This article is about recent attempts by scholars, database practitioners, and curators to experiment in theoretically interesting ways with the conceptual design and the building of databases, archives, and other information systems. This article uses the term ‘‘archive’’ as an overarching category to include a diversity of technologies used to inventory objects and knowledge, to commit them to memory and for future use. The category of ‘‘archive’’ might include forms as diverse as the simple spreadsheet, the species inventory, the computerized (...) database, and the museum. Using this protean concept, this study suggests that we are currently witnessing a time where close convergences are occurring between social theory and archive construction. It identifies a ‘‘move’’ toward exposure of the guts of our archives and databases, toward exposing the contingencies, the framing, the reflexivity, and the politics embedded within them. Within this move, the study examines ways in which theories of performance and emergence have begun to influence the way that archives of different kinds are conceived and reflects on the role of Science and Technology Studies scholars in their construction. (shrink)

Recently, archaeologists have been focusing on material relies as evidence of a historical consciousness. This article examines the Iliad and the Odyssey from the point of view of this 'archaeology of the past'. Various material objects, ranging from tombs to everyday objects, evoke the past in the epic poems, thereby enriching the narrative and providing reflections on the act of memory. In turn, Homeric evidence sheds new light on the hermeneutics of relies in archaic oral society.

Dealing with memories of catastrophes is undoubtedly important for education. Yet, how is such an education possible? On which theoretical basis can we describe it? In this article, I build a bridg...

The objective of this article is to explore the value of psychoanalysis in the early twenty-first century through reference to Freud, Lacan, and Stiegler’s work on computational madness. In the first section of the article I consider the original objectives of psychoanalysis through reference to what I call Freud’s ‘normalisation project’, before exploring the critique of this discourse concerned with the defence of oedipal law through a discussion of the post-modern ‘individualisation project’ set out by Deleuze and Guattari and others. (...) Tracking the development of ‘the individualisation project’ in history, I consider its connections with the cybernetic theories of Wiener and Shannon in the psycho-cyber-utopianism of the 1990s, before moving on to consider the other side of the psychoanalytic-cybernetic interaction through a discussion of Jacques Lacan’s rereading of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle in the second section of the article. In reading Lacan’s seminar on Freudian drive in terms of the cybernetic repression of death, I set up the conclusion to the article which involves a discussion of Bernard Stiegler’s ‘survival project’ that relies on a recognition of the limit of death in order to produce human significance and oppose the madness of our contemporary computational reality. (shrink)

Whereas there are many aspects of Roger Simon’s thought that can be privileged, one of the most compelling points of entry for beginning to consider his legacy in the field of education, and beyond, lies with his concern for the difficult work of receiving and transmitting, of giving countenance to, the traces of those now absent. Indeed, in the last 20 years of his scholarly work, Simon pressed us to consider the pedagogical stakes in forging an ethical living relation with (...) the remnants of past and presently unsettled—ongoing—historical wrongs. Keenly aware of how memorial practices risk falling into facile assurances and deferrals, Simon emphasized the important work of “remembrance-learning,” in which the task is to learn how to ethically receive and translate the remnants of a difficult past in our present, so that we might be able to more thoroughly think our time. In this paper I provide an overview of a certain tendency in Simon’s later thinking, pointing to how his work on pedagogy, aesthetics, curation and collective study was motivated by a not so ordinary way of thinking that takes seriously the fact that the dead cannot bury the dead; that they need those in the present, those whose turn it is to do the work, to offer human significance and a human completion to what remains a remnant. (shrink)

Translated from: W.V.O.Quine, W. H. O. (1986): Philosophy of Logic. Second Edition. Harvard University Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England, 47-61.

The trope of Kuwait runs through numerous stories by Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani, including his well-known novella, Men in the Sun. Using Deleuze's clinical methodology, this paper maps Kanafani's Kuwait stories symptomatically to determine what the legacy of the Kanafani effect might be for contemporary Kuwait. It considers what his textual conjunction of affects and percepts did at the time and whether they can do anything now. Kanafani's position as a seminal figure within Palestinian national and resistance literature is well-recognised; (...) however, his specific location in Kuwait at a key period of its development is generally overlooked. His clinical diagnosis of the relationship between Kuwait and Palestinians in the 1940s and 1950s can provoke a reconsideration of that early period, especially relevant in light of post-1991 events. In addition to his writing, his actual presence in Kuwait in the second half of the 1950s expresses an early promise of Kuwait as an open and cosmopolitan place soon betrayed and today mostly forgotten. (shrink)

The article begins by noting that the widespread assumption that the social basis of more difficult or cosmopolitan art has been undermined in later modernity should lead to blander, less controversial art. An alternative interpretation is briefly described in which cosmopolitan art has become a spectacular tourist attraction. Significant questions that would follow such a development are: how national cultural institutions have been co-opted into a global spectacular culture and whether the work displayed in these settings can be radically critical (...) of dominant social values; and the implications of the development of a public culture focused on spectacular attractions for notions of cultural citizenship. In the article these questions are explored through a brief history of changing attitudes and values in British public culture, leading to a suggestion that we are experiencing an era of cultural fragmentation. The article concludes with a consideration of the possibilities for cultural citizenship in these changing circumstances. (shrink)

Is it possible to remember Hiroshima and, if it is, what exactly is being remembered? This paper uses Resnais’s film Hiroshima Mon Amour as a way of asking this question. The problem of remembering is identified as being due to how nuclear explosions are beyond the human capacity to understand. The paper draws on the work of Günther Anders to explore the implications of Hiroshima for the human understanding of human possibilities.

Claude Bernard (1813–1878) and Emil du Bois-Reymond (1818–1896) rank as two of the most influential scientists of the nineteenth century. Renowned for their experiments, lectures, and writing, Bernard and du Bois-Reymond earned great prestige as professors of physiology in a time when Paris and Berlin reigned as capitals of science. Yet even though they were equals in every way, du Bois-Reymond’s reputation has fallen far more than Bernard’s. This essay compares aspects of the two men’s attitudes to philosophy, history, and (...) biology in an attempt to explain why Bernard remains the better known. The answer lies less in the value of du Bois-Reymond’s contributions than in the way that science is remembered in France and Germany. (shrink)

This article explores the 2020 Turkish Netflix series Bir Başkadır (Ethos) written and directed by Berkun Oya about contemporary Turkey through its objects. With objects surge memories, which are both personal and collective. From the charged objects that convey private attachments, traumas, and histories to ordinary household trinkets and finally archival audiovisual material, this series assumes the status of museum in its drive to carefully exhibit the material world on screen. As the Turkish title of the series indicates, these objects (...) are “bir başkadır”: one of a kind. Through themes and practices of lost innocence, counter-archives, and archiveology, I sift through the quotidian objects, miniatures, old photos, souvenirs, and analogue film footage re-presented and re-collected in this series with an eye to their new scope and allure. The past and present rest adjacent to one another in the mise-en-scène of this series. In engagement with the philosophical writings of Walter Benjamin on the collector, the archive, and memory, Andreas Huyssen's concept of the “museal gaze,” Jennifer Culbert's “counter-archival sensibility,” and finally Catherine Russell's practice of “archiveology,” this article examines how the objects that fashion the on-screen world acquire depth and meaning and the film as museum comes to form. (shrink)

Over the last decades, in response to feminist, postmodern and postcolonial critiques of the modern museum, objects, collections and processes of museaIization have been radically re-signified and re-posited in the cultural arena. The new museums emerging from this shift have redefined their functions in and for communities not simply by changing their narratives but by renegotiating the processes of narration and the museal codes of communication with the public. They define themselves now not as disciplinary spaces of academic history but (...) as places of memory, exemplifying the postmodern shift from authoritative master discourses to the horizontal, practice-related notions of memory, place, and community. The key feature of these new museums is that they deploy strategies of applied theatrics to invite emotional responses from visitors: to make them empathize and identify with individual sufferers and victims, or with their own contemporaries inhabiting alternative modernities in distant places. This dossier seeks to probe these new museographic and curatorial discourses, focusing in particular on the memory museum as an emergent global form of (counter)monumentality. Drawing on different geographical and historical contexts, it argues that the new museums’ apparently global aesthetics implies a danger of surrendering the very specificity of historical experiences the memorial ‘site’ offers its visitors. (shrink)

Further to the recent handover of the Naval School of Mechanics (ESMA), Argentina’s most notorious centre for the clandestine torture and assassination of leftist militants under the dictatorship of 1976–83, to the city of Buenos Aires, in order to create on the premises a ‘Space for Memory’, debates on the proper commemoration of the recent past have gained momentum. In the course of these, it has become clear that there is currently no consensus among the human rights organizations, let alone (...) Argentine society at large, on how the former sites of state terrorism can be adequately ‘recovered’, or what the purpose and function of such a recovery might be. Rather than as a shortcoming, however, this impossibility of closure, and of the monumentalization of a social consensus about the past in museal forms, might be taken as an opportunity to problematize some of the politics and material poetics underpinning the contemporary ‘memorial museum’. The article therefore analyses the principal arguments and positions voiced in the debate about ESMA with a view to their attitudes (explicit or implicit) towards the museum-form as such, and the conclusions that might be derived from these in the context of contemporary debates about ‘postmemory’, ‘secondary witnessing’ and the politics of empathy at the museum. (shrink)

The global COVID-19 pandemic that started in 2020 coincided with another incident that made global news, namely the release of the video of the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in the United States. While the novelty of the pandemic wore off relatively quickly when things “went back to normal”, the death of George Floyd inspired a radical global movement relating to the treatment of black people (by both police and civilians) worldwide, namely the “Black Lives Matter” (BLM) movement. (...) The force of the 2020 BLM movement arguably resulted in greater social activism relating to the treatment of minorities in the US and UK in a matter of a few weeks than the almost unfathomable number of deaths from COVID-19. The aim of this article is to critically analyse this particular phenomenon through the lens of so-called “memory culture”, and specifically the role of spectacle in digital mnemotechnologies in circulating videos, images and appeals to empathetic engagement with the collective memories of violence against black minorities in the West. This trend supports the argument that will be made, namely that we live in a memory culture which has become obsessed with the fetishisation of the spectacle in order to induce the collective imagination, leading towards empathy for different groups. This provides a perspective on how the notion of the spectacle seems to be more effective in our contemporary memory culture at garnering sociopolitical action than appeals to scientific reason, or even just narratives unaccompanied by shocking videos or images. (shrink)

A fruitful direction for research on the European cultural heritage is to adopt a transnational approach. Rather than see cultural heritage as predominantly expressed in national contexts, it could be seen as primarily transnational and as plural. Such a view would also suggest a conception of national histories as themselves products of transnational encounters. In this perspective, the European dimension is not then necessarily something over and above nations, but part of their heritage. Moreover, as fundamentally transnational, the European heritage (...) is not exclusively confined to Europe. Cultural heritage is not something that is fixed or based on an essence; it is produced and reinterpreted by social actors in different but overlapping contexts. This is also an interpretative approach that draws attention to the entangled nature of memories and especially the cultural logic by which new conceptions and narratives of heritage emerge from the encounter and entanglement of different memories. Such an approach offers new opportunities for comparative research on the European heritage as an entangled mosaic of histories and memories. This approach thus rejects not only particularistic but also universalistic ones such as alternative Eurocentric accounts. (shrink)

City-dwellers who are threatened by the risk of natural or social disasters are in search of safer houses. Each attempt to satisfy their need for safety, however, turns into another version of the security problem; so much so that, escaping from risk itself turns into different risks. The film 10 to 11 focuses on the socio-spatial conflict between a stranger and his neighbours who are anxious about a possible earthquake risk in Istanbul. Mithat, the protagonist of the film, is a (...) stranger not only to place but essentially to time. He lives within time and understands place as an essential means loaded by temporal experiences and memories. This paper deals with the multiple dichotomies between time and memory, between risk and fear, between aesthetics and security, and between attachment and profit in the context of urban transformation. The stranger, who is analysed for the first time as a temporal being in this paper, is discussed using Zygmunt Bauman’s concepts of uncertainty and liquid modernity, Richard Sennett’s capitalism, Ulrich Beck’s risk society, Frank Furedi’s culture of fear, Stephen Bertman’s hurried culture, Elias Canetti’s death, Giorgio Agamben’s forgotten and gone, Svetlana Boym’s nostalgia, and Halbwachs, Assmann, Connerton, and Arendt’s memory, as well as around the temporal spaces of museums, bibliopoles, antique shops, and cemeteries. (shrink)

Often created by colonial societies characterized by violence and oppression, historical artefacts such as monuments are increasingly under criticism for perpetuating violent attitudes. While the links between artefacts and society are well understood, there has been little work that finds the opportunity for resistance to violence in these artefacts themselves. Developing a ‘spectrum of violence’ for artefacts, I argue that ambiguous artefacts move us towards non-violence by provoking critique, while absolute artefacts move us away from it by stilling critique. Applying (...) this spectrum to a discussion of a graffitied New York monument in 2020, I propose that the act of ‘refacement’ can turn absolute artefacts into ambiguous ones. In so doing, the artefacts that once upheld colonial values might be transformed to resist them. This paper offers a timely exploration of monuments and violence, and seeks to better understand how cultural artefacts can lay the foundations for a non-violent future. (shrink)

This article identifies the emergence of the problematic of the body as a consequence of the forces of technology and bureaucracy which have run through the 20th century. It explores the hypothesis that the problem of the body has emerged out of the wreckage of the aura of the individual. It is proposed that aura was destroyed in the First World War, but it is also shown that for Benjamin anticipations of the destruction can be found in the technologies of (...) photography. Yet, out of the ruin of the auratic individual, there emerged a vision of the armoured body in the work of fascist writers such as Ernst Jünger. A variation on the theme of armour can also be found in Kracauer's discussion of the Tiller Girls. The article concludes that the Holocaust can be read, at least in part, as a logical product of the destruction of the aura of the individual and the subsequent identification of the individual with her or his body alone. (shrink)

Resumen: El presente artículo revisa los usos de la figura del testigo en dos novelas chilenas de reciente publicación: La dimensión desconocida de Nona Fernández y Monte Maravilla de Miguel Lafferte, ambos relatos cuyas tramas están basadas en casos, lugares y personajes históricos reales relacionados con violaciones a los derechos humanos en Chile durante la dictadura pinochetista. En ambos casos, la figura del testigo es compleja e intrincada, ya sea porque es un victimario arrepentido, una niña que se convertirá en (...) la narradora del futuro o un fantasma que resulta ser real. De paso, y a la luz del testigo como figura articuladora común tanto para el derecho como para la literatura, el artículo quiere reflexionar acerca de las posibilidades de los procesos judiciales, en tanto narrativas, como fuentes de memoria colectiva para dar cuenta del horror. El rol del testigo resulta clave en ambos campos discursivos: mientras en los procesos judiciales el testigo es el sujeto de la enunciación del testimonio y, con ello, elemento de prueba en la determinación de responsabilidades, en la literatura el testigo tiene implicancias tanto narratológicas como éticas importantes, las que le proporcionan una riqueza al testimonio que lo vuelven una forma eficaz de memoria que más que contar lo sucedido, se acerca a mostrarlo.: This article reviews how the witness figure has been used in two chilean novels that have been recently published: La dimensión desconocida, from Nona Fernández and Monte Maravilla, from Miguel Lafferte. Both script plots are based in real cases, places and historical characters, related to Pinochet´s dictatorship. They present a complex and intrincate witness figure, through the form a regretful torturer, a girl who will be the future´s narrator or a ghost that happens to be real. Meanwhile, in light of the witness understood as an common articulating figure for the law, as well as for literature, the article wants to reflect on judicial processes posibilities, while narrative, as colective memory sources that can be held accountable for the horror. The witness role turns out to be essential in both discourse fields: meanwhile in judicial procesess the witness is the subject of the testimony enunciation and, as such, an evidence element for criminal liabilities determination, in literature, the witness has important narrative as well as ethics implications, wich give such richness to the testimony, that it becomes an effective way of memory that not only narrates what happened, it closes to show it. (shrink)

In this article the causes and features of a shift from neurosis to narcissism and then autism were investigated. Moreover, special attention is paid not so much to the psychological or even psychiatric aspects of the problem, but to changes in the general features of a human being. Thus, when speaking of the transition from narcissism to autism, one is focusing on true autism, which is characterized by veracity, sincerity and authencity, which reveal themselves in the form of a special (...) kind of infantility, a kind of mature infantility. A suitable example of such infantility is found in the animated film Shrek, a certain barbarism of which is not so ironic or even knowing ironic, but to a greater extent it is warm, earnest and serious although childish. Among other infantile practices, it is worth noting the situationalist-lettrist practice of organizing a text in the form of an ABC alphabet book, a hornbook, which is actualized in a digimodern context. True autism and to some extent pseudoautism in a certain sense become a way to cope with the trance and amnesia of pseudomodernism and leave a hope for the future. Thus, paradoxically, wholeness that was lost is restored through desocialization and sociopathy. This article also draws parallels between digimodernism and speculative realism, conceptualization of interpassivity as well as automodernity. It is emphasized that personal autonomy and automation can be achieved through the use of devices as a means of achieving productive loneliness, which should be distinguished from alienation. In this case, the widespread use of sensory experience as a way of communication is especially important, as an example of which Hope Sandoval’s mode of being and work are considered. It suggests that the high-tech / high-touch approach is best released in DIY activities. The above considerations allow to conclude that true autism is one of the most actual post-postmodern modes of subjectivation. (shrink)

The rhetorical function of the future in Christian Zionists' commemoration of Israel is a core component of their collective memory. As a discursive act, commemoration typically involves a remembering of the past. Based on an analysis of a corpus of US Christian Zionist texts from 1934 to 2010, I argue that a sort of commemorating and remembering of the future takes place, which silences alternative future worlds and possibilities that discord with Christian Zionist ideologies. These texts exhibit a concern with (...) the future that is rooted in a particularized narrative in order to validate Christian Zionist understandings of the role of Israel in human history. Thus, for Christian Zionists, remembering the future is a strategic resource for constructing specific expectations about Israel. Moreover, I argue that these expectations inform how discourse participants assign meaning to the present by forming biased mental models of Israel and manipulating social cognition. (shrink)

The paper focuses on the modalities of nostalgia in a techno-saturated world. Nostalgia is a protean concept that maintains a strong relationship with technology. The latter can mediate, alleviate or trigger nostalgic feelings and discourses orientated not only towards the past, but also towards the present and the future. In this respect, this paper will investigate how nostalgia was used as a narrative tool by Kurt Vonnegut in his Player Piano at several important levels of the plot and how it (...) becomes a character that acts obscurely in some key moments. Firstly, I will analyse the modalities through which nostalgia develops a subtle relationship with technology and progress. Secondly, I will examine how the occurrences of player piano work in the novel as clues that foreshadow the on-coming intrusion of this feeling in the current mood of the personages. Thirdly, I will discuss the nostalgia for humanity in the framework offered by postmodernism. The crisis of metanarratives does not drive nostalgia towards a simple past, but it steers it towards a set of petite histoires that blurs the temporal orientation of nostalgia. (shrink)

Jeffrey Olick is one of the most prominent researchers in the field of memory studies today. Yet, none of his works have been translated into Russian. “Figurations of memory” is one of his most important texts. It is dedicated to the process-relational methodology. J. Olick criticizes traditional approaches to collective memory as a static thing, whereas it should be studied as a process. On the other hand, the author criticizes a mainstream understanding of memory as a unified object. Instead, he (...) suggests that there are multiple mnemonic forms and practices that should be investigated. As a result he presents a new methodology that is based on analysis of the four essential aspects of memory work: field, medium, genre, and profile. This method of analysis leads to emergence of additional empirical categories, such as official, vernacular, public, and private memory; affective, aesthetic-expressive, instrumental-cognitive, and political-moral media; the normal legitimation, German traditions, German victimhood, and German guilt genres; and the reliable, moral, and normal profiles. Though the final model may seem rather complex, the author claims that it is clearer and more precise that other models of research of collective memory. He claims that this methodology is universal for studying a large number of sociological topics. (shrink)

Este libro promete ser una contribución para el estudio de la teoría crítica en general y para el análisis de la historia de la Escuela de Frankfurt en particular. Todos los trabajos que están contenidos en este volumen hacen parte del amplio marco teórico de la teoría crítica de la sociedad. Muchos siguen las huellas de los fundadores de esta tendencia, mientras que otros se presentan como críticos de la misma y unos cuantos más tratan de vincular problemas y contextos (...) de relevancia a los conceptos más destacados que se empezaron a construir hace cien años en Frankfurt. Encontramos como buena excusa para su publicación precisamente el año centenario del Instituto de Investigación Social. Además, hemos creído conveniente organizar los materiales en secciones que van desde la historia de la Escuela de Frankfurt hasta la consideración de algunos interrogantes de actualidad motivados por el desarrollo de la teoría crítica. No obstante, con esto no pretendemos establecer límites absolutos de clasificación. Confesamos que nuestra forma de organizar los ensayos responde simplemente a criterios editoriales más que a cuestiones teóricas y conceptuales. Claramente las intersecciones entre los estudios aquí presentados son amplias y hacen que cada una de las propuestas pueda dialogar con las otras en función de sus evidentes parecidos de familia. (shrink)