Screen Memory - Department of English

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ongoing engagement than passive absorption and playback” (Lambeck 1996:239). Many of the terms are not transferable, so we are warned to keep collective memory free from the taint of psychoanalysis. “The concept of trauma, as well as the concept of repression,” Wulf Kansteiner writes, “neither captures nor illuminates the forces that contribute to the making and unmaking of collective memories” (187). Nancy Wood reminds us that while personal memory is governed by the laws of the unconscious public memory “testifies to a will or desire on the part of some social group or disposition of power to select and organize representations of the past” (2). But even studies that warn us to avoid psychologizing collective memory, Klein points out, “do precisely this: “Freudian vocabularies are far more common than 4 Halbwachsian or even Lacanian ones” (135). Historians like Anne Rigney insist that a collective memory with no analogical relationship to personal memory can be theorized. It is not the only instance of a memory without rememberers. Mikhail Bakhtin attributed this facility to language (“Our practices and language remember,” he wrote) and Warburg to imagery (Cole 27). 5 Like memory itself, collective memory has a range of meanings: it can refer to the fact that our memories are woven out of social strands (shared items of knowledge and experience, the nature of language itself, etc.); it can simply mean that memories can be validated and fleshed out through social 7
exchange; or, at the other extreme, it can refer to the process by which memories suture the rememberer into particular social groups. In the case of language particularly, the individual speaker is always being colonized by the group, already inhabited by the other; our experience is not the unmediated reality we believe it to be. Our memories are filled with alien contents, for example, other people’s recollections passing as our own, For Hamlet, memories are not individual possessions but shared commonplaces: Yea, from the table of my memory I'll wipe away all trivial fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, That youth and observation copied there” (877). Halbwachs insisted that people inhabit a social arena when they remember: . . . it is in society that people normally acquire their memories. It is also in society that they recall, recognize, and localize their memories . . . . if we examine a little more closely how we recollect things, we will surely realize that the greatest number of memories come back to us when our parents, our friends, or other persons recall them to us (1992:38). We have as many kinds of memory as there are groups that we belong to, and these groups inflect their common memories in 8
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Page 7 and 8: on her head and a children's nurse.
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Page 11 and 12: phantasy of this kind tends to slip
Page 13 and 14: was closely related to other psycho
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Page 17 and 18: Freud and Josef Breuer worked with
Page 19 and 20: A deeply mystical version of memory
Page 21 and 22: in every part of the body, even in
Page 23: example, Yosef Yerushalmi--“Just
Page 27 and 28: private; it is “constructed along
Page 29 and 30: traumatic events that can be neithe
Page 31 and 32: 37). Libraries and museums are the
Page 33 and 34: American conservatives fashioned a
Page 35 and 36: Freedom of Information Act, the Fed
Page 37 and 38: comforting illusion was shattered b
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Page 43 and 44: egime change is familiar television
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Page 47 and 48: past” (Davis 1989:2). According t
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Screen Memory - Department of English

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