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Benjamin suggests that in pre-modern society, voluntary and involuntary mem-
ory, as well as collective and individual memories, would be bound together
through ritual, ceremony and festival (1992b: 156). Like Nora, Benjamin peri-
odizes memory, but he associates the pre-modern period with a unity of volun-
tary and involuntary memory, and the modern period with their splitting.
Involuntary memory as the chance experience of an isolated individual is a
modern concoction. Benjamin uses Freud’s work on memory to explore this
concept further. In his 1920 essay ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, Freud (1984)
suggested that consciousness operates defensively, protecting against external
stimuli. Conscious preparation enables us to reconcile external stimuli with
our experience. Memories are not registered by consciousness, but at an
unconscious level. As Benjamin says, ‘in Proustian terms this means that only
what has not been experienced explicitly and consciously, what has not
happened to the subject as an experience, becomes a component of the
mémoire involontaire’ (1992b: 157).
Freud derived his view that memory is primarily unconscious from the
organic memory theorist Ewald Hering, as well as his tendency to think of
memory in physical, textual terms (Otis 1994: 188). In 1924, he updated the
model of the mind as palimpsest to the model of the mind as mystic writing pad
– a toy notebook on which words can be written and then made to disappear,
but still remain in partial traces on a layer underneath (Freud 1991; Leslie 2003:
172–3). Memory traces are permanently etched on the unconscious, but con-
sciousness itself receives no such permanent marking – instead the process of
conscious reflection dissolves any impact of an incident by allocating it ‘a
precise point in time’ and giving it ‘the character of having been lived’ – that is,
turning it into ‘an experience’ (Erlebnis). Benjamin thus places Freud’s theory
within the context of a broader characterization of urban modernity as height-
ening and multiplying shock experiences. The defensive shield of consciousness
must continually ‘parry the shocks’ of urban and industrial life, with the result
that sense impressions do not enter experience in its deeper, cumulative sense
(Erfahrung), but are simply registered as moments that have been lived through
(Benjamin 1992b: 158–9). When memory traces surface unbidden, they produce
an impression of a depth of experience, of the past in the present. It is no
accident that the sense which most frequently stimulates involuntary memory is
the sense of smell. A scent ‘deeply drugs the sense of time’, it ‘may drown years
in the odour it recalls’ (Benjamin 1992b: 180). Memory traces, like the traces
of use on an everyday object, or the marks of an artist’s hand, give an impres-
sion of historical connectedness which Benjamin refers to as ‘aura’. Auratic
experiences, in other words, can be provoked by those everyday and otherwise
inconsequential things and sensations that stimulate involuntary memory. The
images and impressions that arise in involuntary memory are suffused in aura