New trends in memory studies: A symptom of what?

The article analyzes the conceptual apparatus developed in the field of memory studies: the concepts “post-memory”, “prosthetic memory”, “cultural memory”, “transcultural memory”. In particular, post-memory refers to memories of events experienced and transmitted by parents to their children, who were not participants in these events, but experience them with the same force. Prosthetic memory is understood as the memory of events which individuals have not personally encountered and which are not related to the events of the national history of their country, which they received through the mass media, but to which they have a certain emotional attitude (namely, a sense of “empathy”). Modern research literature also discusses the question of the so-called “transcultural turn”, which is linked with the study of the ways in which various media forms of memory transmission and forms of memory in general can circulate between the borders of nation-states and beyond them and which is reflected in the concept of “transcultural memory”. We propose and argue the thesis that the creation and use of such concepts as “post-memory”, “prosthetic memory”, “transcultural memory”, etc. should be interpreted as a symptom of the actualization of the theme of perception and attitude to the past in the mass (public) consciousness in general. We also argue that behind this topic lies a deeper and more painful problem: what does the modern mass consciousness see as the value of the past and how productive is such a vision for modern culture? We argue that the division into communicative and cultural memory, introduced by Jan Assmann, should be considered a turning point in memory studies. Assmann notes that cultural memory is institutional in nature, embodied in symbolic forms (monuments, museums, libraries, archives and other mnemonic institutions), and extending to objects that are temporally removed from the present. Based on the analysis of the idea of cultural memory, we show that the concepts of post-memory, prosthetic, transcultural and transnational memory are introduced and used not so much to expand the concept of memory beyond the traditionally established ideas about it, but rather to expand collective ideas about the past as a whole. We argue that they create the removal of ideas about the past beyond the limits of their own national histories and the formation of a special attitude towards such a past through empathy, moral assessment, compassion, in particular, by including the tragic experience of other cultures in their own. As a result, in discussions about memory, we are increasingly speaking not so much about its role, as we usually imagine it, but about effective tools for influencing the formation of our ideas about the social world as a whole and the past as an immanent part of this world. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.

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