Screen Memory - Department of English

Collective amnesia
Amnesia was also pluralized in the twentieth century, when
it came to be regarded as a social disease. Modernity and
postmodernity are said to carry heavy charges of it, so much so
that we are frequently told that we have now lost our sense of
the past. John Frow describes postmodernity as “the time of a
fall from . . . history into amnesia” (218). But Marx and his
followers had already written amnesia into the psychology of
capitalism: “Ideology and amnesia have long been linked,”
Nicholas Dames writes, “from Lukács’s analyses of the structural
forgetting embedded in reification to Althusser’s well-known
argument that ideology ‘has no history’” (2001:17). “All
reification is a forgetting,” Adorno and Horkheimer had declared,
and Herbert Marcuse announced (after Adorno) that “the spectre of
man without memory . . . is more than an aspect of decline–-it is
necessarily linked with the principle of progress in bourgeois
society” (Jay 229 and 234).
Earlier, the historical novel of Scott and Hugo was often
occasioned by an inability (in Waverley and Nôtre-Dame de Paris)
to find any signs of the past in the present as a result of
radical social change. The absence of memorial signs produces the
amnesia that Eliot described in Silas Marner: “Minds that have
been unhinged from their old faith and love have perhaps sought
this Lethean influence of exile in which the past becomes dreamy
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