Conclusion: longing for the future in search of lost times

Abstract

We live in an age of fluctuating images, words and goods. Speed and the ‘new’ are the mottos of this new era. Both visually and verbally, we are faced with this acceleration in our daily life practices. The desire for speed and for the new, which trigger off rapid changes, however, ironically in turn produce the demand for memory: the more we forget the more we want to remember. Long before our digital age where memory is measured in megabytes and gigabytes and stored on digital devices, Pierre Nora (1989) warned us about the loss of memory in the modern age. He argues that we no longer live in memory (milieux de memoire), but we live between memory and history (lieux de memoire): “no longer quite life, not yet death, like shells on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded” (Nora 1989: 12).

The title of this chapter is inspired by Marcel Proust’s book In Search of Lost Times.