Abstract
Rarely is a new philosophical concept introduced with such care, clarity and systematicity. Speaking as an inter-disciplinarian with interests in social and cultural anthropology, philosophy, memory studies, media and cultural studies, I can say with confidence that the concept of ‘mnemonic imagination’ speaks to all these fields and maybe more. It is also an excellent contribution to debates on the constitution of experience and self-identity in late modernity.
Keightley and Pickering move beyond ‘the modernist association of memory with the past, and imagination with the future, and think instead about the necessity of memory for thinking about the future, and imagination for thinking about the past’ (p. 50).
The book opens by accentuating what the authors find to be ‘a large and unacknowledged gap’ in memory studies, a field which they argue focuses exclusively on memory, giving little if any attention to the creative role played by imagination in processes of remembering. The mnemonic imagination, assert the authors, is key to understanding the ways in which ‘the past attains or regains significance for the present and the future, and makes of remembering a creative process’ (p. 13). The book steers away from sociologically and psychologically deterministic interpretations of memory and advocates focusing on the relations between personal and popular memory and the interplay between ‘situated and mediated experience’. The key to these relations and this interplay, argue the authors, is mnemonic imagination, which facilitates ‘the transactional movement necessary for their co-existence’ (p. 9). In elaborating the concept of mnemonic imagination, the book attempts to develop a sociological aesthetics of memory that embraces creative dimensions of remembering through self and its other (p. 12).
Central to this ethico-political aesthetics is the operationalizing of the mnemonic imagination, necessitating emphasis on the shared and interwoven affinities between memory and individual/collective forms of experience. For the authors, the redrafting of memories of our past experience is not a fixed process. Experience in this case is ceaselessly traversing a temporalized space between the remembering subject and the changing intervening social forces with which it enters in a dialectical relationship. Staying clear of modernist and deterministic interpretations of ‘experience’, the authors define experience as ‘never exclusively personal or public, interiorised or outwardly facing, self-directed or the blind product of social forces’, but always in flux and crossing between ‘these mutually, informing categories’ (p. 19). But how and through what means is experience articulated? According to the authors, we are not merely authorial selves, but ‘editors-in-chief of our own memories’. The traversal movement of experience is predicated on a dual temporal structure, ‘characterised by its continual unfolding in time while also acting back on the continuing development across time’ (p. 24). This dual structure allows the modern subject to creatively reflect ‘narratively’ about self across time. It is because of our access to Efrahrung (the point where accumulated experience is evaluated) that our knowledge about self is crystallized.
In the second chapter, ‘The mnemonic imagination’, the authors set themselves three complex and difficult intellectual tasks: First, they provide an excellent critique of literature on memory encompassing work from philosophy, sociology, psychology and memory studies. This critical, interdisciplinary exercise, it is important to add, is pursued rigorously throughout the book. But it is particularly in this chapter that the theoretical deficits in understanding the relationship between memory and imagination are painstakingly exposed by the authors; giving their new concept, ‘mnemonic imagination’, a well-deserved sense of urgency. Second, the chapter maps out the relational structures and the taxonomies upon which the authors rely to give their concept a sense of hermeneutical relevance and coherence. Third, the authors demonstrate how the concept can be theoretically operationalized to serve as a creative and critical analytical tool.
Taking their cue from Dilthey’s work on Poetry and Experience (1996), Kant’s distinction between reproductive (re-collective) and the productive (inventive) imagination and Merleau-Ponty’s situating of the ‘real’ and the ‘unreal’ within a dialectical relationship, the authors build a strong case against ‘the deleterious consequences of analytical separation of memory and imagination’. Their concept, ‘mnemonic imagination’, moves beyond this tendency, insisting instead on memory and imagination’s ‘continuous interpenetration’ (p. 76). Taking their argument further, in the third chapter Keightley and Pickering turn their attention to the relationship between individual and popular memory. The latter, they define as ‘a continuous operation of popular remembrance’ that manifests itself not in texts or individuals, but in the ‘discursive space between them’ (p. 109). In the fourth chapter the authors put nostalgia at the centre of individual and collective processes of remembering, reclaiming it, at the same time, from its negative connotation as a ‘modern malaise’ (p. 113). Here, the authors offer a plausible critique of Marxist interpretations of nostalgia best summed up by Frow’s statement where nostalgia is seen as ‘a paralysing structure of historical reflection’ (p. 127). Such uses of the term, argue the authors, ‘prevent us from tackling the complex and in some ways the contrary features of nostalgia’ (p. 127). Instead, the authors take their cue from Svetlana Boym, whose study of post-communist cities distinguishes between two types of nostalgia: restorative nostalgia and reflective nostalgia. The former ‘reconstructs emblems and rituals of home and homeland in an attempt to conquer and spatialise time’, whereas the latter ‘cherishes shattered fragments of memory and temporalizes space’ (Boym, in Keightley and Pickering, p. 135). It is this reflective aspect that guides the authors’ conceptualization of nostalgia. As well as delineating the creative and fluid traits of nostalgia, Keightley and Pickering also draw the reader’s attention to a more regressive form of nostalgia which they call retrotyping, the consequence of which is ‘generally to reduce the past to a limited repertoire or set of stock images’, which because of the disconnection it creates in time, ‘imposes restrictions and constraints in the mnemonic imagination’ (p. 159). The authors provide a number of examples from television advertising to show the various ways in which retrotyping is manifested as a form of discursive narrativity. It is not, however, the media they blame for this regressive form of nostalgia, ‘but the recurrent tendency in media culture to reductive retrotyping’ (p. 159). The concept of retrotyping is further explained in the next chapter ‘The foreclosure of mnemonic imagination’, where the authors examine the ways in which consumerism and promotional culture are central to the ideological production and perpetuation of ‘armchair nostalgia’.
While the traversal and connective movement through time is important for a critical mnemonic imagination to be functional, it is, I argue, not enough. It is surely our ability to critically assess how these temporalities have been framed/represented for us that renders our mnemonic imagination critical. Now, this critical act is not readily available to everyone, at every time and everywhere. So there is a need here to engage with not just the consumerist structures of retrotyping, but also its ideological forms. Furthermore, since the mnemonic imagination is presented to us as a conceptual tool for pursuing a ‘sociological aesthetics of temporal experience’, which transcends a purely phenomenological or purely aesthetic emphasis to ‘incorporate an ethico-political dimension’ (p. 79; see also chapter 6 ‘Creative memory and painful pasts’) we have to be cautious when representations of others’ suffering take the form of a digressive, ideological retrotyping, where the text (framing a traumatic past) is intentionally cut off from its transactional relation to and its continuity with its ‘political’ present. Documentaries on the Holocaust, depicting atrocious crimes against humanity, hardly ever engage with connected historical events such as the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 and the occupation of Palestinian land. Ideological retrotyping functions through the omission or the delinking of past events and their politically charged present. What can be synthesized through mnemonic imagination, therefore, does not always guarantee an ethical positioning in relation to the other. So, here synthesis itself has to be a constant object of questioning.
On another note, and since the authors make it clear that a critical mnemonic imagination is also dependent on appropriating an ethics of otherness, the traversal route they design for the operationalization of the mnemonic imagination seems to privilege movement across my-our time (a simultaneous, cross-temporal movement) whereas I contend that a trans-temporal movement or route is equally important. Thinking of trans-temporality rather than mere cross-temporality as a relational constituent of remembering and imagination may offer other means for thinking about the self in relation to others and their different cultural temporalities, thus contributing to the concept’s potential for engaging with the ethics of otherness. While cross-temporalness is an ontological manifestation of how we relate to my-our time, trans-temporalness is, in the main, a globalized, technologically driven phenomenon: a techno-ontological manifestation of how my time and the other’s time are interwoven.
In their concluding chapter, ‘Coda’, the authors make a timely and well-placed plea for the importance of and urgent need for empirical/ethnographic research to gain a better understanding of the interwoven workings of memory and imagination in everyday life. Keightley and Pickering’s book is an intellectual tour de force. Their new concept, the ‘mnemonic imagination’, should become an object of debate and discussion across the humanities for a long time to come.