In Transparent Things Vladimir Nabokov wrote: ‘Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future.’ 1 The future, of course, does not exist concretely and individually. It exists as an idea or a temporal horizon firmly nested in the present. The present derives its complexity from being constantly on the run, in passing, in transit, always already gone. The seductiveness of the past, however, does not emanate from encoding the present into the past and the past into history but from the ways the past is interpreted in the present, how it is brought into the now, how it is re-presenced, 2 and how it is turned into memory and how it is remembered: only what is lost to time is ready to be remembered. 3
If we concur with the idea that knowing one’s past is the precondition of imagining one’s future, then it is reasonable to insinuate that the way we see, hear, smell, or taste the past, how we understand it and what sense we make of it (and through which senses we perceive it), is key to any theoretical or practical engagement with our being in the world. In truth, it has been for ages. In the time of digital media and incessant re-presences of the past, the significant question is how to balance the demands of the bygone with the demands of the not-yet. 4 The question is all the more pertinent in the post-socialist worlds that underwent (they still undergo) a self-imposed future-crippling sanitisation of the past. At the centre of my interest is the entanglement of legitimacy of memory in the post-socialist contexts and the political uses and cultural appropriations of the past. On the one hand, my motives reside in intimate witness experience of the collapse of Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRJ) and the formation of the states which emerged in its wake. In these processes, my biography was reframed by different historical, political and ideological contexts and discourses. On the other hand, this entanglement reveals all too well the processes of reinterpreting, rewriting, deleting and problematising the past. This shows how a taken-for-granted historical narrative can be readily dismantled and moreover, what difficulties an emerging narrative faces in the time when the past can hardly be put to rest, and markedly so, I argue, because of digital media.
Twentieth Century Matters
As the cinema defined the short twentieth century, as Eric Hobsbawm termed it, similarly, the proliferation of digital media seems to open a new chapter in the history of human communication, memory and storytelling. This new chapter, as far as we can tell today, is yet again invested with hopes of a potential to give voice to intimate and personal micro-scale bottom-up interventions. The relationship between digital media technologies and post-socialist Europe is not an immediate one, but given the historical, cultural and social changes and evolving contexts, the topic deserves attention mostly because memory in post-socialism has been radically and notoriously problematised.
It is for this reason also that the twentieth century, marked by unprecedented technological innovations, scientific discoveries and most appalling atrocities, still looms large in popular culture, media and political discourses. The ambiguity of the legacy of the last century, particularly of both World Wars and the Cold War, profoundly reconfigured our understanding of humanity, history, as well as our everyday life. The role of mass, electronic and, recently, digital media is central to this, as they have contributed to the diversification and commoditisation of cultural preferences and desires that, in turn, have provided the tools and destinations of fictional and virtual migration.
The twentieth century saw the rise of radio, television and cinema that largely assigned to popular culture the role of the chronicler of the times. These quintessentially twentieth century media rendered ‘their’ century into a highly mediated meta-event and saved from oblivion large portions of fact and fiction alike. However, regardless of how much of the content was saved, a lot of it was also (deliberately and systematically) forgotten, left out of the canon as a consequence of the nature of preservation (insufficient funds and inadequate archiving facilities), media politics, or alleged inappropriateness of the source event. Still, the events that today are considered seminal in thinking about and understanding of the twentieth century would never have made it into the history of the twentieth century were it not for the mass and electronic media that radioed and televised, mediatised and mediated them to audiences of that time and the subsequent decades.
And, of course, the reverse is true: were it not for these technologies, some of the events that today are considered seminal would never have made (it into) History. Mediatised content that otherwise would have been buried under the debris of ideological reproduction can in mass, electronic and, all the more so, in digital media be retained for possible future(s) (uses). This is particularly intriguing in the post-socialist situation where the new regimes strived for the symbolic and material purification of national edifices.
Friedrich Kittler argues that the ‘sequence from silent film to sound and color film [represents] three stages that oddly correlate with the outbreak of the world wars’ 5 ; accordingly, one could ask whether the most recent technological innovations in media and major socio-political perturbations that we witness today can also be seen in this light: whether connectivity—spliced with incessant contestation of the interpretative authority and the implications of the re-presences of the past—contributes not only to the emergence of pressing issues regarding our understanding of what it means to be human, but also adds to the instability of human lifeworlds and existential uncertainty of the inhabitants. From the post-socialist perspective, this opens up questions concerning the ways in which post-socialist states confront the continual and irresistible re-emergence of the wished-away memories. Hence, I might ask, is it just a coincidence that socialism failed at the dawn of the digital age?
Media, mediatisation and mediation of the past play an integral part in picking and discarding products, beliefs and ideologies as content—that may or may not have informational, educative, illuminative, enjoyable, or, for that matter, historical value. An investigation into such traverses exposes the multi-layered aspects of navigating and migrating between different historicities and their entanglements, and reveals the more hidden contours of the most essentially human interactive activity, i.e., storytelling.
When thinking about storytelling, we may wonder whether the past is indeed a foreign country? 6 The past may be gone for good and they may indeed ‘do things differently there’, 7 but in the ‘world after mediatisation’ things are being done extremely differently ‘here’ as well, and the temporal borders are hardly closed. Hence, I propose to see the past, as Boris Buden suggests, as a cultural and not just as a geographical or temporal category:
This offers an intriguing starting point for the discussion of how we have been weaving our lives into memories in the time of digital media. Buden advocates a perspective of seeing the present condition through the lenses of the ‘culture of the past’. 9 His proposition invites a reconsideration of our relationship with the past and a rethinking of what it means to be human through the prism of liminalities: the past and the present, presence and absence, the public and the private, forgetting and remembering … or, for that matter, unseeing and unforgetting. The liminalities are the puzzle of every present, but it seems that the digital age has exposed them most painfully so far.Just like culture, the past is everywhere and in everything that surrounds us, it is in front of us just as it is behind us. The past is not something we have left behind to look back to, it is also something which we have not yet set our foot into, something that is just as new as it is alien, unknown, foreign, different, in short, another culture. 8
Memories Between the Land and the Sea
The most chrono-resistant materialisations of memory are often found in landscape and architecture that ‘embody’ the historical period and its symbolic investments. The physicality of the landscapes of memory, however, interacts and intersects quite vividly with the imaginative individual and collective memorisations. Together they form a multilayered picture that Sharon Macdonald calls ‘the memory complex’. Macdonald uses the ‘European memorylands’ metaphor to refer to the complexities of shared European ‘patterns in ways of approaching and experiencing the past’, 10 and finds relevant ‘matters such as whether significance is attached to collective remembering at all, whether longer or shorter time periods are activated in local commemorative life or how personal and collective memories are brought together.’ 11 Macdonald focuses on recognising diversity and observes that memoryland is ‘characterised more by certain changes underway and also by particular tensions and ambivalences, than by enduring memorial forms.’ 12
Yet, given the abundance and the ebb and flow of the information seas and the ever-shifting terrains of social interaction in digital media, navigation among memories can, complementarily, be seen as charting a sea of memories—an endeavour I call memonautica. This term alludes to the navigatory metaphoricity entailed in the term ‘surfing the internet’ and indeed in the practice of social activity online: it invokes the aspect of navigation (Gr. kybernetes), moving (and being moved), circulating, floating, amid the versatility of liminalities. Crucially, in relation to the politics of memory and practices of remembering in digital media, memonautica implies that the ‘sea’ we are charting is never calm or still. Rather, it is constantly changing and shifting, revealing and submerging reefs and ports of memory.
Thus, in the early twenty-first century, we can only ever return to a digital place of memory and realise that it has changed or even disappeared since ...