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How do course texts deal with questions of shared memory (or shared amnesia)?
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Assessing shared memory within varying political, economic and social climates
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1514623 Michael GardinerHow do course texts deal with questions of shared memory (or shared amnesia)?
Shared or ‘cultural’ memory may be defined as “a collective concept
for all knowledge that directs behavior and experience,” obtained “through
generations in repeated societal practice and initiation.” (Assmann 126) Said
to emerge in times of “perpetual economic instability,” shared memory can
be characterized through its “distance from the everyday” – making it a
concept that is based in a time other than the present. (Assmann 129) In
Neoliberalism: The Key Concepts, Matthew Eagleton-Pierce establishes the
present neoliberal era as a time of “inequality, insecurity and austerity” and
this essay will explore how Mark Fisher and Shane Meadows deal with
questions of shared memory (or shared amnesia) as a result of the unstable
economic and political climate. (Eagleton-Pierce 14)
It is suggested that capitalism’s concepts surrounding the “expansion
of the economy and knowledge” force people to look to the future as a time
that will be better than their current present. (Berardi 34) In After the Future,
Berardi suggests that the future is a “modality of projection and imagination,
a feature of expectation” and becomes a kind of “utopian” ideal. (Berardi 44,
34) He goes onto outline how the 1970’s see a point where the “utopian
movement was slowly overturned and […] replaced by the dystopian
imagination.” (Berardi 33) The 1970s were a turning point in the political
system and therefore, the future of progress and growth that people had
been imagining, seemed no longer possible – “the shift into so called Post-
Fordism – globalization, ubiquitous computerization and the casualization of
1
, labour – resulted in a complete transformation in the way that work and
leisure were organized.” (“Ghosts” 8) With the economy becoming less
dependent on industry and more on information, a focus on the past,
particularly in culture and heritage, became significant. In Ghosts of my Life,
Fisher attributes recent developments in technology to the “sense that
culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present.” (“Ghosts” 9)
This is supported in Ilde Rizzo’s The Artful Economist that suggests “digital
technologies and the internet revolution have had a remarkable effect on the
modes of approaching and consuming cultural heritage […] in terms of
access, sharing and re-use” as well as “creation, participation, interaction and
learning” (Rizzo, 199) Thus, as the internet provided easy access to
information and the growth of social media satisfied a need to share
(memories in particular), the ability to reminisce and hang onto past
moments became almost effortless. Therefore, advancing technology paired
with “neoliberal capitalism’s destruction of solidarity and security” enabled ,
in Fisher’s view, “a compensatory hungering for the well-established and the
familiar.” (“Ghosts” 14)
Mark Fisher outlines his theories on why the “cultural logic of late
capitalism” has resulted in “a culture of retrospection and pastiche.”
(“Ghosts” 13) He suggests that “the postwar welfare state and higher
education maintenance grants constituted an indirect source of funding for
most of the experiments in popular culture” and therefore this period saw
the beginning of the ‘marketisation’ of cultural products, depriving “artists of
How do course texts deal with questions of shared memory (or shared amnesia)? Page 2 of 10
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