From Intro
'Looking back and remembering has to confront some difficult problems of representation in its relationship to temporality and memory. Human memory may well be an anthropological given, but closely tied as it is to the ways a culture constructs and lives its temporality, the forms memory will take are invariably contingent and subject to change. Memory and representation, then, figure as key concerns at this fin de siècle when the twilight settles around the memories of this century and their carriers' (p. 2).
'The mode of memory is recherche (search - my addition) rather than recuperation. The temporal status of any act of memory is always the present and not, as some naive epistemology might have it, the past itself, even though all memory in some ineradicable sense is dependent on some past event or experience' (p. 3).
'Twilight memories are both: generational memories on the wane due to the passing of time and the continuing speed of technological modernization, and memories that reflect the twilight status of memory itself. Twilight is that moment of the day that foreshadows the night of forgetting' (p. 3).
'Architecture itself has become ever more interested in site-memory and in inscribing temporal dimensions in spatial structures, most stunningly in Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin' (pp. 3-4).
'The undisputed waning of history and historical consciousness, the lament about political, social and cultural amnesia, and the various discourses, celebratory of apocalyptic, about posthistoire have been accompanied in the past decade and a half by a memory boom of unprecedented proportions. There are widespread debates about memory in the cultural, social and natural sciences. In an age of emerging supranational structures, the problem of national identity is increasingly discussed in terms of cultural or collective memory rather than in terms of the assumed identity of nation and state' (p. 5).
'Our mnemonic culture rejects the idea of the archive while depending on the archive's contents for its own sustenance' (p. 6).
'When Nietzsche stated in the foreword to the the second of his Untimely Meditiations that we are all suffereing from a consuming historical fever, he was arguing against the past as burden, against archival and monumental history, and he attacked the stifling historicism of his times in the belief that a more vital form of history could invigorate modern culture. That is what The Birth of Tragedy and some of Niezsche's other early writings were all about. In those texts, Nietzsche was a utopian modernist, standing at the beginning of an intellectual trajectory from Bergson to Proust, from Freud to Benjamin, that articulated the classical modernist formulations of memory as an alternative to the discourses of objectifying and legitimizing history, as a cure to the pathologies of modern life' (p. 6).
'Memory is no longer primarily a vital and energizing antidote to capitalist reification via the commodity form (as it was for Nietzsche, Benjamin, Adorno etc. - my addition) [...] It rather represents the attempt to slow down information processing, to resist the dissolution of time in the synchronicity of the archive, to speed information and cable networks, to claim some anchoring space in a worls of puzzling and often threatening heterogeneity, non-synchronicity, and information overload' (p. 7).
In our century (20th century), different political versions of some better future have done fierce battle with each other, but the quintessentially modern notion of the future as progress or utopia was shared by all. It no longer is' (p. 8).
'We still harbour high-tech fantasies for the future, but the very organization of this high-tech world threatens to make categories like past and future, experience and expectation, memory and anticipation themselves obsolete' (p. 9).
In a 'dystopian vision of a high-tech future, amnesia would no longer be part of the dialectic of memory and forgetting. It will be its radical other. It will have sealed the very forgetting of memory itself: nothing to remember, nothing to forget' (p. 9).
From 'Escape from Amnesia: The Museum as Mass Medium'
'It (the museum) has stood in the dead eye of the storm of progress serving as a catalyst for the articulation of tradition and nation, heritage and canon, and has provided the master maps for the construction of cultural legitimacy in both a national and a universalist sense' (p. 13).
'The modern museum has always been attacked as a symptom of cultural ossification by all those speaking in the name of life and cultural renewal against the dead weight of the past' (p. 13).
'The museum can indeed no longer be described as a single institution with stable and well-drawn boundaries. The museum in this broad amorphous sense has become a key paradigm of contemporary cultural activities' (p. 14), e.g. memoir writing, confessional lit., facebook etc. See also Baudrillard.
It (the museum) inevitably will construct the past in light of the discourses of the present and in terms of present-day interest. Fundamentally dialectical, the museum serves both as burial chamber of the past - with all that entails in terms of decay, erosion, forgetting - and as site of possible resurrections, however mediated and contaminated in the eyes of the beholder' (p. 15).
'It (the museum) enables the moderns to negotiate and to articulate a relationship to the past that is always also a relationship to the transitory and to death, our own included. As Adorno once pointed out, museum and mausoleum are associated by more than just phonetics' (p. 16)
'The key question here is of course whether the new museum culture of spectacle and mise-en-scène can stil fulfill such functions or whether the much discussed liquidation of the sense of history and the death of the subject, the postmodern celebration of surface versus depth, speed versus slowness has deprived the museum of its specific aura of temporality' (p. 16).
'Their (Marx and Nietzsche's) very different celebrations of the storm of progress, of liberation and freedom, and the emergence of a new culture were always coupled with an acknowledgement of the need for a lifeline to the past [...] They fully understood the dialectic of innovative drive and museal desire, the tension between the need to forget and the desire to remember. Marx and Nietzsche's texts are themselves testimonies to the productivity of a thought that located itself in that tension between tradition and anticipation' (p. 19).
'As Jürgen Habermas has observed, a new intimacy has developed in recent years between culture and politics, realms which a now obsolete cold war ideology went to great contortions to keep apart' (p. 21).
'There has been slow but important progress in the past decade in the tracings of hidden and repressed pasts, the reclaiming of underrepresented or falsely represented traditions for the purposes of current political struggles, which are always also struggles for multilayered cultural identity and forms of self-understanding' (p. 22).
'Original artwork has become a device to sell its multiply-reproduced derivatives; reproducibility turned into a ploy to auraticize the original after the decay of aura, a final victory of Adorno over Benjamin' (p. 24).
'The more the present of advanced consumer capitalism prevails over past and future, sucking both into an expanding synchronous space [...], the weaker its grip on itself, the less stability or identity it provides for contemporary subjects' (p. 26).
'Our fascination with the new is always already muted, for we know that the new tends to include its own vanishing, the foreknowledge of its obsolescence in its very moment of appearance. The time span of presence granted the new shrinks and moves toward the vanishing point' (p. 26).
'It seems undeniable to me that rather than having been displaced by categories of space, 'the great high-modernist thematics of time and temporality' are alive and well in the museum boom' (p. 27).
'Musealization is precisely the opposite of preservation: for Baudrillard and similarly for Jeudy, it is killing, freezing, sterilizing, dehistoricizing and decontextualizing (p. 30). (Huyssen is ultimately critical of Baudrillard).
'The museum fetish (itself) transcends exchange value. It seems to carry with it something like an anamnestic dimension, a kind of memory value. The more mumified an object is, the more intense its ability to yield experience, aa sense of the authentic. No matter how fragile or dim the relation between museum object and the reality it documents may be [...], as object it carries a register of reality which even the live television broadcast cannot match (p. 33).
'The gaze at the museal object may provide a sense of its opaque and impenetrable materiality as well as an anamnestic space within which the the transitoriness and differentiality of human cultures can be grasped. Via the activity of memory, set in motion and nurtured by the contemporary museum in its broadest and most amorphous sense, the museal gaze expands over the ever shrinking space of the (real) present in a culture of amnesia, planned obsolescence and ever more synchronic and timeless information flows, the hyperspace of the coming age of information highways' (p. 34).
'In relation to the increasing storage capacity of data banks, which can be seen at the contemporary version of the American ideology of 'more is better', the museum should be rediscovered as a space for creative forgetting. The idea of the comprehensive data bank and the information superhighway is just as incompatible with memory as the television image is with material reality (p. 34).
References
Adorno, Theodor, Minima Moralia: Reflections on Damaged Life. London: Verso, 2005.
Huyssen, Andreas, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Koselleck, Reinhardt, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. by Keith Tribe. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
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