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distinction between an older social and collective memory – which is relatively
unmediated or immediate – and modern archival history, seeing the first as a
cultural by-product of the latter. He also seems to suggest that there is no
outside to the constructed collective memories of historiography and the
museum, or to put it another way, that memory is either reducible to individual
psychology or entirely socially constructed.
Walter Benjamin’s writings suggest other ways of thinking about this. He
drew on the notion of a memory trace and on Freud’s layered, palimpsest model
of consciousness. His theory of memory and history supports Bennett’s view
that the true/archival memory distinction could only be thought in modernity,
that this memory theory is marked by the conditions in which it was produced.
Nevertheless he maintained that experience in modernity is qualitively different
than pre-modern experience and that practices of remembering have also
changed. Benjamin considered that there were certain practices of memory and
remembering which might challenge, or at least exist outside of, dominant
culture and its ideological versions of history. For Benjamin practices of collect-
ing, and the notion of objects or artworks having aura, are closely connected
to this discussion of memory. Benjamin’s theory of memory is complex and
incomplete, dispersed across several writings. Here I will focus on those aspects
which allow us to situate this understanding of memory and history in relation
to Nora’s and Bennett’s.
Benjamin does not use the distinction between true and archival memory, but
works from Marcel Proust’s distinction between voluntary and involuntary
memory. Proust’s famous description of how the madeleine cake – soaked in a
little camomile tea – brings the past flooding back, epitomizes the relationship
between involuntary memory and things. A chance encounter – usually a phys-
ical sensation such as a taste or scent – vividly conjures up a past experience. By
contrast, voluntary memory is the memory of the intellect. It gives information
about the past but ‘retains no trace of it’. This kind of memory consists in
recalled facts, rather than depth of experience. It produces knowledge which is
repeatable. It imposes itself on things – from the knotted handkerchief to the
souvenir, to the thing turned into a museum artefact. For Proust, the past can
only be ‘actualized’ involuntarily. He viewed involuntary memories as rare,
chance occurrences, and the past as:
somewhere beyond the reach of the intellect and unmistakeably present in
some material object (or in the sensation which such an object arouses in
us), though we have no idea which one it is. As for that object, it depends
entirely on chance whether we come upon it before we die or whether we
never encounter it.
(Proust cited in Benjamin 1992b: 155)