Memory, Trauma, and History: Essays on Living with the Past by Michael S. Roth

Author:Michael S. Roth [Roth, Michael S.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: History/General
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2011-11-22T00:00:00+00:00

The historical and anthropological associations with Warburg intersect in the theme of cultural memory, a topic currently attracting much interesting theoretical and empirical work. Cultural memory, for Warburg, was the conduit for the reuse or revival of past experience and emotion—both in the objects he studied and in his conception of the reason for studying them. As Wind noted, Warburg thought the scholar was both a “trustee of a repository of human experience” and an analyst of the way that repository worked.13 Memory and empathy were closely linked together by Warburg as features of historical work and cultural creation, and exploring their connection, as Juliet Koss has done, is likely to be one of the most vital dimensions of the Warburg Nachleben.14 The revival of interest in his work has coincided with the resurgence of interest in cultural memory and in the connections between memory and history. The extraordinary exfoliation of publications on memory over the last twenty years has been stimulated by the effort to understand how people retain the possibility of connecting to the past even as their communal traditions grow weaker and their official historical accounts more remote from their experience. Warburg’s vague notion of a “repository of human experience”—depending on no particular archival structure or narrative practice—comes in handy here because it allows one to think that an artist is retrieving the past without having to show the paths of mediation and communication through which he or she comes into contact with the past or its representations. Some commentators might fall back on quasi-biological or natural accounts to explain how cultural memory can reappear after what seemed to be generations of radical amnesia, others can use constructionist, morphological, or semiotic accounts. But the idea that there is a living past that can (or must) be tapped into by culture makers seems to have appeal today, as it did in Warburg’s time. We get to have a connection to the past without being bound to any particular narrative recounting of it.

Of course, Warburg was not merely nostalgic. He recognized that the past that could be tapped into was also violent, dangerous, and potentially overwhelming. Being connected to cultural memory wasn’t just staying in touch with beloved and friendly ancestors who might inspire one’s creativity in history’s playground. It was also being vulnerable to forces that one had with great effort tried to leave behind. As Matthew Rampley noted in a 1997 essay on the philosophical import of Warburg’s work, social memory “serves both as a tool of redemption and as a focus of regression.”15 Redemption is never final, since regression is always an open possibility.

The subject of ambivalent cultural memory and the potential danger of forces anchored in the past leads me to the final section of my considerations of why Warburg is now such an attractive figure for art history today. This concerns his dramatic biography. There are two features of that biography that are prominent in contemporary appropriations of his work. The first concerns his mental illness and the second his Jewishness.

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