''In times not so very long ago, the discourse of history was there to guarantee the relative stability of the past in its pastness. Traditions, even though themselves often invented or constructed and always based on selections and exclusions, gave shape to cultural and social life. Built urban space - replete with monuments and museums, palaces, public spaces, and government buildings - represented the material traces of the historical past in the present. But history was also the mise-en-scène of modernity. One learned from history. That was the assumption. For about two centuries, history in the West was quite successful in its project to anchor the ever more transitory present of modernity and the nation in a multi-faceted but strong narrative of historical time. Memory, on the other hand, was a topic for the poets and their visions of a golden age or, conversely, for their tales about the haunting of a restless past. Literature was of course valued highly as part of the national heritage constructed to mediate religious, ethnic, and class conflicts within a nation. But the main concern of the 19th century nation-states was to mobilize and monumentalize national and universal pasts as to legitimize and give meaning to the present and to envision the future : culturally, politically, socially. This model no longer works. Whatever the specific content of the many contemporary debates about history and memory may be, underlying them is a fundamental disturbance not just of the relationship between history as objective and scientific, and memory as subjective and personal, but of history itself and its promises. At stake in the current history/memory debate is not only a disturbance of our notions of the past, but a fundamental crisis in our imagination of alternative futures.''
''Today, we seem to suffer from a hypertrophy of memory, not history. [...] Of course, memory is one of those elusive topics we all think we have a handle on. But as soon as we try to define it, it starts slipping and sliding, eluding attempts to grasp it either culturally, sociologically, or scientifically.''
''Neither Wordsworth nor Proust was compelled to think about memory and forgetting as social and political issues of global proportions, as we are today. If the Romantics thought that memory bound us in some deep sense to times past, with melancholia being one of its liminal manifestations, then today we rather think of memory as a mode of re-presentation and as belonging even more the the present. [...] Inevitably, every act of memory carries with it a dimension of betrayal, forgetting and absence.
''The form in which we think of the past is increasingly memory without borders rather than national history within borders. Memory has brought with it a very real compression of time and space. But in the register of imaginary, it has also expanded our horizons of space and time beyond the local, the national and even the international. In certain ways, then, our contemporary obsessions with memory in the present may well be an indication that our ways of thinking and living temporality itself are undergoing a significant shift.''
''The desire for narratives of the past, for re-creations, re-readings, re-productions seems boundless at every level of our culture. History in a certain canonical form may be delegitimised as far as its core pedagogical and philosophical mission is concerned, but the seduction of the archive and its trove of stories of the human achievement and suffering has never been greater.''
''We need both past and future to articulate our political, social, and cultural dissatisfactions with the present state of the world. And while the hypertrophy of memory can lead to self indulgence, melancholy fixations, and a problematic privileging of the traumatic dimension of life with no exit in sight, memory discourses are absolutely essential to imagine the future and to regain a strong temporal and spatial grounding of life and the imagination in a media and consumer society that increasingly voids temporality and collapses space.''
''One of the most interesting cultural phenomena of our day is the way in which memory and temporality have invaded spaces and media that seemed among the most stable and fixed : cities, monuments, architecture, and sculpture. After the waning of modernist fantasies about creatio ex nihilo and of the desire for the purity of new beginnings, we have come to read cities and buildings as palimpsests at all. As Freud once remarked, the same space cannot possibly have two different contents. But an urban imaginary in its temporal reach may well put different things in one place: memories of what there was before, imagine alternatives to what there is. The strong marks of present space merge in the imaginary with traces of the past, erasures, losses, and heterotopias.''
Extracts from : Present Past; urban palimpsests and the politics of memory, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2003.
on memoria