HT IES

become ever more interested in site-memory and in inscribing temporal dimensions in spatial structures, most stunningly in Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin which is currently under construction. In the political realm, the issues of memory and forgetting, memory and repression, memory and displacement resurfaced in the wake of German unification. There was the unresolved question of German nationalism and the acrimonious reevaluation of the past four decades of German culture, East and West, topics treated i n the second and third essays of this collection. Indeed, all of the essays are marked by time, and I attribute their sometimes risible, sometimes more subterranean interconnectedness to two factors. For me us .1 member of the first post-World W a r II generation growing up in West (iermany, b o m in the Third Reich, but too late to have any conscious remembrances, the politics of memory in the German context has been a formative issue since adolescence. The current conjuncture i n Germany, with its contested reorganization of cultural capital and realignment of national memory will certainly keep this issue in the forefront for some time to come. Secondly, 1 have been interested for a long time i n the effects of media on modern culture. The work of both Walter Benjamin and Theodor W . Adorno on art in the age of mechanical reproduction and on the culture industry had been energized by issues of memory and temporality, while diverging in its respective assessments of culture i n the age of modernism, fascism, and communism. The critique of amnesia as terminal malady of capitalist culture was, after all, first articulated by A d o r n o in his work on die fetish character in music in the late 1930s and then again i n the famous culture industry chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment. While Adorno's and Benjamin's analyses pertain to another, now historical stage of modern culture, the issues of memory and amnesia have been exacerbated by the further development of media technologies since their time, affecting politics and culture i n the most fundamental ways. Thus the essays in this volume are about cultural memory as it is articulated in institutions, in public debates, i n theory, i n art, and in literature. Time and again, the essays reach back to earlier moments of twentieth-century culture (the essays on Rilke and J linger, but also the work on Fluxus and on M c L u h a n and the reflections on the modern museum). O n l y the essay on Baudrillard deals explicitly with media theory, but the issue of mediaand this is assumed throughoutis central to the way we live structures of temporality in our culture. In his work on Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin once said that the mass was the agitated veil through which Baudelaire saw and represented Paris, the capital of nineteenth-century modernity. Similarly I would suggest that in this book the media

are the hidden veil through which I am looking at the problem of cultural memory and the structures of temporality at the end of the twentieth century. The struggle for memory is ultimately also a struggle for history and against high lech amnesia. Like Alexander Kluge, 1 worry about the destructive power o f the media as much as I appreciate, even get excited about their potential for new forms of communication. The high-tech world we have entered is neither apocalypse nor panacea. It has elements of both, and it does have profound effects on the ways we think and live cultural memory. [Some of these effects have led to a major and puzzling contradiction in our culture. The undisputed waning of history and historical consciousness, the lament about political, social, and cultural amnesia, and the various discourses, celebratory or apocalyptic, about posthistoire have been accompanied in the past decade and a half by a memory boom of unprecedented proportions. There are widespread debates about memory i n the cultural, social, and natural sciences.
2

In an age of emerging supranational structures, the problem of national identity is increasingly discussed in terms of cultural or collective memory rather than in terms of the assumed identity of nation and state. France designated the year 1980 as I'annee du patrimoine (heritage year) and England, independently, celebrated its national heritage that very same year. Even Israel, where the memory of the Shoah has always played a crucial political role for state and nation, has witnessed a marked intensification of its memorial culture, and Germany (then West Germany), gritting teeth and dutifully contrite, went through a never-ending sequence of Nazi related 40th and 50th anniversaries in the 1980s that produced a number of fascinating public debates about German identity as well as the embarrassment of Bitburg and the Historikerstreit (historians' debate). A l l that time, both the United States and Europe kept building museums and memorials as if haunted by the fear of some imminent traumatic loss. But the concern with memory went far beyond the official political or cultural sphere. Struggles for minority rights are increasingly organized around questions of cultural memory, its exclusions and taboo zones. Other memories and other stories have occupied the foreground in the raging identity debates of the 1980s and early 1990s over gender, sexuality, and race. Migrations and demographic shifts are putting a great deal of pressure on social and cultural memory in all Western societies, and such public debates are intensely political. M o n o l i t h i c notions of identity, often shaped by defensiveness or victimology, clash with the conviction that identities, national or otherwise, are always heterogeneous and in need of such heterogeneity to remain viable politically and existentially. H o w do we understand this newest obsession with memory? H o w do we

evaluate the paradox that novelty in our culture is ever more associated with memory and the past rather than with future expectation? Clearly, it is related to
3

would teem to he its alrophyJ( lerlainly, there is evidence lor the view that capil.ilr.l culluie with its continuing frenetic pace, its television politics of quick oblivion, and its dissolution of public space in ever more channels of instant
i

IN I

the evident crisis of the ideology of progress and modernization and to the fading of a whole tradition of teleological philosophies of history. Thus, the shift from history to memory represents a welcome critique of compromised teleological notions of history rather then being simply anti-historical, relativistic, or subjective.) Memory as a concept rather than merely material for the historian seems increasingly to draw literary critics, historians, and social scientists together, while .1 more traditional concept of history, certainly in some prominent discourses of literary theory, just gives rise to disciplinary trench warfare.; The privileging of memory can be seen as our contemporary version of Nietzsche's attack o n archival history, a perhaps justified critique of an academic apparatus producing historical knowledge lor its own sake, but often having trouble maintaining its vital links with (he surrounding culture. Memory, it is believed, will bridge that gap. There is a double paradox in this privileging of memory today.Our mnemonic culture rejects the idea of the archive while depending o n the archive's contents for its own sustenance. A n d it marks its vital difference from the archive by insisting on novelty, the novelty of no longer fetishizing the new. M y hypothesis, therefore, is that the current obsession with memory is not simply a function of the fin de siecle syndrome, another symptom of postmodern pastiche. Instead, it is a sign of the crisis of that structure of temporality that marked the age of modernity with its celebration of the new as Utopian, as radically and irreducibly other. W h e n Nietzsche stated i n the foreword to the second of his Untimely Meditations that we are all suffering from a consuming historical fever, he was arguing against the past as burden, against archival and m o n u m e n tal history, and he attacked the stifling historicism of his times i n the belief that a more vital form of history could invigorate modern culture. That is what The Birth of Tragedy and some of Nietzsche's other early writings were all about. In those texts, and especially in the meditation on the uses and abuses of history, Nietzsche was a Utopian modernist, standing at the beginning of an intellectual trajectory from Bergson to Proust, from Freud to Benjamin, that articulated the classical modernist formulations of memory as alternative to the discourses of objectifying and legitimizing history, and as cure to the pathologies of modern life. Here memory was always associated with some Utopian space and time beyond what Benjamin called the homogeneous empty time of the capitalist present. That, however, is no longer our situation. Nietzsche's polemic addressed the hypertrophy of historical consciousness in public culture, while our symptom

iiici

1 . 1 1 1 ) 1 1 1 1 - 1 1 1 is inherently amnesiac. Nobody would claim today that we have

loo

milt

h history. But how does one reconcile the amnesia reproach, articulated

Jrcady in the inter-war period by philosophers as different as Heidegger and Aden no, with the observation that simultaneously our culture is obsessed with lltr issue of memory? Clearly, Adorno's brilliant Marxist critique of the freezing i l l memory in the commodity form still addresses an important dimension of imnesia today, but, in its reductive collapsing of commodity form and psychic nliin lure, it fails to give us the tools to explain the mnemonic desires and prach i i " , that pervade our culture. flic difficulty of the current conjuncture is to think memory and amnesia together rather than simply to oppose them. Thustour fever is not a consuming historical lever in Nietzsche's sense, which could be cured by productive forgetting, ll is rather a mnemonic fever that is caused by the virus of amnesia thai al iiiiics threatens to consume memory itself. In retrospect we can see how the historical fever of Nietzsche's times functioned to invent national traditions, to legitimize the imperial nation states, and to give cultural coherence to conllictive si N HI ies in the throes of the Industrial Revolution. In comparison/ithe mnemonic i onvulsions of our culture seem chaotic, fragmentary, and free-floating. They do mil seem to have a clear political or territorial focus, but they do express our sociriy's need for temporal anchoring when i n the wake of the information revolution, the relationship between past, present, and future is being transformed. I'emporal anchoring becomes even more important as the territorial and spatial i oordinates of our late twentieth-century lives are blurred or even dissolved by I I U reased mobility around the globe. Indeed, I would argue that our obsessions with memory function as a reaction formation against the accelerating technical processes that are transforming our Lcbcnswelt (lifeworld) i n quite distinct ways. M e m o r y is no longer primarily a vilal and energizing antidote to capitalist reification via the commodity form, a rejection of the iron cage homogeneity of an earlier culture industry and its consumer markets. It rather represents the attempt to slow down information processing, to resist the dissolution of time i n the synchronicity of the archive,to recover a mode of contemplation outside the universe of simulation and fastspeed information and cable networks, to claim some anchoring space i n a world of puzzling and often threatening heterogeneity, non-synchronicity, and information overload.\This argument is most fully developed in the essays about the

IGHT DRIES

museum as mass medium and about the monument. At stake in the surprising memory boom o f the past decade and a half is indeed a reorganization of the structure of temporality within w h i c h we live our lives in the most technologically advanced societies of the West, h i s t o r i a n s such as Reinhart Koselleck have shown how the specific tripartite structure of past-

world. And yet, lor the cultures of Western societies the "global postmodern" BUUks a significant shift in their cultural memory which can no longer be safely sec in eel along the traditional axes of nation and race, language and national history. Al the same time, modernity's engine of the future, namely technological development, continues at its accelerated pace ushering us into a world of information networks that function entirely according to principles of synchronicily while providing us with multiple images and narratives of the non-synchronous. T h e paradox is that we still harbor high-tech fantasies for the future, but the very Organization of this high-tech world threatens to make categories like past and future, experience and expectation, memory and anticipation themselves obsolete, The jumble of the non-synchronous, the recognition of temporal difference in I he real world thus clashes dramatically with the draining of time in the world ol Information and data banks. But the borders between real w o r l d and its c n i s i ruction in information systems are of course fluid and porous. The more we
(

INTRODUCTION

presenl future, in w h i c h the future is asynchronous with the past, arose at the
turn of the seventeenth to the eighteenth century. The way our culture thinks
4

boul lime is far from natural even though we may experience it as such. In Comparison wild earlier Christian ages that cherished tradition and thought of lb'- future primarily and rather statically, even spatially, as the time of the Last ludgment, modern societies have put ever more weight on thinking the secular Inline as dynamic and superior to the past. In such thinking the future has been radii ally temporalized, and the move from the past to the future has been linked to notions of progress and perfectibility in social and h u m a n affairs that characterize the age of modernity as a w h o l e O f t e n enough this modern structure of temporality, of l i v i n g and experiencing time, has been criticized as deluded or dangerous, especially in the tradition of romantic anti-capitalism and critiques of (he Enlightenment. In our century, different political versions of some better future have done fierce battle with each other, but the quintessentially modern notion of the future as progress or Utopia was shared by all. It no longer is. (Thus we are not just experiencing another bout of pessimism and doubt of progress, but we are living through a transformation of this modern structure of temporality itself. Increasingly in recent years, the future seems to fold itself back into the past} The collapse of the post-World W a r II status quo that carried with il its own register of a rather stable sense of temporality and global zoning has resurrected the specters of the past that are now haunting Europe. The twentyfirst century looms like a repetition: one of bloody nationalisms and tribalisms, of religious fundamentalism and intolerance that we thought had been left behind in some darker past; The increasing two-way interpenetration of First and Third W o r l d adds yet another dimension. Rather than moving together, if at different paces, into the future, we have accumulated so many non-synchronicities in our present that a very hybrid structure of temporality seems to be emerging', one that has clearly moved beyond the parameters of two and more centuries of Kuropean-American modernity. Some have spoken about a "global postmodern" to capture this novel and exhilarating diversity, but the t e r m remains problematic for two reasons. The old relations between center and peripheries k n o w n from an earlier modernity are by no m e a n s simply obsolete today and the struct II res of an emergent postmodernity are very unevenly developed throughout the

live with new technologies of communication and information cyber-space, the iiuire our sense of temporality will be affected. Thus the waning of historical Consciousness is itself a historically explainable phenomenon. The memory I m o m , however, is a potentially healthy sign of contestation: a contestation of the Informational hyperspace and an expression of the basic human need to live in extended structures of temporality, however they may be organized. It is also a reaction formation of mortal bodies that want to hold on to their temporality against a media world spinning a cocoon of timeless claustrophobia and nightmarish phantasms and simulations! In that dystopian vision of a high-tech future, amnesia would no longer be part of the dialectic of memory and forgetting. It will In- lis radical other. It will have sealed the very forgetting of memory itself: nothing to remember, nothing to forget.