It Doesn't Belong To You

Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (Columbia University Press, 2004)

Jay Winter, "The Generation of Memory: Reflections on the 'Memory Boom' in Contemporary Historical Studies," GHI Bulletin 27 (Winter 2000)

I'm not sure what to do with this material. In many ways reading these works alongside each other is evocative of a personal choice I've had to make within the last few years. The question before me: what intellectual and analytical framework would best help me pursue the kind of career I want, and even more deeply, accommodate the worldview I have developed and make possible the kind of life I want to live.
History ultimately won out and in many ways reading these texts is affirmative of my decision. Maybe I've already been indoctrinated, but with respect to the arguments of the above works, the historian's is the more convincing.

I happen to be uniquely qualified to evaluate both. I hold a bachelor's degree in cinema and photography and spent much of my undergraduate years reading works just like Alison Landberg's. For a while I actually assumed I would be producing work of this kind. In other words, the intellectual choices offered by these readings are reflective of the personal choices I've had to make in my own life. When you spend seventy-plus hours a week reading and writing it's hard not to identify personally with the work that you do. There are numerous commentaries on the necessity of those in my generation to "feel good" about their professional life - that a job away from home is no longer simply a means to a domestic material end.

See how easy it is to go on and on about yourself! But talking about yourself is in fact an appropriate place to start with these readings. Both Landsberg and Winter comment on the tendency of contemporary history consumers to personalize historical content. This is not a new concept for us this semester. Rosenzweig and Thelen set the stage here and the challenge has appeared in various other readings. The question repeatedly is what to do with this predicament. How do you reconcile the popular historymaker's interests with the professional historymaker's vision? Landsberg here provides a rather unique model.

Taking the concept of mimetic realism to a whole new level, she argues that memory is a principal mode of knowledge acquisition, and further that memories can in fact be fabricated, "burned in" to the visitor, across temporal and geographic borders. In other words, through mediated content (film, television, comic books, "experiential" museums) you can access and, most importantly, feel the memory of a historical reality you were never in fact a part of. Landsberg is right to recognize the importance of mass mediated content. Films and miniseries are a significant, if not the primary, site of historical engagement for many Americans. These are tools that public historians need to learn how to use, particularly the use of traditional narrative arcs. They also are an avenue into the digital interface, which (if your institution can afford it) is a necessary feature of a museum. Rather than bemoan the use of digital technology, at this point it is best to learn to utilize it toward your age old ends. But I think the utility of Landsberg's study ends there.

I am deeply skeptical of Landsberg's embrace of "prosthetic memory" as a valuable pathway to historical meaning. It's tempting to write off Landsberg's book as a work of theory and to ridicule the vernacular of her field (film theory, essentially). But it's important to remember while reading the book that Landsberg is not, by trade, a historian, and her work shouldn't be evaluated as such. She is a literary scholar. That she can comment on historical patterns and it not be an utter disaster deserves some recognition.

That said, the history here is indeed bad. Much of her argument rests on the assumption that the rise of modernity coincided with the demise of traditional kinship networks built around race, ethnicity, and class. Certainly this is a part of the story of the displacements of immigration, slavery, and the Holocaust. But Landsberg neglects the various kinship networks that developed as a response to these displacements, many of them built upon the very unifying concepts that Landsberg suggests were increasingly obsolete in modern America: race, class, and ethnicity (With respect to slavery, the recent scholarship of Ira Berlin and Steve Hahn bears this out). This is just one of a number of historical bones one could pick with Landsberg. More pressing is what to do with her conclusions, and Jay Winter offers some valuable answers.

Winter offers a valuable reminder of collective memory's proximity to political power. He is leery of state-sponsored commemorative sites, and with respect to the Holocaust and its "transferential spaces" (Landsberg's term) Winter writes:

"None of these sites can 're-present' the Holocaust; nothing can do so in any conventional way. All they can accomplish - and it is a lot - is to suggest what is absent... because of genocide and to leave the question of its 'meaning' open...

...I doubt that 'transference' can really be a framework for those telling and those attending to such narratives."

In other words, prosthetic memory is totally bogus. Landsberg doesn't offer the realm of prosthetic memory as the only site of historical engagement - she rightly recognizes a need to bridge the gap between the 'experiential' (museums, films, etc.) and the 'cognitive' (traditional narratives, academic history). But she fails to recognize the dangers of such a process. Winter reminds us of those dangers and his work is the more cogent of the two.

I'll leave with this. Is it not reasonable for the historian of trauma to tell their audience, "I'm sorry. You weren't there. You cannot possibly know what it was like to be there. Part of this simply does not belong to you. But that doesn't mean we can't try to grasp at its historical meaning."

That often is good enough for me, and at the risk of alienating popular historymakers, it should often be enough for them as well.