I was never very happy with the jacket copy for this book, which I don’t think conveyed what I thought was important about my approach to the subject of memory. There is a continuity between this book and my previous, On Garbage, which – amongst other things – is also about forgetting. As Memory: Encounters with the Strange and the Familiar reveals, remembering and forgetting go together. The book was commissioned by Reaktion Books as ‘A Philosophy of Memory’, which offers some idea of its general disciplinary orientation.
At one point I had titled a near-complete draft of the memory book, ‘Enlargements’, a photographic metaphor that applied – I thought – not only to my exploration of images as fragments of time and place, but to the phenomena of cultural memory more broadly. That is to say, each of the three chapters – titled ‘Pasts’, ‘Presences’, and ‘Ecologies’ – are about enlarging, doubling, and the creation of a surfeit of reality that is multitemporal in nature and that we encounter as something that we are not always able to come to terms with.
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From the jacket copy:
It is easy to take memory for granted because we suspect it is always with us, and always at our command. Yet to live without memory would be to experience the collapse of almost everything that provides a basis for not only a sense of personal identity, but for the kind of awareness that locates us in particular times and places as people with a history that is as impersonal as it is a power within our control.
As such, memory not only informs our temporal experience - the sense of time passing, the concepts of past and present - it goes to the core of how people in modern societies have understood what it is to be ‘at home’ in the world, and to live within human communities and in society. This is why memory may offer the comfort of the familiar, while also revealing the distance we have travelled from our origins, which may equally be strange and unfamiliar.
Drawing on thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Emile Durkheim, Carlo Ginzburg, Friedrich Nietzsche and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and reaching back to ancient Greek myth for the source of our modern ideas about memory, the book develops a new understanding of how memory has been transformed by modernity, technology and pervasive digital networks, but at the same time has always shaped our conception of ‘home’.
Home, in this sense, is not only the homeland: it refers to the childhood spaces we inevitably end up separated from; it is the psychological ‘interior’; and it is the ‘habitat’ that today is taking the form of a profusion of digital networks that have created a new ecology of remembering and forgetting. Memory: Encounters with the Strange and the Familiar probes the nature of a phenomenon we all too easily associate with inner, mental life, and reveals it to be both the source and consequence of the ways we are always remaking the external world as our home.
Editions:
Reaktion Books, July, 2013 (UK)
University of Chicago Press, August 2013 (USA)
ISBN 978-1780231785
188 pages | 15 illustrations
From the Preface
‘It is arguably the case that an existential split defines modern experience in a more thoroughgoing way that it did in any earlier time, simply because the past, and knowledge of the past, is accumulated so comprehensively through archives and media, and through the preservation of physical traces. ‘Hieroglyphic’ was how Walter Benjamin described the topography of modern life; we occupy a space alive with treasures that could reveal the depth of history and the mysteries of a present easily bamboozled by its own everydayness.
For those who sense the past to lie dormant it will always seem accessible, if only we pay attention to its fleeting appearances, which can be as elusive as lightning flashes, Benjamin once said. The figure of the flâneur, who took up much of Benjamin’s attention, was viewed as a proto-detective figure with an intuitive grasp of the fact that backthere, and down below, there was something more. The depth of modern life was, in fact, memory:
“The street conducts the flâneur into a vanished time. For him, every street is precipitous. It leads downward – if not to the mythical Mothers, then into a past that can be all the more spellbinding because it is not his own, not private. Nevertheless, it always remains the time of childhood [ … ] In the asphalt over which he passes, his steps awaken a surprising resonance.”
Benjamin was convinced that the dead were all around us in the material stuff of modern life. This demanded a knowledge that could only be borne of a ‘telescoping of the past through the present’; the redemption of a collective memory that seemed to have been abandoned to progress and its new social forms and technologies, its media, and its attachment to life at the surface. Benjamin’s fascination for memory lies in the interplay of surface and depth. This book seeks to show that in contemporary life, collective memory, as Benjamin understood it, is transformed. Without depth, we are not merely left with surface, but with a new ecology that abolishes the distinction – it is, rather, ‘surf life’ – not merely surface, but surfeit; a ‘too muchness’ that defines the ecology of memory today. Benjamin’s sense that fragments, ruins, and small things are the key to larger truths – itself reflecting a variant of Leibniz’s theory of monads (the idea that particulars, or monads, reflect a universality) – seems nonetheless to be borne out in the present, when all around us, in our ambient networked spaces, infinite remembrance of some kind is at the behest of any wandering attention that stops to plunge in. It is no longer best thought of, however, as down there, underneath; but rather, out there in the atmosphere.’
Reviews
‘Scanlan argues that the digital revolution and . . . the surfeit of available past experience [it produces] threatens to overwhelm the present. The distinction between past and present, between memory and forgetting becomes blurred and undermines any possible sense of tangible reality. We no longer live lives tightly tethered to a particular time and place, but skim along the surfeit of experience, dipping in where and when we please. Scanlan is ambivalent about this new way of living. He sees the potential for playful engagement with the world, but worries about a deepening culture of forgetfulness. Memory: Encounters with the Strange and the Familiar is a useful entry point into the growing scholarship on history and collective memory. For historians of medicine, such work poses a challenge to connect historical accounts of the reductive focus on individual memory as recall in the neurosciences to these broader sociocultural meanings of memory.’
— JF Ballenger, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Vol. (89:2) 2015.
Other editions
Pamćenje: Susreti s nepoznatim i poznatim (Zagreb: Tim Press, 2015). Croatian translation.
الذاكرة : لقاءات مع الغريب والمألوف (Abu Dhabi: Kalima, 2017). Arabic translation.
