Trapped in Amber: The New Materialities of Memory

Cultural Memory and Historical Topographies

The New York art critic Hal Foster once observed: "We still find it difficult to think about history as a narrative of survivals and repetition," yet we increasingly have to come to terms with a "continual process of protension and retension, a complex relay of anticipated futures and reconstructed pasts."¹ Foster does not name film and photography, with their uniquely haunting time-warp effects on our conception of history as a linear sequence, connecting effects to causes. But Foster clearly alludes to the relays of countervailing temporalities that the prevailing ubiquity of photographic media has engendered. Cinema, after all, defies time by what I would like to call its uncanny ontology: simulacra of life at its most vivid, moving images always document what is not yet dead but neither quite alive. This unresolvable tension, between rewind and replay, between presence and absence, between life preserved and the kingdom of shadows, has profoundly altered our understanding of what history is, just as the same tension, between original and copy, between reconstruction and the replica, dominates our thinking today about the status of art and of historical artefacts, in our post-auratic era that nonetheless craves for authenticity and for "keeping it real."

Damien Hirst's controversial exhibition, on show in Venice in 2017, called "Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable,"² is both a suitably baroque (and bombastic) treatment of these topics of the simulacrum and a slyly mischievous middle finger cocked at the art-world and at academia, for wrestling so earnestly with such questions as the ethics of restoration and preservation, of how to tell appropriation from plagiarism, how to distinguish the reproduction from the copy, the replica from the fake, and what the emotional difference is between the mass-produced souvenir in the gift shop and the priceless collector's item: all categories that—as already Walter Benjamin recognized—had become highly problematic if not obsolete in the age of reproducibility, of which he saw photography and film as the unmistakeable harbingers and inevitable disruptions. The implied suspension of epistemic boundaries between different orders of reality and reference has only become more explicit, indeed self-evident, with digital imaging and 3-D printing. Yet the questions this poses about truth and verification, visibility and evidence have lost none of their slippery intractability for philosophers, art historians, and indeed, film scholars.

In what follows, I may be doing no more than, yet again, to demonstrate this frustrating intractability, as I try to clear a path through what the impact has been of moving pictures on history and memory, as we make sense of obsolescence and nostalgia, document and proof, testimony and traumatic forgetting. I want to start with an observation—or a claim—namely, that the coexistence in the twentieth century of cinema and of nineteenth-century historicist consciousness has produced two unsettled but interrelated crises: it has turned into a truism the spatialization of time that was already well under way with Einstein's relativity theory versus Bergson's time as duration, and second, it has begun to substitute for our notion of linear causality such terms as contingency, chance, chaos theory, and stochastic series.

Taken together, the spatial turn and the crisis in causation have challenged the hegemony of history—which the nineteenth century had discovered as the relentless force of destiny (Hegel's world spirit), or had celebrated as the engine driving human progress (Marx). More specifically, spatial time and contingent non-linearity have deconstructed history into competing but also complementing centers of more entropic forms of energy, identified with the archive and archaeology as the "materializations of memory." But there is also associative memory and dissociative trauma—what we might call the "immaterializations of memory."

Given my topic, I want to approach history as time spatialized under the heading of cultural memory, and history as the archive under the heading of historical topographies, suggesting that a concept such as obsolescence might combine or maybe even reconcile the locatedness of topography with the new materialities of memory.

Cultural memory has been extensively studied by Aleida Asmann...