Date: 10/2/2023
Email: meb10135@nyu.edu
This week’s readings delve deeper into the exploration of memory. Paul Connerton, in “How Societies Remember,” distinguishes between two types of social practice: incorporating practice and inscribing practice. I have some doubts about this differentiation, and some of my concerns are already pointed out in Connerton’s text: “[a] hesitancy is bound to arise as soon as these distinctions have been made. For it is certainly the case that many practices of inscription contain an element of incorporation, and it may indeed be that no type of inscription is at all conceivable without such an irreducible incorporating aspect.” I agree with this hypothesis, because in my understanding of what incorporation is, there can be no inscription that doesn’t involve embodied action and therefore incorporation. Inscription becomes even more impossible outside of incorporation when we consider incorporation from a less anthropocentric view, and extend the capacity for incorporation to nonhuman bodies: we can think of the body of a book or the body of a text as incorporated, embodied, existing materially. Perhaps inscription practices could be better situated as a category of incorporation practices?
However, I want to acknowledge writing as an incredibly efficient and somewhat special technology of knowledge transmission. Connerton writes about the invention of writing as a cultural innovation: “the alphabet frees a society from the constraints of a rhythmic mnemonics. (…) This economization of memory releases extensive mental energies previously invested in the construction and preservation of mnemonic systems.” There is no doubt that the invention of writing transformed how memory is practiced in society. Nonetheless, the following question arises for me: how can we refuse to privilege sign over body, in our attempt to dismantle Enlightenment’s notion of what counts as knowledge? While Connerton argues for a recognition of performances and other inscribed practices as vehicles of memory, I would argue that he doesn’t go far enough to acknowledge the full scope of incorporation as a condition of possibility for inscription.
In response to Connerton’s and Hirsch’s text (“The Generation of Postmemory”), I would like to share information about the following performance:
“Still Standing” is a piece created by a group of Polish artists, Janus, Pelczyńska, and Szpunar, described as a site-specific living sculpture that explores the body as a memory time-machine in urban spaces. The piece references a choreography by an Isreali choreographer from 1953 created for the 10th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and is woven with personal stories related to the performance site, an Old Jewish Cemetery in Vilnus. This piece stands out to me as an interesting example of art as a vehicle for sustenance and ongoing creation of memory in relation to traumatic events in the past and with a restorative approach to living in sites marked by histories of violence.
The artists have shared the following materials with me:
Full documentation: https://vimeo.com/746502433 password: stillstanding
Short: https://vimeo.com/680618217
Teaser: https://vimeo.com/701818590