Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia, Essay Example

Andreas Huyssen’s “Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia” discusses and examines the culture of memory and how memory has become globalized. Huyssen states that the global  media has made memory and history a commodity of lived experiences. He says that the rise in history as commodity leads to greater amnesia about the past, because memories are unreliable and biased. He also says that memory commodification also preserves history because of pop culture’s fascination with certain past events. For Huyssen, this means that new media has and continues to transform what we perceive as time and space. To further elaborate, it means that historical spaces and places are significant in their ability to preserve memory, but also at the same time commodifies and influences a shared, globalized memory. Huyssen also argues the efforts put into retaining memory and the memory culture that has been created is in response to how quickly culture transforms and changes.

Huyssen presents the argument that modern media has created a memory culture that ties space and time together. He says globalization and media and technological inventions have lead to this place and time, and that it causes amnesia about past, historical events. He provides an example of how there are many subplots in the memories of the Holocaust in Western culture, meaning that the Holocaust now provides metaphor for other, unrelated horrific events from history. He describes this as the Holocaust being a prism that we look through to assess other acts of genocide. He also provides the example of “self-musealiztion,” through video recording, confessional literature, autobiography, visual art. This shows the obsession with personal memories, which spread history whether it is truly factual or not. Another aspect of memory culture that Huyssen says adds to the globalization of memory, is that of combining historical events, memory, entertainment and trauma. He uses the film Titanic as an example of how selective memory is distributed globally and how the world is becoming musealized.

Huyssen uses hitorically traumatic events to highlight the meaning behind his argument of selective memory, and how geographic spread of memory and politics leads to amnesia. Specifically, selective memory and forgetfulness can lead to a political culture in which past events have been either downplayed or exaggerated in order to change the perception of the public. He discusses how memories are mass-marketed and also imaginary, and these memories seep their way into the popular culture to form a collective memory, replacing actual historical context. Huyssen argues that the co-opting of memory in present day pop-culture is due to the public’s mass fear of forgetting, and that leads to the obsession of building museums and memorial sites all over the world, even when those locations have no real context to the historical event.

Huyssen argues that memory culture has created a new “present,” which means that memory preservation and globalization has created a new space of understanding in which both present day and memory meet. Huyssen describes how traumatic, historical events are metaphorically used to describe unrelated events. He also presents how self-musealization and world musealization addresses the need to retain memory, and by doing so, history and memory becomes commodified, unreliable and rooted in present day.

Works Cited

Huyssen, Andreas “Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia” Public Culture, Vol 12, No 1, Winter 2000, pp. 21-­?38