Gregor Samsa
That Guy
Hey, for those of you who are studying History & Memory in the next year, here's a potentially useful definition of it. The 'definition' is from 'From The Ruins of Colonialism; History As Social Memory'.
The writing of history gains much of its cultural force, not because it is fundamentally different from the more ephemeral work of remembering, but through the institutional locations of history. Histories are acts of institutional inscription, acts of installing memory. Thus historians have been keen to criticise the immateriality and impermanence of the voice of memory compared to the permanence of historical inscription. History and memory refer to different orders of activities constituted in different forms in different sites. Memory is dream-like; it is private, imaginative, particular and saturated with sensation; it does not obey chronology, it is hard to discipline and document; it is rarely evidential and tends to be determined by its moments of enunciation. Memories possess and articulate some of the anti-historical qualities which we need in order to inhabit space and time through our bodies. History is realist and rational, public and prosaic; it consists of disciplinary chronicles that aim to cerify and be universal in their aspirations. Histories establish, substansiate and explicate ways of understanding the temporal continuities and discontinuities of social relations. Such sharp contrasts have been incomprehensible in other cultures and at other times, and if these radical distinctions between history and memory are credible today it is only because both terms have been transformed so that their differences appear more important than their affinities.-Healy, From The Ruins Of Colonialism, p.74.
I hope that it is indeed of use.
The writing of history gains much of its cultural force, not because it is fundamentally different from the more ephemeral work of remembering, but through the institutional locations of history. Histories are acts of institutional inscription, acts of installing memory. Thus historians have been keen to criticise the immateriality and impermanence of the voice of memory compared to the permanence of historical inscription. History and memory refer to different orders of activities constituted in different forms in different sites. Memory is dream-like; it is private, imaginative, particular and saturated with sensation; it does not obey chronology, it is hard to discipline and document; it is rarely evidential and tends to be determined by its moments of enunciation. Memories possess and articulate some of the anti-historical qualities which we need in order to inhabit space and time through our bodies. History is realist and rational, public and prosaic; it consists of disciplinary chronicles that aim to cerify and be universal in their aspirations. Histories establish, substansiate and explicate ways of understanding the temporal continuities and discontinuities of social relations. Such sharp contrasts have been incomprehensible in other cultures and at other times, and if these radical distinctions between history and memory are credible today it is only because both terms have been transformed so that their differences appear more important than their affinities.-Healy, From The Ruins Of Colonialism, p.74.
I hope that it is indeed of use.