The fallibility of memory

I am in the final stages of research and writing a paper on memory which I expect to submit for peer review and publication early in the new year. This paper has proven most difficult to complete, least of all because I started doing research about eight months ago — at the beginning of a period of some disruption in my personal and professional life. Since then, I have travelled to South America, back north to Princeton, New Jersey, moved back to South Africa, looked for a new job, taught a class in global political economy, worked on a couple of other papers and battled to rescue a relationship. Besides the time and disruption(s) in my personal life, the topic “memory”, a fairly new academic discipline, is not directly related to my personal and intellectual interests and scholarly training in political economy and international affairs. Nonetheless, through my interest and elementary training in media and cultural studies I find some affinities with an interdisciplinary approach to memory studies.

In the paper I present a set of photographs as mnemonic devices and launch a discussion of the time and spaces between making each picture. The narrative I present is framed by the understanding that our memories tend to be unreliable, and shaped by episodes of what I describe as para-amnesiac confabulation, and a tendency to re-imagine past episodes of our lives based on new information. On this basis, acts of remembrance tend to produce accounts of events that may, sometimes, be significantly different from what actually happened. In other words, what we think happened in the past is often not what actually happened. Now, this is, of course, not earth shatteringly new. Some people have different memories of specific historical events than others. Astrid Erll summed this up well in the following passage:

” … a war which is orally presented, in an anecdote by an old neighbour seems to become part of lived contemporary history; but as an object of Wagnerian opera, the same war can be transformed into an apparently timeless, mythical event … different modes of representation may elicit different modes of cultural remembering … ”

With the set of photographs as mnemonic devices, I launch a narrow account of the first two years of the states of emergency in the 1980s, and how, by the end of 1987, I had become disillusioned by press photography. At the time, I developed an understanding of “press” or “news” photography as crude voyeurism and predation; where photographers become embedded with invading forces (in South Africa’s townships and elsewhere) and move from story-to-story, apparently recording the misery of others, becoming famous and justifying their action on the basis that they are simply recording events in the public interest. While I do not intend to indulge in the details of this particular argument (hence the fact that I am presenting them here, instead), the basic contention here is that, as Susan Sontag most eloquently put it, photography is “an act of non-intervention”.

“The act of photographing is more than passive observing. Like sexual voyeurism, it is a way of at least tacitly, often explicitly, encouraging what is going on to keep on happening … ”

In other words, during periods of conflict, the photographer, including myself, for two or three years during the 1980s, had an interest in the conflict continuing — so I can “get the story” and “bring it to the public”. However, as an engagé journalist, I had an interest in the conflict ending, in the invading forces or aggressors being brought to justice, and not simply assuming some kind of expedient objectivity.

Nonetheless the argument that I hope to present in the paper is that, based in part on my notes and on published material, the memories evoked by the photographs cannot be trusted for two reasons. Memory is, essentially, quite fallible — even eyewitness accounts in legal procedures have at times been proven to be false — and because (especially in my case) I interpret the time and space between making each of the photographs in a type of post hoc way through knowledge frameworks acquired long after the events. This, I argue, is not sufficient grounds for limiting what “can be talked about”, as Barbara Harrison suggested.

The paper is currently in draft form. Who knows what it will look like in a few weeks from now?

For those who are interested in the topic. The following are some of the readings I refer to in this short post:

Harrison, Barbara 2002, “Photographic Visions and Narrative Inquiry.” Narrative Inquiry, Volume 12, Number , pp 87 – 111.
Erll, Astrid, 2008a. “Cultural Memory Studies: An Introduction”. In Erll & Ansgar Nünning (eds) Cultural Memory Studies: An Interdisciplinary Handbook. Media and Cultural Memory/ Medien Und Kulturelle Erinnerung. Walter de Gruyter: Berlin, pp 1 – 11.
Erll, Astrid, 2008b. “Literature, Film and the Mediality of Cultural Memory.” In Erll & Ansgar Nünning (eds) Cultural Memory Studies: An Interdisciplinary Handbook. Media and Cultural Memory/ Medien Und Kulturelle Erinnerung. Walter de Gruyter: Berlin, pp 389 – 398.
Sontag, Susan, 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador.
Sontag, Susan, In Plato’s Cave.