Abstract
The general process of the dynamic links between remembering and forgetting involves constant coordination of the imaginary future (“how would it all be then?”) and coordinating it with past. In this chapter an analysis of various cultural tools—large monunments and small figurines—that serve as memory devices, is given. Such value-suggestive monuments set up an affectivating context in the public space. Any passer-by experiences the value of the oversized object as an episode of the sublime. A similar trigger of value triggering can be accomplished on the other side of the size spectrum—in the case of miniature objects that may be acquired in the public space but then transported to and maintained in the private domains. These are “mini-monuments”—that differ from their oversize counterparts by their focus on specific values they promote.
The World’s tallest (33 m) monument to Jesus Christ Swiebodzin, Poland
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Notes
- 1.
After World War II it was the prison building of a peripheral suburb of Berlin—Spandau—where the Nazi prisoners who were committed to prison terms in the Nürnberg trials were housed under Allied changing guards. When the last prisoner—Rudolf Hess—committed suicide un 1987, the whole building of the prison (originally built in 1876) was not only demolished to the ground but even the bricks of the building were crushed to and which was buried in the North Sea. The fear of the prison or even its bricks becoming ideological symbols for neo-Nazi ideologies was sufficient to invest in the complete eradication of a building which—other than by the post-WW II administrative decision—had no guilt in the making of potential memory devices. The location was first used to build a British department store, after its failure—a parking lot. The fear of the paraphernalia from the prison building to become symbolic relics was substantiated by the long history of relic-making in European history (Geary, 1986) and elaborated further with the concrete sequence of events in Hess’ reburial in family site and final (2011) burning of the remains and distributing the ashes in the sea. The political fear of establishing remaining signs of martyrdom was socially justified (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Hess).
- 2.
The research area of memory was an early hostage to the invasion of the methods of experimental psychology and their constituent reduction of complexity into elements. Hermann Ebbinghaus (1885) introduced the “nonsense syllables” stimuli as “freed from meaning” materials—as an effort to “purify” the memory study from the “contamination” with pre-established meanings He did not realize that this is a hopeless task human beings in every instant enter into construction of meaning out of any previously meaningless material.
- 3.
Frederic C Bartlett (1886–1969) was a Cambridge (UK) experimental psychologist whose early work (1917, 1920, 1924) was dedicated to the study of genesis of folklore through the question. Later he became known in psychology for his work on memory (in usual classification of mental functions in psychology). His contributions were of course wider all over his academic life (Wagoner, 2017) involving the feed-in into the cognitive science and theory of social representation.
- 4.
In our contemporary cultural psychology, the focus on processes of imagination is increasingly under investigation (Tateo, 2016, 2018; Zittoun & Gillespie, 2016). The crucial innovation in this field is the recognition of its central importance in the whole of functioning of the psyche. Imagination is a necessary basic process for all higher psychological functions.
- 5.
Widespread focus on the future in the 1920s Soviet Union and in the case of any other utopian constructions. Likewise person’s beliefs after remarriage that they can build new marital relations without the previous (now divorced) relationship is such utopia at the personal level.
- 6.
Bartlett’s serial reproduction technique—persons retelling the stories to one another in a sequence—fits the folklore study task and may give evidence of conventionalization in social groups, but it does not provide adequate data for reconstructive memory process as it equates inter-individual variability (differences between persons in story telling) with intraindividual variability. Psychological phenomena are non-ergodic (Molenaar et al., 2002) which renders such equality theoretically impossible. This has major consequences on the interpretations made of development (diachronic process) based on inter-individual variation (synchronic nature of cross-sectional data).
- 7.
The tradition of looking at the process of Gestalt formation is covered by the notion of Aktualgenese (emergence of actuality) that comes from the Second Leipzig School (Felix Krueger and Friedrich Sander) in the German psychology of the 1920s. A century later this tradition finds its expression in the focus on microgenetic methodology (Wagoner, 2009).
- 8.
The Ancient Greeks were “acutely aware of the dangers intrinsic to remembering past wrongs because they well knew the endless chains of vendetta revenge to which this so often led. And since the memory of past misdeeds threatened to sow division in the whole community and could lead to civil war, they saw that not only those who were directly threatened by motives of revenge but all those who wanted to live peacefully together in the polis had a stake in not remembering” (Connerton, 2008, p. 61).
- 9.
Alex Gillespie (2006) has demonstrated how the “must see” social suggestions are socially prefabricated even halfway around the world. British tourists travel long way to Ladakh in North India to see the specific sights their tourist brochures back in the United Kingdom prescribe as a “must see.”
- 10.
Marschik and Spitaler, 2005, p. 17
- 11.
Described by Jeranek (2005)
- 12.
Edward Colston (1636–1721) was an English tradesman who among other trades was involved in African slave trade in the 1680s. As a benefactor to the city of Bristol, a monument to him was erected in 1895 and taken down by protesters in 2020.
- 13.
The German-Kurdish sculptor Mehmet Akca was invited to create a deserter monument for the city of Bonn. After its completion it was actually set up in the city of Potsdam. The circumstances of the transfer are interesting: The monument was first exhibited on anti-war day on the Friedensplatz in 1989. After just 10 h on public display, the monument was ordered to be removed. City officials in Bonn refused to approve a public site for the monument, and in September 1991, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was relocated to Potsdam where it is located at Platz der Einheit (Welch, 2012, p. 386). Political ambivalence takes notable forms in administrative decisions.
- 14.
The notion of affectivating (Cornejo et al., 2018) entails the creating the meaning of an object starting from the initial feeling towards it—I feel into the particular object, a flower, and arrive at the meaning “beautiful flower.”
- 15.
The authenticity of such souvenirs—body parts of saints or pieces of the Berlin Wall—can always be disputed—yet these disputes do not diminish the functional role of these objects in the role of as if the carriers of the symbolic meaning.
- 16.
- 17.
For example, various memorials to the horrible events in the past of the given society—guiding the persons who explore them to work through their grief for the sake of societal futures (Bresco & Wagoner, 2019)
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Valsiner, J. (2021). Monuments and Memory: Imagination Amplified and Objectified. In: General Human Psychology. Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75851-6_8
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