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1 Things to Remember
Introduction to Materializing Memory in Art and Popular Culture
LĂĄszlĂł MunteĂĄn, Liedeke Plate, and Anneke Smelik
But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
âMarcel Proust (1956, pp. 57â58)
Stuff matters.
âDaniel Miller (2010, p. 125)
Dipping a âPetite Madeleineâ in a Cup of Linden Tea
From Pierre Noraâs lieux de mĂ©moire and its many successor projects across the European and American continents to Raphael Samuelâs (2012) âtheaters of memoryâ, the literature on memory intimates that remembering is entangled with things. This entanglement of memory with materiality can be illustrated by the souvenir that people buy as a memento on their travels; objects we keep so that they will remind us of a particular time, place, or situation we wish to remember. Built so as to make people remember, monuments and memorials further exemplify the interrelation of memory and materiality. Plaques commemorating writers and artists, statues of kings and politicians are a case in point. Perhaps the most famous literary example of this entanglement is the episode in Marcel Proustâs Ă la recherche du temps perdu, when, dipping a âlittle madeleineâ cake in a cup of linden tea, Marcel unexpectedly remembers similar crumbs of the little madeleine which his aunt LĂ©onie used to give him on Sunday mornings at Combray. âThe sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted itâ, Marcel observes (Proust, 1956, p. 57). But once he has recognized the taste of the madeleine soaked in linden tea, the memory of the old gray house in which his aunt used to live emerged before him, and with the house the town, indeed the whole of Combray and its surroundings, âlike the scenery of a theatreâ (58), inaugurating the narrative of his âremembrance of things pastâ, as Proustâs novel is called in English. âThe past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspectâ (p. 54).
Proustâs insight into the importance of things, and especially the sensation thereof, proves that the material, sensual, and sensory dimensions of memory in culture have long been known. As he makes clear, it is the feel, smell, and touch of things that trigger memory; it is the encounter between the embodied human being and the inanimate thing that occasions the act of remembrance, not some âexercise of the willâ (Proust, 1956, p. 53). Or, as Freeman, Nienass, and Daniell put it: âwe rarely remember through ideas only, but rather through our encounters with thingsâ (2016, p. 3).
Like Proustâs madeleine, the mundane things we accidentally find while clearing out drawers easily lend themselves as vehicles of time travel. They make us relive, in a fraction of a second, memories of places and events, of feelings, and of people we have met but long forgotten. Susan Stewartâs poem âThe Memory Cabinet of Mrs. K. 1960â, published as a prelude to this book, offers a poignant articulation of the mnemonic potential of things. Structured by the drawersâ location within the cabinet, the poem constitutes an inventory of things that Mrs. K. accumulated. Unlike the madeleine that pries open the recesses of Marcelâs memory in Proustâs novel, Stewartâs poem does not disclose Mrs. K.âs memories related to the objects in her cabinet. Instead, they are situated in the poem according to their location within the cabinet. The year 1960 serves as a temporal reference point, while the âmemory cabinetâ suggests that these objects have been willfully retained. In Stewartâs inventory, none of them emerges as more or less important than any other. Rather, they form a metonymic chain of contiguity, held together by commas and semicolons. The fact that they are stored in the drawers of a memory cabinet, however, invests them with a mnemonic aura. Beyond the functions they serve as cosmetics, souvenirs, cloths, and knickknacks, they emerge in the poem as metonyms of past journeys, events, and relationships. Like the letter K., which marks and at once conceals the name that it stands for, the things in Mrs. K.âs cabinet are material markers of memories undisclosed to the reader. But even if they are silent about memories, these objects also mark Mrs. K. as a person. They bespeak her social standing, her taste, her sense of self, and above all, her will to remember.
Yet if the entanglement of memory and materiality has long been known and can be traced throughout the massive amount of texts that make up the field of cultural memory studies, so far this material dimension has remained relatively undertheorized in memory studies. Materializing Memory in Art and Popular Culture seeks to remedy this situation. In this collection of essays, we examine practices of memory centered on the concept of materiality, by which we mean the concrete, material, and physical dimensions of acts of remembrance. As we shall demonstrate, this means that we regard materiality as the relations between people and things. As Ian Woodward asserts, âmateriality ⊠refers to the relations between people and objects, especially the way in which social life is inherently structured by everyday dealings with objects, such as technology or objects of memoryâ (2007, p. 55, emphasis in original). Important in this definition is the emphasis on the inherent relationality of materiality. Indeed, scholars tend to stress that matter is always embedded in its social relations. John Law, for example, defines materiality as âa way of thinking about the material in which this is treated as a continuously enacted relational effectâ (2004, p. 161). In The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, he writes that in Science and Technology Studies (STS), âmateriality is usually understood as relational effectâ (2010, p. 173). Similarly, in their edited volume Material Powers, Tony Bennett and Patrick Joyce refer to the âintrinsic sociality of matterâ (2010, p. 15), while Giuliana Bruno argues that âmateriality involves a refashioning of our sense of space and contact with the environment, as well as a rethreading of our experience of temporality, interiority, and subjectivityâ (2014, p. 8).
In this book, we focus on the interrelation of memory and materiality in art and popular culture to explore material culture as an integral aspect of memory practices. As such, we seek to account for the material world as a medium through which acts of remembering and forgetting take place. On the one hand, we investigate the ways in which objects and things are endowed with meaning and affect through the various memory practices that are centered on them. On the other hand, we are especially interested in the âagencyâ of objects as a key element in practices of memory and forgetting. The theoretical and methodological apparatus of the book stems from the paradigm known as the âmaterial turnâ, which has gained substantial recognition in social and cultural research over the past decades but has received significantly less attention in the field of memory studies. According to Bennett and Joyce (2010), the material turn was instigated by the need to rethink anti-ontologizing dualisms, such as those between the natural and the social, the human and the nonhuman, the material and the immaterial. The material turn encompasses the so-called new materialism (Barrett and Bolt, 2013; Dolphijn and van der Tuin, 2012) or new materialisms (Boscagli, 2014; Coole and Frost, 2010; St. Pierre, Jackson, and Mazzei, 2016), which looks at how material powers affect our daily lives and discusses the agency of nonhumans. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost emphasize that âWe live our everyday lives surrounded by, immersed in, matterâ (2010, p. 1), while Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt draw attention to the performative power of materiality without, however, throwing out the discursive dimension of reality (2013, pp. 6, 7). Fully to acknowledge the role of materiality in our daily lives âentails recognising distinctive forms of agency and effectivity on the part of material forcesâ, as Bennett and Joyce maintain (2010, p. 3).
A new materialist approach to comprehending practices of memory offers fresh perspectives on the study of memory in culture. The present book seeks to open new horizons in memory studies by focusing on materiality as an integral aspect of memory practices in a wide temporal and topographical range, from ancient Rome to contemporary Latin America and Indonesia. Its scope entails fields as diverse as modern ruins, the exchange and circulation of souvenirs, digitization and the Internet of Things, the materiality of the body and traumatic reenactment, as well as the material aspects of memory in creative performances, literature, film, and fashion design. As a whole, Materializing Memory in Art and Popular Culture addresses four underlying questions: What is the role of materiality in the mediation of memory at the individual, social, and cultural level? What is the role of memory and forgetting in the social and cultural life of objects? How do art and popular culture use materiality to bring the past into the present in the service of the future? And finally, in what ways are memory objects inscribed with meaning, affect, and agency? The answers that this volume provides are predicated on two premises: first, memory is performed, mediated, and stored through the material world that surrounds us. Second, inanimate objects and things also have a certain agency of their own, which affects practices of remembering as well as of forgetting.
Performance and Materiality
If memory is a performance of the past in the present, it is essential to account for the material world as a medium through which performances of memory take place. Whereas the focus of our previous book, Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture, was âon the âactâ of memory, not its âtheatreâ or âpalaceââ, as we wrote in its introduction, âinquiring into the processes of making, constructing, enacting, transforming, expressing, transmitting cultural memory through art and popular cultureâ (Plate and Smelik, 2013, p. 3), this time we direct our attention precisely to such theatres and palaces and look at ruins, souvenirs, interconnected objects, and other things to remember. Celeste Olalquiaga, for example, argues in her chapter that modern ruins induce a new form of memoryâone that focuses on the brittleness of material reality. It is a material reality, moreover, that has become infused with an aura of ârealnessâ where perception is no longer a question of âseeing is believingâ, but rather âtouching is believingâ. This shift in focus, from the performance of memory to its materiality, follows from the insight that there is a material dimension to the performance of memory and that this material dimension has not been given sufficient attention in memory studies. This is not to say that material culture has been underrepresented in cultural memory studies. On the contrary, objects have been central to the study of cultural memory, for instance, in the case of memorials, photographs, souvenirs, and books (Young, 1993; Hirsch, 1997; Sturken, 2007; Rigney, 2012). It is rather a matter of developing the âmeans by which to activate the implicit thing knowledge we already possess, as well as means to become more sensitive to the inherent qualities of things themselvesâ, as BjĂžrnar Olsen writes in In Defense of Things (2013, p. 18). In Death, Memory and Material Culture (2001), Elizabeth Hallan and Jenny Hockey discuss the role of the body and its material environment in the making of memory, focusing on how objects and the rituals around these objects shape the memory of past generations, dead friends, and lovers. In The Memory of Clothes (2015), Robyn Gibson has collected stories of the ways in which memories and traces of the past are, as it were, woven or stitched into the fabrics of our clothes. Such narratives follow in the tracks of Peter Stallybrassâs (1993) groundbreaking article on the pivotal role that clothes play in individual remembrance, as Lianne Toussaint and Anneke Smelik point out in their chapter on techno-fashion. On a different note, in his chapter Louis van den Hengel explores the potential of performance and re-performance to act as material processes of historical, cultural, and aesthetic memoryâa multiple folding of time that carries the past into the present and affirms the presence of the present as the living force of memory. In contrast to the debates within performance theory that center on the ephemeral or fleeting nature of live art, he focuses on how memory is mediated through the distinct materiality of performance. Van den Hengel locates this materiality in the affective operations of performance as a time-based, yet profoundly untimely, art form. In this view, it is the expressive event of performance that creates an enduring archive in which the forces of matter and memory meet in a co-shaping dynamic.
Three works have been particularly influential in our project. The collection of essays edited by Marius Kwint, Christopher Breward, and Jeremy Aynsley entitled Material Memories: Design and Evocation (1999) anticipated and laid the groundwork for the present book by assigning crucial importance to the forms and materials of objects, their social, economic, and historic reasons for being, and the ways in which we remember by interacting with them through our senses, as did BjĂžrnar Olsenâs In Defense of Things: Archaeology and the Ontology of Objects (2013). In the realm of the arts, Lisa Saltzmanâs (2006) discussion of material techniques of remembrance in her Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art has also been a source of inspiration for our project. It is this continued attention to the materiality of objects, and to the role of this materiality in the process of cultural remembering, that we want to pursue in this volume. For example, in her chapter, Inge van de Ven argues that digitalization has enabled new possibilities for scale, which in turn has reinforced a widespread cultural drive to capture and preserve âeverythingâ. She explores the effect of databases on literary representations in two âbigâ novelsâKnausgĂ„rdâs Min Kamp and Bolañoâs 2666âthat embody the monumental in a double meaning of the term: commemoration and material magnitude. She analyzes how the material dimensions of these works and their expansive scope relate to their workings as vehicles of cultural memory. The notion of scale plays a similarly central role in LĂĄszlĂł MunteĂĄnâs contribution to this volume, albeit in the essentially different context of the miniature. MunteĂĄn uses the photographer David Levinthalâs 2008 project entitled I.E.D.: War in Afghanistan and Iraq as a case study that combines American soldiersâ blogs of their war experience with photographs of miniature dioramas depicting scenes of Americaâs War on Terror. Levinthalâs photographs, as MunteĂĄn demonstrates, monumentalize these miniature objects and render them uncannily realistic, activating âmemoriesâ of a war experienced through mediatized representations.
In Materializing Memory in Art and Popular Culture, we refer to an increasing body of research gathered under the rubric of ânew materialismsâ as a terminological and theoretical apparatus fitting not only to discuss hitherto overlooked aspects of remembering but also to demonstrate the methodological value of studying materiality for a humanities and social sciences perspective on âmemoryâ. Similar to other adherents of the material turn in the humanities and social sciences (e.g., Hicks and Beaudry, 2010; Boscagli, 2014), we draw on insights from a variety of sources and disciplines. These range from archaeological, anthropological, and vernacular theories about things to literary studies, material culture studies, science and technology studies, philosophy, political theory, and quantum physics, all of which regard things not as inert but as âvibrantâ matter (Bennett, 2010) and perceive things, people, and society as co-producing one another. In this latter respect, Arjun Appaduraiâs edited volume The Social Life of Things has been a seminal text that pleads to âfollow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectoriesâ (1986, p. 5). The idea that a thing, a gift, or a commodity may have a social life is indeed illuminating, particularly in light of the distinction between what Appadurai describes as the social history of things, pertaining to longer-term shifts and larger-scale dynamics, and what Igor Kopytoff in the same volume calls the âcultural biographyâ of things (1986, p. 34). In her contribution to the present book, Maggie Popkin follows Appaduraiâs and Kopytoffâs example to show the evolving biographies and shifting functions and meanings over the course of the âlivesâ of glass vases from ancient Pozzuoli. These vases were purchased as commodities but were then transformed into souvenirs with greater sentimental value and, ultimately, into grave goods in some cases. The complexities of their biographies, however, do not change the fact that they spent parts of their âlivesâ as souvenirs. Willy Jansen, too, traces the âsocial life of thingsâ in her chapter on religious objects used in rituals, such as a crystal tear expressing the Virgin Maryâs suffering. She claims that groups create and sustain a symbolic focal point for their identity construction by exhibiting, describing, and photographing the biography of their most precious things. Through their care for things, groups develop internal cohesion and distinguish themselves from others. On a personal level, objects serve to symbolize the intimate suffering of mothers in everyday life and the emotional work involved in caring f...
