Present pasts: Media, politics, amnesia

Public Culture

Volumn 12, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 21-38

  Huyssen, Andreas ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0034407812     PISSN: 08992363     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/08992363-12-1-21     Document Type: Article

References (25)

1. Both the title of this essay and the notion of present futures are indebted to the seminal work of Reinhart Koselleck in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985).
2. Of course, an emphatic notion of present futures still operates in the neoliberal imaginings of financial and electronic globalization, a version of the former and largely discredited modernization paradigm, updated for the post-Cold War world.
3. The case received its paradigmatic statement in Fredric Jameson's classic essay "Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review, no. 146 (1984): 53-92.
4. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989).
5. See Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), esp. chap. 4, and most recently Public Culture 11(1) (1999), a special issue on "alter/native modernities," edited by Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar.
6. See Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), esp. chap. 4, and most recently Public Culture 11(1) (1999), a special issue on "alter/native modernities," edited by Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar.
7. On the complex mix of present futures and present pasts see Andreas Huyssen, "The Search for Tradition" and "Mapping the Postmodern," in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 160-78, 179-221.
8. See Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988) and special issues of New German Critique on Historikerstreit (44 [1981]) and German unification (52 [1991]).
9. See Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988) and special issues of New German Critique on Historikerstreit (44 [1981]) and German unification (52 [1991]).
10. See Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988) and special issues of New German Critique on Historikerstreit (44 [1981]) and German unification (52 [1991]).
11. See Anson Rabinbach, "From Explosion to Erosion: Holocaust Memorialization in America since Bitburg," History and Memory 9 (1997): 226-55.
12. Of course, the use of Holocaust memory as a prism for the events in Rwanda is highly problematic, since it cannot acknowledge the specific problems arising within a postcolonial memory politics. But that was never the issue in Western media accounts. On memory politics in various parts of Africa, see Memory and the Postcolony: African Anthropology and the Critique of Power, ed. Richard Werbner (London: Zed Books, 1998).
13. This view was first articulated by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, 1972); it was taken up again and reformulated by Jean François Lyotard and others in the 1980s. On the centrality of the Holocaust for Horkheimer and Adorno's work see Anson Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
14. This view was first articulated by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, 1972); it was taken up again and reformulated by Jean François Lyotard and others in the 1980s. On the centrality of the Holocaust for Horkheimer and Adorno's work see Anson Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
15. Gerhard Schulze, Die Erlebnisgesellschaft: Kultursoziologie der Gegenwart (Frankfurt: Campus, 1992). The term Erlebnisgesellschaft, literally "society of experience," is hard to translate. It refers to a society that privileges intense but superficial experiences oriented toward instant happiness in the present and quick consumption of goods, cultural events, and mass-marketed lifestyles. Schulze's is an empirical sociological study of contemporary German society that avoids both the restrictive parameters of Pierre Bourdieu's class paradigm and of Walter Benjamin's philosophically inflected opposition of Erlebnis and Erfahrung as an opposition between fleeting surface and authentic depth experience.
16. On Chile see Nelly Richard, Residuos y metáforas: Ensayos de crítica cultural sobre el Chile de la transición (Santiago: Editorial Cuarto Propio, 1998); on Argentina see Rita Arditti, Searching for Life: The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the Disappeared Children of Argentina (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
17. On Chile see Nelly Richard, Residuos y metáforas: Ensayos de crítica cultural sobre el Chile de la transición (Santiago: Editorial Cuarto Propio, 1998); on Argentina see Rita Arditti, Searching for Life: The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the Disappeared Children of Argentina (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
18. My use of the notion of "imagined memory" is indebted to Appadurai's discussion of "imagined nostalgia" in his Modernity at Large, 77. The notion is problematic to the extent that all memory is imagined, and yet it allows us to distinguish memories grounded in lived experience from memories pillaged from the archive and mass-marketed for fast consumption.
19. On these issues see Miriam Hansen, "Schindler's List Is Not Shoah: The Second Commandment, Popular Modernism, and Public Memory," Critical Inquiry 22 (1996): 292-312. See also my forthcoming "Of Mice and Mimesis: Reading Spiegelman with Adorno," New German Critique.
20. On these issues see Miriam Hansen, "Schindler's List Is Not Shoah: The Second Commandment, Popular Modernism, and Public Memory," Critical Inquiry 22 (1996): 292-312. See also my forthcoming "Of Mice and Mimesis: Reading Spiegelman with Adorno," New German Critique.
21. Dennis Cass, "Sacrebleu! The Jazz Era Is up for Sale: Gift Merchandisers Take License with History," Harper's Magazine, December 1997, 70-1.
22. Hermann Lübbe, Zeit-Verhältnisse: Zur Kulturphilosophie des Fortschritts (Graz: Verlag Styria, 1983). For a more extended critique of Lübbe's model see my "Escape from Amnesia: The Museum as Mass Medium," in Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (London: Routledge, 1995), 13-36.
23. Hermann Lübbe, Zeit-Verhältnisse: Zur Kulturphilosophie des Fortschritts (Graz: Verlag Styria, 1983). For a more extended critique of Lübbe's model see my "Escape from Amnesia: The Museum as Mass Medium," in Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (London: Routledge, 1995), 13-36.
24. Gerd Meissner, "Unlocking the Secrets of the Digital Archive Left by East Germany," New York Times, 2 March 1998, D5.
25. See Charles S. Maier, "A Surfeit of Memory? Reflections on History, Melancholy, and Denial," History and Memory 5 (1992): 136-51.