Regimes of Memory

Katharine Hodgkin, Susannah Radstone, Katharine Hodgkin, Susannah Radstone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134448173
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

A focus on memory has come to prominence across a wide range of disciplines. History, literature, philosophy, anthropology, and cultural studies have placed memory at the heart of their interrogations of subjectivity, narrative, time and imagination. At the same time, memory has emerged as a central theme and preoccupation in popular literature, film and television, and the emergence of memory as an academic theme cannot be separated from its prominence in the wider culture. This volume represents, explores and interrogates the current developments, engaging directly with the place of memory in culture, and with memory's meaning's and history.

Part I

BELIEVING THE BODY

Introduction

Susannah Radstone and Katharine Hodgkin

This section is concerned with the possibility of embodied memory — of memories that are carried in the body and that may be transmitted between bodies, even across generations. As Tony Bennett’s introductory remarks make clear, this is a topic that touches on wider questions that are being debated outside as well as inside the academy, and that have immediate political resonance. For to speak of memories that are carried in the body and that may be passed on through the generations touches on debates between those who believe in the possibility of genetic or biological inheritance, versus those for whom character and disposition, whether individual or collective, are shaped, in the main, by cultural and environmental forces.

The two chapters that follow have certain themes in common. They both foreground the significance of the visual in relation to the passing on or construction of memory. Both chapters, too, are concerned with memory transmission. Jill Bennett suggests that photography may transmit affect memory, while Tony Bennett discusses organicist theories of evolutionary transmission between the generations. Yet these two chapters take up very different positions on the question of embodied memory.

Jill Bennett’s chapter is about the transmission of what she calls bodily ‘affect memory’ — a mode of memory that she distinguishes from representational memory. She argues that affect associated with past experiences may be transmitted to others, particularly through the visual media. Conversely, Tony Bennett argues that all ideas concerning embodied or organicist memory have their origins in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century regimes of memory that reached their apogee in the evolutionary museum. For Tony Bennett, the idea of embodied or organicist memory serves as a limit-case for an argument concerning the imbrication of all ideas about and theories of memory — even the notion of a mode of memory buried in the body — with regimes of power and knowledge. Even the idea that memory can be carried in the body, argues Tony Bennett, is produced by a ‘regime’ of memory, the politics of which invite analysis. For Jill Bennett, on the other hand, affect memory can itself be disruptive of regimes of knowledge and can transmit that which cannot be represented in written language. Here, she focuses on affects linked to sexual abuse, and through an analysis of the affectual qualities of the photographs she discusses, demonstrates that the feelings that surround such abuse may be far more complex and ambivalent than writings on sexual abuse tend to suggest.

Jill Bennett’s chapter focuses on the transmission of traumatic affect through photographic practices, and suggests that affect may be drawn on directly by an art practice aimed at regenerating sensation so as to produce an encounter in the present. She argues that experience that cannot be spoken may nevertheless be registered visually, producing visual icons in the mind’s eye. As Jill Bennett herself points out, these ideas concerning affect, memory and visual iconography have a long history; such ideas underpinned the medieval understanding of the mnemonic function of art. This was a conception of art not as aiming to reproduce the world — art as representation — but as registering and producing affect. As William West’s chapter in this collection demonstrates, early modern memory practices stressed visuality and spatiality, and counterposed the direct experience of visual icons with the mediations of language and representation. The poetics of sense memory involved not speaking of but speaking out of a particular memory or experience. The beginnings of an unravelling of this regime of memory in early modern times is the subject of his chapter. Jill Bennett’s chapter suggests, however, that the medieval notion of art as registering and producing affect — a conception that preceded the Renaissance stress on art as representation — might now be ripe for revision, since it dovetails with many of the most powerful and influential trends in current humanities research in the fields of memory, trauma and representation. She substantiates this proposal by arguing that visual icons provide the most effective means of storing and retrieving memories, since the eye can function as a mute witness. This concept of the witness is central to contemporary theories of trauma and testimony, and, in this regard, Jill Bennett’s work touches on wider debates in the humanities concerning trauma and representation.¹ However, the most influential work in this field has, up until now, been informed by revisions of Freudian or Lacanian psychoanalysis.² Jill Bennett’s essay takes a fresh departure by theorising the transmission of traumatic memory not in relation to psychoanalytic concepts, but via the work of Gilles Deleuze, whose writings on affect have yet to be fully explored in the field of traumatic memory, and whose work, she argues, subverts the opposition between thought and sensation that has shaped so much previous thinking on memory.

Jill Bennett’s chapter follows Charlotte Delbo in distinguishing between two modes of memory: ordinary representational memory versus sense memory, which registers the physical imprint of an event. This is a distinction which is taken up in this volume in Paul Antze’s critique of current developments in psychology, which identify similar modes of memory. For Antze, the notion of a psychical process that does not make use of associations akin to linguistic tropes produces an understanding of the human being which is overly deterministic and impoverished. But Jill Bennett suggests, rather, that an attention to modes of memory that by-pass representation may offer a fuller and more adequate account of human experience. Jill Bennett’s chapter raises a key question about the relationship beween affect memory and (visual) language. She raises the possibility of non-representational memory that is transmitted via photographic images. Yet these images also make meaning by means of visual signs. A fascinating field is opening, then, for the investigation of the relation between the meaning-making of (visual) languages and affect memory.

Like Jill Bennett’s chapter, Tony Bennett’s contribution to this section is concerned with memory, the body and the visual. Whereas Jill Bennett’s focus falls on memory transmission through photography’s spectatorial relations, however, the focus of Tony Bennett’s chapter is the new depth structure of vision that emerged in the nineteenth century. This new structure of vision arguably informed archaeological theory and practice and the construction of the evolutionary museum. Drawing on novels of the period to show how particular eighteenth- and nineteenth-century regimes of memory were evolving, Tony Bennett’s chapter discusses the idea of organicist memory as it developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and was put on display in nineteenth-century evolutionary museums.

Theories of organicist memory suggest that all previous stages of an organism’s development are simultaneously present, layered within that organism. When applied to the human species, this theory suggests that the human body carries within it layered memories of its development from prehistory to the present. Tony Bennett goes on to suggest that it was the development of a new depth structure of vision, particularly within archaeology, that produced the idea that all the layers of the past are simultaneously present below the ground surface. This idea could then be extended to the human organism itself, to produce an archaeological construction of the person as an entity comprised of successive layers. This idea of simultaneous presence touches on the issues of memory and temporality discussed in this volume’s introduction; as Tony Bennett points out, the temporality of memory constructed in the evolutionary museum is one of the simultaneous existence of all past moments.

Tony Bennett’s central thesis is that it was only when evolution was made perceptible (as in the nineteenth-century evolutionary museums) that it became possible to see the long pasts that theories of organicist memory placed within the body as a set of memory traces. In other words, for Tony Bennett, the idea of organicist memory emerged out of a construction of human prehistory and history as evolutionary — a construction that depended upon the development of a particular regime of vision: ‘(i)t is because this is so’, argues Tony Bennett, that ‘it is … imperative to view the notion of an organic memory carried in the body … as an effect of the evolutionary museum’s functioning as an evolutionary accumulator in which all pasts are stored and rendered simultaneously present’ (p. 51).

The significance of this argument lies, in part, in its rebuttal of the idea that embodied memory lies outside culture, outside regimes of power and knowledge. The idea that memory traces may be carried in the body is an idea, of course, that is aligned with those geneticist theories of human behaviour, ethnicity and sexuality that are currently being mobilised both within and outside the academy. Tony Bennett insists, however, that the very idea of memory carried within the body arose out of particular museum and archival practices that were tied to specific regimes of power and knowledge. For Tony Bennett, then, there is no conception of memory that lies outside systems of power/knowledge — that lies, that is, outside specific regimes, or ways of thinking and understanding the world. Jill Bennett, on the other hand, seems to suggest, rather, that bodily affect memory by-passes or precedes systems of representation.

Notes

1 For an introduction to debates about trauma and screen studies see Susannah Radstone (ed.) ‘Special Debate on Trauma and Screen Studies’, Screen vol. 42(2), 2001, pp. 188–216.

2 The most influential work in this field includes Cathy Caruth, ‘Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Culture and Trauma’, American Imago, vol. 48(1), 1991, pp. 1–12; Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996; Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992; Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, New York and London: Routledge, 1992.

1

THE AESTHETICS OF SENSE-MEMORY

Theorising trauma through the visual arts¹

Jill Bennett

It is impossible to feel emotion as past…. One cannot be a spectator of one’s own feelings; one feels them, or one does not feel them; one cannot imagine them without stripping them of their affective essence.²

There is a compelling logic to these words written in 1911 by the Swiss psychologist Edouard Claparède. Emotions are felt only as they are experienced in the present; in memory they become ideas, representations, and representation inherently implies distance, perspective. For Claparède, to represent oneself in memory was to see oneself ‘from the outside’ as one might see another. ‘My past self’, he wrote, ‘is thus psychologically distinct from my present self, but it is … an emptied and objectivised self, which I continue to feel at a distance from my true self which lives in the present.’³

Claparède’s refutation of emotional memory’s possibility is partly influenced by the work of William James, who argued that although we can remember undergoing specific emotions, we cannot remember just how those emotions felt.⁴ However, wrote James, if emotions are not retrievable from memory, they are revivable; hence, we don’t remember grief or ecstasy, but by recalling a situation that produces those sensations we can produce a new bout of emotion.⁵ So, in other words, affect, properly conjured, produces a real-time somatic experience, no longer framed as representation.

This opposition between affect and representation also subtends early work on trauma and memory. Pierre Janet argued that, in the normal course of events, experiences are processed through cognitive schemes that enable familiar experiences to be identified, interpreted and assimilated to narrative. Memory is thus constituted as experience transforms itself into representation. Traumatic or extreme affective experience, however, resists such processing. Its unfamiliar or extraordinary nature renders it unintelligible, causing cognitive systems to baulk; its sensory or affective character renders it inimical to thought — and ultimately to memory itself. Moreover, trauma is not so much remembered as subject to unconscious and uncontrolled repetition: ‘It is only for convenience that we speak of it as a “traumatic memory”’, wrote Janet, ‘The subject is often incapable of making the necessary narrative which we call memory regarding the event….’⁶

In this chapter, I want to consider the issue of the registration of affect as it relates to traumatic memory, not from a clinical or psychological perspective but from the point of view of art practice. The argument that trauma resists representation has continued to be made at different times in relation both to psychological process and to aesthetics. Bessel Van der Kolk, for example, has been particularly ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Regimes of memory: an introduction
• PART I Believing the body
• PART II Propping the subject
• PART III What memory forgets: models of the mind
• PART IV What history forgets: memory and time
• PART V Memory beyond the modern
• Index