Sites of Memory

Why do we feel this way?  Nora suggests it is because we no longer feel as if we are part of the past. Or to put it another way, we no longer feel our shared past is part of the present in a meaningful way. I can connect this to Kensington and Fishtown, two North Philadelphia neighborhoods which are suffering from a tension between “old” and “new” neighbors.  “Old” residents—who  feel a strong sense of place and belonging, who lived here for generations, have weathered tough times,  and share a sense of connectedness and of a collective memory—feel besieged by processes of gentrification and the influx of “new” neighbors it brings, many of whom, like me,  have starkly different cultural, economic, educational, and religious backgrounds and who often bring a strong “suburban” sense of entitlement to these neighborhoods.  There is even a t-shirt for sale in local chain of second-hand shops that ironically symbolizes some of these feelings of discontinuity and longing: “I miss the Old Philadelphia.” “Philadelphia” is even printed in a calligraphy-style font that visually accentuates the sense of the lost past that the words express.

My point is that we no longer feel and embody a profound sense of connection to the past. “Old” neighbors knew it once, perhaps, but they feel it slipping irretrievably away.  They recognize something once valued is disappearing. “New” neighbors experience that past in highly attenuated and curated ways, but they experience it not as a way of life but as history. Perhaps part of the reason the second-hand shops do such a brisk trade in this part of the city is because what they sell is a piece of the past, which can anchor some of those feelings.  Such encounters with the past may be more or less positive for us. But just as often our encounters with collective memory and history can be unpleasant and a source of conflict.  And in the context of gentrification even the highly attenuated, curated past is being rapidly swept away by the current of “the new.”  

As I said—apocalyptic. Nora’s point is that we once lived or better embodied the past as tradition.  Tradition here refers to the ordinary, taken-for-granted, way-things-are-because-they-have-always-been-that-way nature of collective life.  The past was once embodied in our everyday lives as a shared sensibility and as a backdrop of understandings and expectations against which our individual and shared stories played out.  This sensibility is what defined us as individuals in relation to a collective, just as it defined that collective through the shared knowledge, rituals, stories, and habits passed on as tradition.  But this state of what he calls collective or “real” memory—“social and unviolated”—was put into crisis by the modern advent  of “history.”  For Nora, history is understood as “how our hopelessly forgetful modern societies, propelled by change, organize the past”(8). “Real” or “pure”  collective memory was “torn” from lived, unscrutinized everyday life by history.  This tearing continues, and it feeds those feelings of dread and anxiety we experience as we watch our way of life in the present rapidly becoming past, and thus being lost to the oblivion of history.

This contrast between memory and history is the main point of Nora’s essay (as the title suggests). “Memory is life,” he insists, and it is therefore “a perpetually actual phenomenon,” something always in the act of becoming real in the present, even as the present is always passing away and becoming the past (8).  Accordingly, memory is “affective,” connected to the “sacred” and the magical: It selectively preserves the past in the present in order to align the collective with something that transcends the sum of its individual parts.  It imbues groups with a sense of destiny, of inevitability, of being special, even exceptional.  It is thus also “collective, plural, and yet individual”(9). For while it is inherited, it is nevertheless found in the hands of those who understand themselves as connected through memory to something greater than themselves. Importantly, memory is not just ideas or feelings, it “takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images, and objects”(9).

We can conclude from this that collective memory does not simply go away because history wishes to “annihilate” it (9).  It persists and so our anxieties about its slipping away mount. In response to these feelings of panic that arise when the present (the motorcycle) feels like it is taking off and leaving us behind, collective memory “crystalizes and secretes itself” in what Nora called “lieux de mémoire” or sites of memory.  We respond to (or maybe “act out”?) these feelings of dread and anxiety in a frenzy of memorial activity.  This frenzy is what Erika Doss terms “memorial mania: an obsession with issues of memory and history and an urgent desire to express and claim those issues in visibly public contexts”(2).  Doss’ book explores the various practices through which we express these “urgent feelings about history and memory”: we rename parks, streets, schools, and other public places; we create and attend ethnic festivals and fairs; we remove old and erect new statues and plaques; we write and rewrite accounts of the past; we build museums and curate exhibits;  we create shrines, hold vigils, designate holidays, and insist we will “never forget.”