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Elie Weisel asked, "How does one remember?" Alison Landsberg has answered specifically from our vantage point of a society infused with, and in many ways defined by, mass culture. In her book, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture, Lansberg adds to the historiographic record of the study of memory by examining how specific mass culture tools - film, books, television, comic books, experiential museums - have been used to instill memories of specific cultural events - immigration, slavery, the Holocaust - in those who did not live through the experiences themselves.
I am at a loss. Cognitively, I can see Landsberg's theory and argument, understand how they fit into the historiographic record of studies on memory, and even respect how she bridges memory study with social history questions of class and race. I follow the logic. But I cannot see through her eyes to share the memories because I do not share with her any of the points of entry. While I know of every source she uses, I have not lived through - watched, read, visited - any of them. Yes, I've walked through the room while Blade Runner and Total Recall have blared out of the television. I remember when Roots aired as a mini-series. The volume containing Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is upstairs on a shelf. I've read Morrison, but not Beloved; Butler but not Kindred. While I have the means to experience this "new form of memory largely made possible by the commodification of mass culture" I have not braved the experience of sitting through the experience that is Schindler's List nor had the opportunity to visit the Holocaust Museum. I have not lived through the specific experiential and meaningful contact that she posits might allow me to "see differently," and through sensual, not cognitive experiences, enter a "transferential space" where I can perceive another's experience to the point of creating personal pain.
However. I think she's onto something. The ability to pay to physically partake in an experience that stimulates our senses through a technologically possible medium. The rupture of one's one comfort or experience or timeline as a mechanism for being able to see through someone else's eyes or walk through another's experience. The human ability to be transported through empathy to creation of a memory. And the possibility for social action or change because of that assumed - or prosthetic - memory. Yes, I can see that. I don't yet possess it. I cannot draw the personal analogy to her specific examples. As Jay Winter says in his essay, "The Generation of Memory: Reflections on the "Memory Boom" in Contemporary Historical Studies", I haven't experienced the trauma. Or going back to Landsberg, paid the cost. However. While I do not feel, I do think.
Her work supports thoughts we've had this fall that comfort, while good for tourism, doesn't support the social agenda of public history. That if through discomfort our perspective can be shifted to a point where divisions of "other" are dissolved through the sharing of memory, then there is hope for political and social action that can further erode boundaries and create understanding. We've already on the path. We've gone from using film to propagate nationalist concepts of "American" sameness in the 1920s to educating - and experiences - the horrors that have occurred when nations erase differences. We have, one could say, the technology. Now to use share that technology with more and more people, widening the base of those who share the memories and choose to take the subsequent actions.
