Screen Memory - Department of English

More documents

Recommendations

Info

Commemoration is only one of the systems designed to anchor national memory; another is censorship, socially dictated forgetting, which may be even more important. Ernest Renan laid this rule down: Forgetting, and I would even say historical error, are essential factors in the creation of a nation; in this, the progress of historical studies is often a danger for nationalité. Historical investigation, in effect, brings to light facts of violence which took place at the origin of all political formations, even those whose consequences were the most beneficial. Unity is always brutally created (Matsuda 206). Renan further pointed out that there was a fundamental procedural forgetting that holds the people of a nation in place: they “forget that they are not inevitable and that their internal fissures may be as significant as their external boundaries” (Olick 117). Although empires have been systematically obliterated and lost to memory (e.g., the Incas), the “tyrants of the twentieth century,” Todorov writes, seek “to capture memory systematically and to bring even its most secret repositories under control . . . . The traces of what once existed have been either erased or doctored or transformed, lies and inventions replace reality” 13 (2003:113 and 11). The image of a toppling statue following a 25
egime change is familiar television fare: The Chinese communist government tried to destroy all places of memory, “such as temples and monasteries, after the occupation of Tibet in 1951" (Misztal 18). Is this so different from the digital removal of the World Trade Center from television and movies? Milan Kundera offers the following wry example of a doctored image: “After the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in February of 1948 the fur hat on Party leader Klement Gottwald’s head was the only trace that remained of former Foreign Minister Vlado Clementis because it had started to snow and he gave Gottwald his hat” (Sayer 76). Censorship has become an all-embracing policy for nations; the modern landscape is pocked with absences and disappeared people, monuments, histories, images. Contemporary states monitor memory in an ongoing way in the name of national security and engage in techniques of disinformation. In George Orwell’s 1984, Winston Smith puts facts that are embarrassing to the present conduct of the state down a “memory hole” (188). Czech writer Ivan Klíma notes that “In our country, everything is forever being remade: beliefs, buildings, and street names” (Sayer 76- 77). One of the more extraordinary stories of memory manipulation came out of the Korean War, under the name of brainwashing. Brainwashing was one of several imaginary events that made the writing of cold war history possible; it was a phantasmal rediscovery of state force which America used to frighten itself with during the early 1950s. According to Robert J. Lifton, 26
Page 1 and 2: Screen Memory At just the moment Pr
Page 3 and 4: they also tell a relatively insigni
Page 5 and 6: No one calls in question the fact t
Page 7 and 8: on her head and a children's nurse.
Page 9 and 10: I have at my disposal a fair number
Page 11 and 12: phantasy of this kind tends to slip
Page 13 and 14: was closely related to other psycho
Page 15 and 16: (Bogaç 73). 8 There is another sys
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 and 24: example, Yosef Yerushalmi--“Just
Page 25 and 26: exchange; or, at the other extreme,
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
Page 39 and 40: Collective amnesia Amnesia was also
Page 41: family portrait galleries” and
Page 45 and 46: material of history. Whether mental
Page 47 and 48: past” (Davis 1989:2). According t
Page 49 and 50: econfigures) the past into a form t
Page 51 and 52: 2003:211). Nora states that “Memo
Page 53 and 54: LaCapra history is a corrective to
Page 55 and 56: that is expressed by it were both b
Page 57 and 58: South Africa, the writer Njabulo Nd
Page 59 and 60: therefore by its very nature could
Page 61 and 62: Philosophy of History," he wrote th
Page 63 and 64: where “an extreme threshold or ou
Page 65 and 66: with community, as Halbwachs propos
Page 67 and 68: ut its literature contained extensi

Screen Memory - Department of English

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?