What does it mean for a culture to remember? Who and what form the understanding of history and subsequent varying values present in a culture? In the introduction to
Tangled memories: the Vietnam War, the AIDS epidemic, and the politics of remembering, Marita Sturken investigates these questions, as well as analyzing components of memory, such as individual, collective, cultural and national memory. Most importantly, how the American “popular culture” through cultural artifacts (technologies of memory), “…has produced (cultural) memories… and how these film and television images have moved between cultural memory and history.” (Sturken, 3). This concept of the formation of cultural memory is central to its distinction from other forms of memory such as collective and popular memory.
In the opening sentences to the Technologies of Memory portion of the article, Sturken states that, “Cultural memory is produced through objects, images, and representations.”(Sturken, 9). Most of this introduction is aimed at understanding the interactive relationship between mainstream American culture and the creation of memory and history through these tools. I, however, find it very interesting to try to apply these concepts attributed to the formation of my culture of remembering, to a culture which we Americans understand very little about. I believe our ignorance is central to our formation of History in relation to the War on Terror. Sturken writes that, “What we remember is highly selective, and how we retrieve it says as much about desire and denial as it does about remembrance.”(7). That which we “…’strategically’ forget…”(3) is as much a part of our formation of history and cultural memory as it is of those we consider “savage” or “terrorist”. Therefore we are very ignorant to the formation of Islamic societies in the Middle East; their plight, and formation of collective understanding, and social reactions.
More specifically, the collective memory (of radical groups like ISIS) would be considered “popular memory” as characterized by the war torn nation of Syria’s absence of “…access to publishing houses or movie studios.”(Sturken, 3). However Sturken doesn’t describe technologies of memory as televisions or newspapers only, she writes that, “even bodies themselves. These are technologies of memory in that they embody and generate memory and are thus implicated in the power dynamics of memory’s production.”(10). Therefore members of ISIS do form their cultural memory through violence. The narrative of history they describe is of suffering, exploitation and invasion by impure, unfaithful, infidels. The technology of memory they employ is meant to be “…practices that people enact upon themselves.” In Foucault’s view. This, “… embodiment of memory…is an active process with which subjects engage in relation to social institutions and practices.”(10). These are, “technologies of the self, which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.”(Foucault qtd. 10). Violence is not only a signal of the history of this country, but equally an indicator of the processes in which collective memory and history are intertwined, always shaping each other.