#present pasts

[findepartida]

What is at stake here is not the moral struggle of good vs. evil, a discourse that itself remains deeply embedded in self-righteous religious thinking. Demonizing the terrorists only reiterates what they themselves do in their hatred for the infidel. Politicized religious zealotry, whether of Islam, Christianity, Judaism, or any other religion, is not the other of modernity, but its very product. At stake therefore is the political struggle to combat religious zealotry in all its forms, with the goal of preventing it from infiltrating or capturing state power wherever it may threaten to do so. To win that struggle, strategies other than military ones are needed. Questions of political power and economic devastation need to be addressed, as well as deficits of meaning, histories of humiliation and injustice, the downside of globalization which is mostly forgotten when one looks at the world from a 1990s Western perspective only. In the meantime, the twin memories keep haunting me.

Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory, “Twin Memories: Afterimages of Nine/Eleven“

[findepartida]

But to collapse memory into trauma, I think, would unduly confine our understanding of memory, marking it too exclusively in terms of pain, suffering, and loss. It would deny human agency and lock us into compulsive repetition. Memory, whether individual or generational, political or public, is always more than only the prison house of the past.

Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory

[findepartida]

We need both past and future to articulate our political, social, and cultural dissatisfactions with the present state of the world. And while the hypertrophy of memory can lead to self-indulgence, melancholy fixations, and a problematic privileging of the traumatic dimension of life with no exit in sight, memory discourses are absolutely essential to imagine the future and to regain a strong temporal and spatial grounding of life and the imagination in a media and consumer society that increasingly voids temporality and collapses space.

Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory

[nickkahler]

In an era of ethnic cleansings and refugee crises, mass migrations and global mobility for ever more people, the experience of displacement and relocation, migration and diaspora seems no longer the exception but the rule.

Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts, 2000

[nickkahler]

The past cannot give us what the future has failed to deliver.

Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts, 2000

[startingagainffloc-blog]

One of the most interesting cultural phenomena of our day is the way in which memory and temporailty have invaded spaces and media that seemed among the most stable and fixed: cities, monuments, architecture, and sculpture. After the waning of modernist fantasies about creatio ex nihilo and of the desire for the purity of new beginnings, we have come to read cities and buildings as palimpsests of space, monuments as transformable and transitory, and sculpture as subject to the vicissitudes of time. Of course, the majority of buildings are not palimpsests at all. As Freud once remarked, the same space cannot possibly have two different contents. But an urban imaginary in its temporal reach may well put different things in one place: memories of what there was before, imagined alternatives to what there is. The strong marks of present space merge in the imaginary with traces of the past, erasures, loses, and heterotopias.

Andreas Huyssen "Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory" p.7

[wifeofwrath]

Space and time are fundamental categories of human experience and perception, but far from being immutable, they are very much subject to historical change. One of modernity's permanent laments concerns the loss of  better past, the memory of living in a securely circumscribed place with a sense of stable boundaries and a place-bound culture with its regular flow of time and a core of permanent relations. Perhaps such days have always been a dream rather than a reality, a phantasmagoria of loss generated by modernity itself rather than by its prehistory. But the dream does have staying power, and what I have called the culture of memory may well be, at least in part, its contemporary incarnation. the issue, however, is not he loss of some golden age of stability and permanence. The issue is rather the attempt, as we face the very real processes of time-space compression, to secure some continuity within time, to provided some extension of lived space within which we can breathe and move.

- Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia