Memory & Geography
The relationship between memory - neurological, cultural, collective - and geography is a key site of struggle. My own interest in this topic comes from a 2000 essay from the Palestinian-American cultural critic, Edward Said in the excellent journal Critical Inquiry. The first page can bee seen here:
Said goes on to articulate the concept “invention of tradition,” which he describes as “a method for using collective memory selectively by manipulating certain bits of the national past, suppressing others, elevating still others in an entirely functional way. Thus memory is not necessarily authentic, but rather useful” (2000, p. 179). We can apply the invention of tradition to almost any organized project related to memory, from holiday celebrations unfolding now (including invented traditions like the USD Christmas tree lighting) to poetics particularly tied to national identity (the pledge of allegiance, Thanksgiving, pilgrimages, etc).
Let’s take a look at Frontline’s recent report: A Year of War: Israelis and Palestinians
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A. HISTORICAL TENSIONS
Today we are talking about reality-based media concerned with history and memory. Why do these topics seem important in the culture? Why might they seem unimportant? It is important to begin with this assertion: history is the site of political and ideological struggle.
According to Raymond Williams (from his book KEYWORDS), History is more than, though it includes, organized knowledge of the past. It is not easy either to date or define this, but the source is probably the sense of history as human-self development which is evident from the eC18 in Vico and in the new kinds of Universal Histories. Past events are seen, in this sense, as not specific histories, but as an ongoing, continuous, connected processes. Moreover, given the stress on human self-development, history in many of these uses loses its exclusive association with the past and becomes connected not only to the present but also to the future.
History in its modern sense draws on several kinds of intellectual sources (the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and Marxism). This modern sense is a study of historical forces -- products of the past which are active in the present and will shape the future in knowable ways.
There are tensions between these varying forms of the sense of process, and between all of the and those who continue to regard history as an account, or a series of accounts, of actual past events, in which no necessary design, or sometimes alternatively no necessary implication for the future, can be discerned.
THE FICTIONS OF FACT
"What is at issue here is not, What are the facts? but rather, How are the facts to be described in order to sanction one mode of explaining them rather than another?" (p. 134).
White begins by arguing at the outset that "Historical events differ from fictional events in the ways that it has been conventional to characterize their differences since Aristotle. Historians are concerned with events which can be assigned to specific time-space locations, events which are (or were) in principle observable or perceivable, whereas imaginative writers - poets, novelists, playwrights - are concerned with both these kinds of events and imagined, hypothetical, or invented ones." (p. 121). White argues that what should interest us is this "fictions of factual representation" - to what extent the discourses of the historian and that of the "imaginative writer overlap"
CORRESPONDENCE
History must adhere to both correspondence and coherence. "Whether the events represented in a discourse are constructed as atomic parts or as possible occurrences within a perceivable totality, the discourse taken in its totality as an image of some reality bears a relationship of correspondence to that of which it is an image. This is true of even the most seemingly expressive discourse - of poetry no less than of prose, and even of those forms of poetry which seem to wish to illuminate only 'writing' of itself. IN THIS RESPECT, HISTORY IS NO LES A FORM OF FICTION THAN THE NOVEL IS A FORM OF HISTORICAL REPRESENTATION". (p. 122)
FACT VERSUS FICTION
White goes on from here to trace the history of the idea, of how the opposition of history to fiction arose. Pre-French revolutionary historiography considered the RHETORICAL function : "THE IMAGINATION NO LESS THAN THE REASON HAS TO BE ENGGED IN ANY ADEQUATE REPRESENTATION OF THE TRUTH; and this meant that he techniques of fiction-making were as necessary to the composition of a historical discourse as fiction might be." Together with other projects of the empiricist paradigm, historiography became "the realistic science par excellence, was set over against fiction as the study of the real versus the study f the merely imaginable." (p. 124).
Further, "Historians continued to believe that different interpretations of the same set of events were functions of ideological distortion or of inadequate factual data. THEY DID NOT REALIZE THAT HE FACTS DO NOT SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES, BUT THAT THE HISTORIAN SPEAKS FOR THEM, SPEAKS ON THEIR BEHALF, AND FASHIONS THE FRAGMENTS OF THE PAST INTO A WHOLE WHOSE INTEGRITY IS - IN ITS REPRESENTATION - A PRUELY DISCURSIVE ON. The process of fusing events, whether imaginary or real, into a comprehensible totality capable of serving as the object of a representation is a POETIC PROCESS" (P. 125). Linguists understand this, but it hasn't completely reached the historians buried deep in the archives. White argues, thus today, that we no longer need to believe that fiction is the antithesis of fact. Indeed, poetizing "represents a mode of praxis which serves as the immediate base of all cultural activity...even of science itself" (p. 126).
GETTING THE STORY STRAIGHT
Modern historiography has become merely "get the story straight." But there are serious consequences of this separation of the factual from the real.
Modern historiography has resulted in the repression of the conceptual apparatus of the historian. Without this, atomic facts cannot be articulated into complex stories within a historical narrative. There has also been a remission of the poetic moment in historical writing. This has been pushed back into the interior of historical discourse, where it works unacknowledged, and therefore cannot be criticized. “Those historians who draw a firm line between history and philosophy of history fail to recognize that every historical discourse contains within it a full-blown, if only implicit, philosophy of history” (126-127). We call this historiography. Is this also the case of journalism?
MEMORY STUDIES
As Zelizer discusses, there is a whole field of study that interrogates the politics and processes of memory. She writes, “unlike personal memory, which refers to an individual’s ability to conserve information, the collective memory comprises recollections of the past that are determined and shaped by the group. By definition, collective memory thereby presumes activities of sharing, discussion, negotiation, and, often, contestation.” (p. 214).
What are some good examples of collective memory?
MEMORY & HISTORY
Zelizer argues that memory studies has had a profound impact in the study of historiography, as we’ve discussed. Sympathetic historiographers refer to collective memory as more mobile and mutable that official history. “They have thus come to refer broadly to its being a kind of history in motion.” (p. 216).
Other scholars refer to how collective memory “vibrates” – it is in touch with the past as much as its alive in the present (it constitutes the past within the present). IN this way,we move from the notion that memory is some kind of thing to be recounted, and into the notion that within the processes and politics of memory, issues such as social identity, authority, solidarity, and political affiliation are at play.
Zelizer writes, “the study of collective memory, then, is much more than the unidimensional study of the past. It represents a graphing of the past as it is used for the present aims, a vision in bold relief of the past as it is woven into the present and the future.” (p. 217)
PREMISES FOR COLLECTIVE REMEMBERING
• Processual – there is no beginning and end, but an ongoing process or remembering and forgetting.
In this way, memory fuses recollection (establishing a relationship with the past) and commemoration (reproduces the past for aims in the present). The processural nature of memory accounts for the changes in how we remember
• Unpredictable – the past is sutured together in unpredictable ways
• Memory & Time – time recreates memories. Zelizer refers to “retrospective nominalization, where earlier events are re-named in light of later events (WWI).
• Memory & Space
• Partial
• Usable
• Particular and Universal
• Material
CULTURAL MEMORY AND GEOGRAPHY
If history and journalism are problematic in their cherished role of reproducing the truth, where does this leave more fluid concepts like memory? Have you ever witnessed a struggle over memory? Two situated studies of memory will help us understand how the struggles over geography are necessarily intertwined with the struggles over memory.
POPULAR/CULTURAL MEMORY
Memory is something in the culture that is screened and commodified in the culture. This has been linked to many factors (Paul Grainge, CFP):
• The emergence and growth of markets for memory and the heritage industry
• New technologies of digital reproduction
• A postmodern representational economy of cultural recycling
(Grainge continues) “In a time when it is claimed that meta-narratives of history and progress have, themselves, been severely undermined, and when the past has become increasingly subject to cultural mediation, textual reconfiguration, and ideological contestation in the present, memory has developed a new discursive significance”
We can define popular or cultural memory as: "cultural memory is a field of cultural negotiation through which different stories vie for a place in history." (Marita Sturken)
PALESTINE AND ISRAEL
Said addresses the growth of memory and geography studies, and especially focuses on the role in invention in the constitution of dominant notions of nation. He mentions that the search for memory has to do with the dissolution of certainties in the present (family, etc.). Said argues that in order to come to a more complex understanding of the conflict in the Middle East, we have to understand the role of invention and landscape in memory and geography. The Palestinians have never realized the need to create a narrative history, which is an interesting point considering the discourse of Aztlán. Said brilliantly comes up with a way of using the notion of invention to solve the Middle East problem: get them to see each other’s stories in light of one another.
MEMORY AND NATION
Further, Said writes, “Memory and its representations touch very significantly upon questions of identity, of nationalism, of power and authority. Far from being a neutral exercise in facts and basic truths, the study of history, which of course is the underpinning of memory, both in school and university, is to some extent a nationalist effort premised on the need to construct a desirable loyalty to the insider’s understanding of one’s country, tradition, and faith” (176).
National identity becomes important here (how memories of the past are shaped in accordance with a certain notion of what “we” or, for that matter, “they” really are): “National identity always involves narratives – of the nation’s past, its founding fathers and documents, seminal events, and so on. But these narratives are never undisputed or merely a matter of the neutral recital of facts” (177). As an example, the celebration of Columbus is used, and different collective memories are cited.
INVENTIONS
Over the past decade, there has been a burgeoning interest in two over-lapping areas of the humanities and social sciences: memory and geography or, more specifically, the study of human space (175). In addition, and somewhat on the margins, as been a serious, sometimes bitter inquiry into the authenticity of certain memories, as well as, at the other, calmer end of the spectrum, a remarkable academic analysis of the role of invention in such matters as tradition and collective historical experience” (175).
Said writes about how this problem of invention unfolds in different nations (The Assassins of Memory), including at the Smithsonian in the U.S.: “these controversies raise the question not only of what is remembered but how and in what form. It is an issue about the very fraught nature of representation, not just about content” (176).
Considering the mediated cultural environment, invention has a very important role here as people look to render their own histories in the face of a complicated and media-saturated cultural environment. Said cites effectively examples from Terence Ranger’s edited book, The Invention of Tradition. “the invention of tradition was a practice very much used by authorities as an instrument of rule in mass societies when the bonds of small social units like village and family were dissolving and authorities need to find other ways of connecting a large number of people to each other” (179).
People now look to this refashioned memory, especially in its collective forms, to give themselves a coherent identity, a national narrative, a place in the world, though…the processes of memory are frequently, if not always, manipulated and intervened in for sometimes urgent purposes in the present.” (179). Order is maintained in memory, Said argues: “The modern art of memory is much more subject to inventive reordering and re-deploying” (180).
STRUGGLES IN THE MIDDLE EAST
As for geography (“a socially constructed and maintained sense of place”) sites of place are over-determined when it comes to memory. “Geography stimulates not only memory but dreams and fantasies, poetry and painting, philosophy…fiction…and music” (181).
Regarding the Middle East, “I want to argue that we can go behind the headlines and the repetitively reductive media accounts of the Middle East conflict and discern there a much more interesting and subtle conflict that what is customarily talked about. Only by understanding that a special mix of geography generally and landscape in particular with historical memory, and…and arresting form of invention can we begin to grasp the persistence of conflict and the difficulty of resolving it, a difficulty that is far too complex and grand than the current peace process could possibly envisage, let alone resolve (183).
In Said’s conclusion, he points toward “what the interplay among memory, place, and invention can do if its is not to be used for the purposes of exclusion, that is, if it is to be used for liberation and coexistence between societies whose adjacency requires a tolerable form of sustained reconciliation”(191).“ There can be no possible reconciliation, no possible solution unless these two communities confront each’s experience in the light of the other” (192).