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  • Déjà Vu: Aberrations of Cultural Memory
  • Mirko M. Hall (bio)
Déjà Vu: Aberrations of Cultural Memory By Peter KrappUniversity of Minnesota Press, 2004

In his theoretically provocative book Déjà Vu: Aberrations of Cultural Memory, Peter Krapp traces the cultural logic of déjà vu from its origins in nineteenth-century psychoanalytic literature to its eternal return in the culture industries of the late twentieth century. Originally understood as an uncanny experience of "reduplicat-ing or foreboding unfamiliarity," Krapp historicizes and theorizesdéjà vu's semantic—and experiential—shift to a sense of the "overly familiar" and the "tediously repetitive" (x). This profound change coincides with the invention of the first media technologies of photography, telegraphy, and phonography. These technologies harnessed and replicated the feeling of déjà vu, consequently mapping, through incessant repetition and control, an auratic spell of the already (reassuringly) known onto cultural memory. This spell is continuously amplified by ever-increasing technologization and, above all, theculture industries of mass distraction: from the latest blockbust-ers of Hollywood to the most recent terror warnings of the WhiteHouse. Under these conditions, a truly dialectical memory of culture becomes displaced, like the Freudian screen memory, as libidinal attachments are re/cathected to rampant consumerism or ideological manipulation. Déjà vu is, thus, an aberration of cultural memory.

The political stakes of today's déjà vu are of paramount concern for Krapp, particularly as they regard human agency in the information age. He laments (and rightly so) how media technologies participate in normalizing the peculiar singularities of cultural memories through their reification in an endlessly repetitive feedback loop of [End Page 217] familiarity. Memory is subjected to "manipulative strategies of omission and disingenuous ideological filtering" (61) as the objective and subjective history of cultural phenomena are obliterated. Unfortunately, this loop also has considerable psychological effects: not only does the continuous onslaught of new media stimuli (sensations, events, and information) deflect critical consciousness, but, more importantly, the spatialized temporality of the ever-same reinforces an illusory sense of autonomy in the modern subject.

After reviewing the relevant theoretical literature (with a heavy emphasis on Freud), Krapp investigates how the effects of déjà vu can also disrupt conditions of reified cultural memory. He seeks out active moments of resistance in the functioning of déjà vu itself, asking: "how does it allow a vision of the future as if you suddenly remembered it?" (x). It is an attempt to return to the "first perceptions of uncontrollable effects of uncanny recognition [in] an ageof marketing and advertising that seeks to generate such effects" (xxiii). Krapp finds such moments, for example, in Heiner Müller's political theater on war commemoration, in Andy Warhol's obsessive audiovisual self-documentation, in Jacques Derrida's early hypertextual experiments in Glas, and in the memorial character of modern architecture.

In this search, Walter Benjamin is the book's shining theoretical star, whose "media theory of Modernity" (xi) offers a persuasive guide for exploring the interrelationship of history, memory, and mediality. After mating Freud's insights about failures of memory with Benjamin's dialectics of distraction and attention, Krapp begins locating the effects of an "inverted déjà vu" (48) in art, film, literature, and new media. Here, he undertakes a very Benjaminian project (and one with critical import): how institutionalized memories, with their clichéd celebrations and diverted libidinal attachments, may be "brushed against the grain" to reveal their discursive and politically motivated naturalization.

In this regard, Krapp argues that disturbances of cultural memory engendered by déjà vu, such as mémoire involontaire, false recognition, screen memories, and premonitions, may provide both critical consciousness and cultural-revolutionary insights. In other words, these disturbances can overcome mass media's anesthetization of modern experience. Because of déjà vu's unique spatiotemporal [End Page 218] manipulation, which Krapp refers to as a kind of "unrepeatable repetition" (xx), its structural effects are analogous to such secondary processes as condensation, deformation, and displacement. In the "crevices, suspensions, and extensions of memorial space-time," then, one can indeed re/access memories, which have been allowed to "persist and reappear when time is ripe" (43). These...

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