[Reader-list] madurai

[Karen]

Hi soudhamini,

A gem of a little book by Nadia Seremetakis, called The Senses Still -- it
talks about how sensory experience takes on a politics through the
encounters of
memory with language and material transformation:  the peach that she now
finds in the market is an index of how the old peach used to feel and taste
and does not any more: "the memory of my peach was in its difference". (I am
extracting for you bits from a review I once wrote of this book). The senses
store traces of past experience and of their felt "truths", they tell of
absence and loss, narratives that may be confirmed or denied by language.
Thus naming the new peach outwardly cancels the old, banished peach: this
new peach is a replacement, a surrogate, producing a new meaning,
legislating a forgetting of the old peach under the force of a new market.
Note how this kind of naming invokes institutional power -- in this case of
the European Common Market.  In the case of rituals, of ritual authorities.



But then the senses intervene as potentially subversive elements.  Memories
are stored in the senses, sedimented evidence of difference in the nature,
meaning and taste of things.  The senses carry traces of a different kind of
engagement with the material world than that posited by modernity.  As
circuits of exchange between the interior and the exterior, the unconscious
and the social-material field, the senses can reveal deeper truths about
historical and cultural change.  The memory of the senses provide a
profound, extra-linguistic, commentary on the meaning of change and of
history, interrupting the modern nexus between language and memory.



Things in turn store traces of sensory experience, of histories of
engagement and relations of agency and authorship: they simultaneously
precipitate and are brought into being by memory.  Cultural formation is a
process of materialization of social norms, structures and traditions, of
authorized relationships between present and past experience, of mainstream

narratives of continuity and change.



An author called Turner (I don't have the complete reference - read him in a
course years ago, have a couple of lines of notes, can get you the complete
reference soon if you wish) also discusses ritual symbols, showing how
mnemonic processes are actively engaged and channeled by inscription into
cultural artifacts.  Or, in Seremetakis's case, commodities. But absence or
forgetting can also materialize cultural change: like the disappearance of
the peach "materializes sweeping macro-historical, sociocultural changes"
(p.3 Seremetakis). And inscription is never complete because incorporation
(of sensory engagement in relics and artifacts) is never completely erased.



Lowenthal, author of "The Past is a Foreign Country" - not a book I like
very much - differs from Seremetakis in negating the empirical presence of
the past in the sensory experience.  Although he acknowledges that the
present is saturated with the past, for him the latter is represented
passively and indirectly in the form of memories, histories and relics,
representations that differ epistemologically and formally from each other,
but share a common feature of distance from the active present subject.
There is an ontological separation between past and present, and a linear
progression from past to present, embodied in the progressive attrition of
relics over time. For him there is no direct evidence of the past: its
existence can at best be inferred from its traces in the material world, the
past is gone and finished, a domain of absence, "the past's empirical
absence leaves a grain of doubt" (p.190). Seremetakis on the other hand
insists that the past persists empirically in the senses and in their
incorporation in inscribed traces.


Another book is "Images of memory: on remembering and representation" by
Susanne Kuchler and Walter Melion, Smithsonian Institution Press 1991.

On collective memory, Maurice Halbwachs is a classic -- very Durkheimian.
I have copies of most of these, but they are in my luggage which will reach
me at the end of the month (hopefully!!)-- let me know if you want them.

Finally, a book that deals with history and memory is Shahid Amin's "Event,
Metaphor, Memory" - about the Chauri Chaura incident and its place in the
narratives of the freedom struggle.

best,

Karen

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "sou dhamini" <soudhamini_1 at lycos.com>
To: <reader-list at sarai.net>
Sent: Wednesday, February 09, 2005 7:10 PM
Subject: [Reader-list] madurai


Hi everyone,

Was lovely to read all the new postings. Quite  a leveling experience. But
6 months seems to me barely enuf time to do one's own work and keep abreast
of the others. Not enuf time to formulate any meaningful response. Perhaps
as we go on . also, so many different ideas and approaches, it takes time to
sink in  .

Meanwhile, I have been doing some random reading, and have posed the
following ideas to myself to mull over.

1. All representation is for retrieval -  and hence about memory.
2. To remember is the basis of  ritual.
3. Forms of representation are forms of memory - not life.

If any one has anything to say, or a reading list to suggest, do write.

Best,
soudhamini

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