we become.
CCI Theme, 2007-2008:
“Memory: Exteriors and Interiors”
Memory—as an inner sense of life’s experience and as observable icons ranging from Holocaust memorials to Mickey Mouse—is everywhere. Memory is fundamental to our sense of self and to our group identity, and our culture’s external memories have been with us for millennia, as monuments, as tattoos, as portraits, as autobiographies, as written and lived history. Today, however, external memory surrounds us like an "electronic skin" in new and strangely effective forms. Now we have flash drives, hard disks, Google Earth’s view of everywhere and anywhere—how different are these modern forms of exterior memory? And how do they influence our sense of self and other? Analysis of memory in its many forms is the theme that focuses the Center for Critical Inquiry's interdisciplinary programs for the 2007-2008 academic year. With it, we hope to bring together scholars with wide ranging expertise and interests to explore how we understand ourselves and others and how these perceptions are transformed by new and old ways of storing, constructing, displaying, and celebrating memories.
Modern technology’s external memory tools may both store and distort the processes of thought in ways that transcend the individual to create impersonal collectives of external memory. Are these external memory processes distinct from those of interior memory? Can there be wisdom in such a digital life? Is the ideal bounded personal self now obsolete? Does digital social networking distort and fragment our historical sense of individuality? Is digital memory less subject to the mollifying influence of context and justice than is our private internal memory? How do the pace and the apparent objectivity of modern external memory alter the nature of identity and communication? Does the ubiquitous imagery of contemporary media—photojournalism, web advertising—cause us to replace our own internal images with communal, pre-manufactured experience? If so, who is the virtual overlord? Does that power re-impose an invisible new colonialism? What, in turn, is the response of the concrete historical person to the reach and power of technology?
Just as modern technologies pose puzzles about the relationship of interior and exterior memory, so do the traditions of ceremony, ritual, and print culture. Many of us think of ourselves and others in terms of national identities constructed in large part by historical memory, creation myths, and invented traditions. What do we know about the relationships between memory as historical tradition and the memory of this or that person? Quite independently of Google, how do individuals create their own versions of external memories? If external memory is mediated and not imposed on the person, what biographical, gendered, age, ethnic, and regional features shape how some external memories get inside the skin and others remain outside? How are our perceptions of other times and other societies constructed by material culture and commerce? Does external memory shape our cultural memories of private trauma? Do the politics and the history of cultural memory and personal trauma in turn transform the external memories that we build? Do they offer infinite possibilities for the re-construction of identity but with less and less sense of humanity, autonomy and community? What relationships hold between memory as private "property" ("my memories") and the construction of communal memories as shared historical narratives?