Screen Memory - Department of English

37).
Libraries and museums are the great repositories of
collective memory. Cinema, television, and now the internet are
the most powerful agents in its construction and dissemination,
although this non-confrontational, semi-conscious, non-
referential, and decentralized process is extremely
difficult to reconstruct after the fact . . . . The
media of representation tend to disappear from the
consciousness of the audience in the process of
consumption. Radio listeners, for instance, regularly
forget the source of their memories . . . and often
attach them to other sources” (Kansteiner 194-95).
If memory constructs subjectivity for the individual it
offers a corresponding group identity to the collective in which
it is somehow archived. Collective memory is the glue that holds
groups and societies together. The cultivation of certain texts,
images, objects, and rituals “serves to stabilize and convey that
society’s self-image,” and this allows a society to become
visible to itself and others (Assmann 1995:132). Jan Assmann
calls this form of memory “bonding memory,” and finds its
theoreticion to be Nietzsche: “Just as Halbwachs has shown that
people need bonds in order to develop a memory, Nietzsche has
shown that people need a memory in order to be able to form
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bonds” (2006:5). It is the form of memory incorporated into the
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