Radstone

Brit academic Susannah Radstone visited Melbourne University last year. She has visited Australia multiple times, with research for her most recent book supported by ANU. Her works in the various corners of memory research are consistently some of the best writings in this field - an sometimes disappointing endlessly frustrating field. A serious, engaged and clear thinker, her writing arrives at deceptively simple conclusions. This masks the way she can clear away obfuscation and confusion. To wit:

We also need all the time to be asking whether there are inassimilable or incommensurable aspects to memory, and if so how they can be understood. In other words, we need to attend not only to the articulation of memory by the discourses and institutions of the public sphere, but also to the absences, gaps and slips produced by such articulations—absences that might beg questions concerning both memory’s incommensurability or untranslatability and questions of power, politics and recognition.…Without this dual focus, studies of memory will share with approaches grounded in identity politics a limited view of the processes, practices and institutions through which experience or memory make their mark and are made. Understandings of memory, that is, whether personal, social, collective or cultural, cannot be derived from experience and memory alone.

Which might sound self-evident, but you'd probably be amazed how much work on memory misses this dimension. Radstone has written elsewhere about what she notices as the impact of the 'ethical turn' in discussions of memory.

Antze and Lambek have pointed out that the contemporary emphasis on individual trauma and the recovery of personal memories of victimhood might be conceived of as ‘a triumph over the political… Here historical trauma is displaced by individual drama’. As Antze and Lambek go on to suggest, the current politics of memory and its associated culture of victimhood draw attention away from collective forces and issues, and produce a shift from collective obligations and modes of accountability to narratives of individual suffering and accusations of individual blame. Within this memory culture, a focus by memory studies on individual narratives of remembered suffering may be contributing to what Richard Sennett, deploying as yet unproblematised oppositional terms, described as people ‘working out in terms of personal feelings public matters which properly can be dealt with only through codes of impersonal meaning.’ Memory studies too, that is, with its focus on questions of personal suffering and individual testimony, may be viewed as contributing to what Sennett sees as ‘the erosion of the delicate balance between the public and the private.’

In discussing nostalgia, it is easy to slip into such an ultimately unsatisfactory stress on the individual. But retaining the dual focus Radstone outlines in the first excerpt (above) helps to guard against this.

(Quotes taken from Radstone's "Reconceiving Binaries: the Limits of Memory," History Workshop Journal, 59)
(Pic via Flickr.)