Reading response Week 4 – Chloe Thorne – ct2994@nyu.edu

The Generation of Post Memory (chapter 1) makes a strong case for the second generation of trauma survivors, and the ‘lived connection’ (p33) they hold being able to reanimate the past without appropriating it.

I had always held a line I read as a student in Gavin Butts After Criticism with me – that you don’t need to have authority over an experience to talk about about it. However this idea of ‘lived connection’ (p.33) Hirsch set out made a lot of sense to me. I was taken very early on with the bed time scene described in Maus (p.32). Memories being pasted down in ‘fairy tails’ (p.32) at night is my personal experience with post memory. My mums fairy tails are something I have always attributed to my and my brothers preoccupation with storytelling.

On a side note thought I do think this can lead to a troubling politics of trauma                   passports for example. That help survivors tell their stories but that don’t address               communities.

In the case of The Generation of Post Memory (chapter 1) we are talking about a particular context with a collective memory. Hirsch argues post memory ‘approximates memory in its affective force and its psychic effects’ and are often communicated in ‘flashes of imagery’, broken remains throughout the ‘language of the body’ (p.31). Which fits with How Societies remember which focuses on ritual performances as a means to recollect knowledge. Framing bodily social memory as an essential aspect of social memory. Connerton focuses on the habitual performances stating ‘habit is a knowledge and a remembering in the hands and in the body: and in the cultivation of habit it is our body which ‘understands’’ (p.95). Habitual performance for Connerton is necessarily ‘ambitious’ (p.104).

This ambiguity is also something I enjoyed in The Generation of Post Memory (chapter 1). Witnessing didn’t lead to data or indexicality but a differnt type of knowledge‘ images are more than purely indexical’  (p.37) ‘index of identification’ shaped by the reality of the viewers needs (p.48). This is an evident for in the collaboration in Tuan Andrew Nguyen. I would like to go into this more but am running out of words..

I found the two references to Warburg p.39, p.42 really interesting.

The 1.5 generation was interesting.

Art works: These texts made me think of Fassbinder’s film Third Generation.

I LOVED Rosana Paulino: a costura da memória. This quote especially stuck out to me

‘disappearance and the insisting presence of those who should have disappeared’ P. 164