archive that includes the “oral and popular tradition” (Gabriel 2004:11) as well as the written traditions normally associated with the archives.

Nora (2002) traced the surge in memory work at the level of the nation-state to the revisiting of distorted histories of the anti-Semitic Vichy regime (1940-1944) following the death of de Gaulle in 1970. Structural changes resulted from the end of the peasantry and the dramatic economic slump as oil prices worldwide rose in 1974. Added to this was the intellectual collapse of Marxism precipitated in part by Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago which forced the French to rethink attitudes towards the past.

Gabriel (2004) provided a model for reading the complexities of memory and forgetting by situating unheimlich within the heimlich, in a Freudian ‘one within the other structure’. As point of departure Gabriel examined Edgar Reitz’s eleven-part West German television series entitled Heimat. Reitz’ work was in response to a larger movement in Germany national memory work provoked in part by an American television series entitled the Holocaust followed viewed by millions. As European art in general and German art in particular resurged in the 1960s, artists like Gunther Grass and Edgar Reitz captured international attention as they grappled with issues of identity in a divided, post-Holocaust Germany. Gabriel developed the concept of an impulse towards national memory work in Germany that stemmed from a haunted subject yearning for a lost, far away, nostalgic place, a utopic homeland. “How do we confront that which we have excluded in order to be, whether it is the return of the repressed or the return of the strangers?” (Kristeva 1982). In other words, that which we fear as ‘other’ is within ourselves through our shared humanity. Repressed memories haunt all of us.

The concept of memory work is part of a sociological imagination from a post-national point of view. Expanding on Norbert Loeffler: The idea of one national history is only acceptable as a question, not as an answer.

Memory work is related to identity work often associated with displaced persons. Some of the most provocative research on memory work (Derrida, Cixous, Kristeva) has been authored by French ex-patriots who returned to France following the Algerian war of independence.
–Oceanflynn 06:39, 1 November 2006 (UTC)
References:

Cixous, Hélene. 1997. Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing: Routledge

Derrida, Jacques. 1996. Archive Fever. Translated by E. Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Derrida, Jacques. (1986) Memoires for Paul de Man, Columbia University Press.

Gabriel, Barbara. 2004. “The Unbearable Strangeness of Being; Edgar Reitz’s Heimat and the Ethics of the Unheimlich” in Postmodernism and the Ethical Subject, edited by B. Gabriel and S. Ilcan. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror. New York: University Press.

Kristeva, Julie (1993) Nations without Nationalism, trans. L. S. Roudiez (Yale University Press, 1993)

Nora, Pierre. 2002. “The Reasons for the Current Upsurge in Memory.” Tr@nsit-Virtuelles Forum.22 Retrieved Access 2002. http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2002-04-19-nora-en.html

Ricoeur, Paul. 1955 [1965]. History and Truth. Translated by C. A. Kelbley. Evanston: Northwestern University press.

Ricoeur, Paul. 2000. La Mémoire, l’Historie, l’Oubli: l’ordre philosophique: Éditions du Seuil. http://www.theology.ie/thinkers/RicoeurMem.htm

Russo, Henry. 1991. The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944. Translated by A. Goldhammer. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press.

I write using EndNote so this was the original entry I had added for Barbara Gabriel whose article opened so many doors for me:

In her brilliant article entitled “The Unbearable Strangeness of Being; Edgar Reitz’s Heimat and the Ethics of the Unheimlich” Barbara Gabriel provides a model for reading the complexities of memory and forgetting. As point of departure Gabriel examined Edgar Reitz’s eleven-part West German television series entitled Heimat. Reitz’ work was in response to a larger movement in Germany national memory-work provoked in part by an American television series entitled the Holocaust followed viewed by millions.

In the section entitled “Tropes of Purity and Danger”Barbara Gabriel (2004:165, 197) illustrated how a model of homogeneity depends on a constituent outside. In this essay Gabriel revealed how the concept of heimat resists interpretation. Freud situated the unheimlich within the heimlich, one within the other structure. Freud argued that the heimlich and unheimlich are doubles, not antimonies or opposites which slip and slide inside one another through different shades of meanings explored through Freudian recurrence and return, the haunted house, the double, death and the death drive, enucleation as castration, the prostitute and the primordial uncanny as maternal womb. which a closed meaning so that the haunted subject can continue to yearn for the lost, far away, nostalgic place keep the potential of a utopic homeland footnotes the way in which Kristeva (1982) introduced a diachronic register by mapping theory onto historical subjects. Kristeva created a synthesis between the work of Bataille and Mary Douglas. Douglas’s symbolic anthropological approach resisted the diachronic. Models of homogeneity depend on a constituent outside.

“Recent cultural theory around abjection moves deconstruction as well as psychoanalytic readings around the relationship between insides and outsides onto the category of social subjects (see Butler [1990, 1993]). Kristeva’s (1982) own analyses bring together the work of Mary Douglas and Bataille; what is new here, arguably, is the mapping of the theory onto the domain of historical subjects, shifting the synchronic work of anthropology into a diachronic register in ways ignored by Douglas’s pioneering work. I am indebted to Matti Bunzi for the insight that symbolic anthropology was long resistant to historical frameworks.”
“How do we confront that which we have excluded in order to be, whether it is the return of the repressed or the return of the stangers?” Cited in Gabriel, Barbara 2004

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This is a customized focused Google search that I initiated October 31, 2006 and am maintaining on the emerging useful concept of “Memory Work.” I am maintaining a parallel focused search of “Memory Work” through swicki.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike 2.5 License

Tags: memory work, Derrida, reconciliation, forgetting, Freud, psychoanalysis, ethics, history, Post-WWII

Selected references on “Memory Work”: (draft: first upload unedited November 8, 2006)

Benn, Melissa, (1987), “In and against the European Left: Socialist Feminists Get Organized,” Feminist Review, No. 26 (Summer, 1987), pp. 83-90. keywords: Haug, Frigga, memory work,

Burrett, Deborah. 2004. “Censorship, Controversy and Situated Knowledges.” Pp. 125-148 in Postmodernism and the Ethical Subject, edited by B. Gabriel and S. Ilcan. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Chancer, Lynn, (1994), Review of Haug, Frigga, Beyond Female Masochism: Memory Work and Politics,” Contemporary Sociology, 23:1: 55-6 (Jan., 1994).

Cixous, Hélene. 1997. Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing: Routledge. http://www.sas.ac.uk/irs/Postgraduate/MACulturalMemory/corecourse_03-04/memory-work_and_dramas.htm

Crean, Susan. 1991a. “Taking the Missionary Position.” This. 4:23-8. Retrieved Access 1991a.

—. 1991b. “Taking the Missionary Position.” Pp. 119-128 in Racism in Canada. Saskatoon: Fifth House Publishers.

Derrida, Jacques. 1986. Memoires for Paul de Man: Columbia University Press.

—. 1994. “Jacques Derrida interviewed by Elisabeth Weber, Jüdisches Denken in Frankreich.”77-8. Retrieved Access 1994. http://www.hydra.umn.edu/derrida/deman.html

Dick, Kirby and Amy Ziering Kofman. 2004. Derrida the Movie: Jane Doe Films. http://www.derridathemovie.com/readings.html

Gabriel, Barbara. 2004. “The Unbearable Strangeness of Being; Edgar Reitz’s Heimat and the Ethics of the Unheimlich.” Pp. 150-202 in Postmodernism and the Ethical Subject, edited by B. Gabriel and S. Ilcan. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Haug, Frigga, Ed. (1987) Female Sexualization: a Collective Work of Memory, London: Verso.

Haug, Frigga, (1992), Beyond Female Masochism, Verso, London.

Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror. New York: University Press.

—. 1993. Nations without Nationalism. Translated by L. S. Roudiez: Yale University Press. http://www.sas.ac.uk/irs/Postgraduate/MACulturalMemory/corecourse_03-04/memory-work_and_dramas.htm

Moltke, Johannes von and Julia Hell. 1999. “Ten Years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall.” in Ten Years After the Unification Effect: A U-M Conference Looks at the “Berlin Republic” http://www.umich.edu/~iinet/journal/vol8no1/Moltke-Hell.htm

Nora, Pierre. 2002. “The Reasons for the Current Upsurge in Memory.” Tr@nsit-Virtuelles Forum.22 Retrieved Access 2002. http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2002-04-19-nora-en.html

Räthzel, Nora, (1994), “monious Heimat and Disturbing Auslander,” Feminism and Psychology, Vol. 4:1:81-98. Institut fur Migrations-und Rassismus forschung in Hamburg.

RCAP. 1996. Report on the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples http://www.ainc-inac.gc.ca/ch/rcap/sg/sgmm_e.html

Reitz, Edgar. 1984-2006. “Heimat: Eine deutsche Chronik (Homeland: A German Chronicle).” West Germany: West German television. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0718671/

Russo, Henry. 1991. The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944. Translated by A. Goldhammer. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press.

Sammons, Susan, (1999), “Memory and History in Nunavut,” International Arctic Social Sciences Association, Retrieved Access 1999-.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander. 1975. Gulag Archipelago

Sowa, John F. 2000-1. Ontology, Metadata, and Semiotics http://users.bestweb.net/~sowa/peirce/ontometa.htm

Sources for visualization of brain synapses re: memory as metaphor

Johnson, Graham (2006) Visualization of Brain Synapse Medical Media, Boulder, Colorado. http://www.sciencemag.org/sciext/vis2005/show/ssintro.dtl Accessed September 2006.

Deep inside the brain, a neuron prepares to transmit a signal to its target. To capture that fleeting moment, Graham Johnson based this elegant drawing on ultra-thin micrographs of sequential brain slices. After scanning a sketch into 3D modeling software, he colored the image and added texture and glowing lighting reminiscent of a scanning electron micrograph.