Transcript
Michelle Henning 0:00
If you think about Marcel Proust, if it takes a smell and the taste, or I mentioned it could be a song to bring the past flooding back. That's why art and the arts is so important in in the treatment of people with Alzheimer's and dementia, I would imagine.
Marie-Anne McQuay 0:18
Hello, you're listening with the Bluecoat in Liverpool, a series of podcasts taking the themes of our exhibition programmes as a starting point for 15 minute insights from artists, scientists, writers, educators, storytellers and more. In this episode, writer and Professor Michelle Henning discusses Walter Benjamin, modernity and unfaithful atmospheres.
Michelle Henning 0:42
My name is Michelle Henning. I'm a professor in photography and Media at the University of Liverpool. My background originally I was a fine artist, I did my first degree at Goldsmiths, and then I did an MA in the social history of art, I still am to some extent, a practising artist and writer. Most of my career, I've taught cultural studies, that's where I became interested in questions of memory, around ideas of culture, and everyday life and everyday experience. But also, I've always been interested in the writing of photo Benjamin or Walter Benjamin, depending on he wants to say, so I'm interested in his writing. And he writes about modernity and culture. And it's also relevant to to understanding how media changes, our daily experience, that kind of thing. One of the books I used to read through a plastic bag while I was painting was Susan Buck-Morss book about Walter Benjamin's arcade project, which was this big project he'd done on the 19th century shopping arcades in Paris. And it was just a really, really inspiring book. I was interested in the kind of slight utopianism of it, you know, how you can just be attracted to the way someone thinks, how do we encounter new media, because he says, it's often in the disguise of old media, and so on. A lot of my work is concerned with that relationship between new and old media. And that's, that's where Benjamin came in. Benjamin, he was interested in the way that people of his time, wrote about memories, if there was there was a kind of authentic kind of memory, which people were losing. And then this kind of alienated modern memory, there was an authentic connection with the past that people used to have, and in modernity, something has happened, and we've become broken from that. And Benjamin wants to challenge this. But at the same time, he also wants to argue that they're right in the sense that modernity and modern technology, modern everyday life, you know, living in big cities, and so on, has changed how we remember things. So he wants to say it has changed, but it does. It's not this simple kind of opposition between authentic and alienated. What he does is he takes Marcel Proust notion of involuntary memory. So the famous book by Marcel Proust is called remembrance of things past. And this is this begins with Proust describing eating a Madeline cake with like a little biscuit, which has got soaked in chamomile tea, because it's sat in the saucer. And it's that combination of flavours, when he bites into it, suddenly takes him back to his childhood. And that's involuntary memory. It's usually stimulated by smell, or taste, or the famous ones newly mown grass or song, things like that. These things stimulate a sudden rush of the past into the present, and you don't control it. It's that's what the involuntary memory is, it just comes upon you and you can't You're taken by surprise. And then Proust has this other category, which is voluntary memory, which is straightforward recollection. So if you said to me, how was your train journey this morning, Michelle, I would recall what had happened. So there's these two kinds, involuntary memory is the one that gets seen as authentic. So the idea would be that in the past, say you were from a more rural society, pre modern, you'd have this kind of deep connection with your own past with your ancestors, and so on, it wouldn't be this random attacks of involuntary memory would just be this kind of deep, full, rich experience of remembering that you get from an involuntary venue and sort of takes this idea in a way he's using it. But he's also challenging the idea that it's pre modern. And he's sort of saying that it's actually modern. So this experience that we're having, of what we think is authenticity of this flood of the past is actually a product of being modern. So that's the complicated bit. For example, the storyteller. Do you have an oral storyteller? Who might come to your village and tell you the news, the storyteller will embed the news in their own experience. They want to make the story exciting for you though. They'll give detail and you'll be sat around the fireplace place with a storyteller so you have this kind of rich experience of it. You can trust that with a newspaper where The same story might be printed in amongst another 10 different things and ads and broken up across several pages. And next to articles that almost directly contradict it. Modern experience is seen as fragmented and broken up. And old, pre modern experiences continuous and rich and memory is this rich thing. But he's kind of saying that nostalgia for this older form of memory is itself. It's all a product of modernity. That is because we're modern people that we experienced this in this way.
Michelle Henning 5:32
It relates to memory loss as well, because for example, someone who has memory loss of a certain kind won't be able to, to recollect things consciously and bring them back. But they will still have that experience of the past flooding back, you might play a song and suddenly, that will stimulate a really old memory, this distinction that Proust sets up to still has some kind of value. Benjamin is not kind of throwing it out. He's kind of saying, yes, it exists. But it is actually because we're modern, that we experience it in the way we do. He's interested in how being modern people has changed us, for Benjamin, and for me, and for a lot of cultural historians, I suppose the modern period really begins with industrialization. So it's industrialised modernity. So we're talking about post coal, if you like, we're talking about the steam age. Because I am a photography historian, I think about the invention of photography in 1839. That's a good date. To start with, I can't remember the date of the invention of steam train, but it's not that far apart. We've also got the telegraph around that time, invention of modern communications, modern forms of transport all of these kinds of highly technological things that transform everyday life. And obviously, this happens differently in different countries. So in the UK, it happens very early. In other countries, it will happen at different times. It's a kind of uneven thing. And it's a problematic category, because of that depend, because it is not a time category. It's more of a technical development thing. The society, I was talking about where the storyteller comes and talks to that that would be in a kind of pre modern setting. Once you've got fast transport, and you've got modern communications, you've got a much different sense of time, because you have to have clock time. You know, so if you're taking a train, like I just did, from Bristol to Liverpool in the 19th century, you'd have gone through timezones, probably London to Bristol would have, you'd have gone through a timezone and London to Liverpool. So standardisation of time regulated society, I suppose it's to do with the technologies. And one of the ways in which you can think about modernity is in terms of they sometimes call it time space collapse, the Victorians used to call it the annihilation of time and space, which I quite, which is the idea that if I'd come to Liverpool by horse, it would have taken me a lot longer. So I've effectively made Liverpool closer by by coming here quicker. So and once you start flying around the world, you know, think of Around the World in 80 days, or something like that, the world gets smaller. But it also gets bigger in the sense that you can visit more of it, and you expand your horizons and so on. So there's this really weird relationship of time and space that happens. So for Benjamin modernisation is crucial, because it happens very fast. And it changes people's relationship to their own actions. So he gives a really good example, which is a button pressing, if I press a button in a lift, that one gesture causes the left to go up or down. But I could do exactly the same gesture on the top of the camera, and it causes a photograph to be made. So there's no longer any connection between this thing I do the pressing if my finger and the sequence of actions that unravelled from it, before you have kind of this such complicated machines and so on, you know, you would wind something and something would turn, you know, there was some kind of connection between your gesture and what happened in the world. modernity is also closely linked to capitalism. So certain kinds of economic development is also closely linked to a broader sense of alienation, where you're separated, meaning you're separated from the consequences of your own actions, the nuclear buttons, another obvious example of that
Michelle Henning 9:14
how our time how a kind of much more computer based, technological time differs. We're talking from the perspective of thinking about memory and everyday life and how these things kind of unravel. Let's first talk about how they don't differ how they're similar. So what I just said about the button is still very true of mobile phones. So you swipe a screen and this whole series of things happens that you have no idea because it's completely black box, do you have no idea what's going on in your phone, but it sends an image across the world or something like that, so that so these tiny gestures can have these big results so that there's aspects that are the same, so a lot of what Benjamin is talking about, so he's writing in the predominantly 1920s 1930s And he's mostly writing about the 19th century to his present day. So he's writing about what we would call classic modernity The period of classic modernity in Europe, a lot of what he says is still relevant, I would say. But what he can't know and doesn't relate, is there's no network of the sense that we have it now. So to me the biggest difference, and I think this is arguable, there's probably lots of different takes on this. But to me, the biggest differences is the internet. I don't just mean the world wide web, but the internet in its fullest sense of, you know, including financial markets, for example, and how prices change because of communications technologies. So once you have the internet, and you have things like crowdsourcing, so you have Wikipedia, for example, all these other things, you have relationship with technology as a mediator of social relations, it's very different. In Benjamin's time, he could he could send a telegraph, he could phone somebody, and the technologies he was thinking about were, if you think of the film, I don't know, if you've seen Charlie Chaplin's modern times, but you think it's a clockwork like mechanisms. That's the kind of technology that's still lagging behind it. But five years later, by the end of the Second World War, we're in the computer age, you know, so it's not digitization as such, or even algorithms. It's, it's the network, I think that really drastically changes our experience of everyday life, and our experience of memory and all those things. So to me, to me, that would be that would be the big difference. Because modernity and capitalism are so closely related, neither has gone away, they've changed form, but they haven't gone away. There is a term like networked.
Michelle Henning 11:30
To me, it's it's the network nature of it. That's really, really different. I think mediatization of everything is what we're going through at the moment, the idea that everything now everything we're doing everything we're doing recording, this is mediated through computers, that's a big change. This idea of the network is central to thinking about how memory has changed compared to Benjamin's time. So he's saying, He's seeing people in the 1930s. Remember things and experience the past differently than people in 1700? Let's say I would say that people in the 2000 and 20s, experience the past differently to and experience our relationship with our own memories. So for example, Google Wikipedia, those things, you know, if you're in a conversation with somebody, and you want to, and you're narrating something, there's a kind of fact checker to hand where you can go or just or just check whether that's right. So on one hand, people say, Oh, and I'm not necessarily saying I agree with this, but it's a common thing that people say, you know, I've, I've just kind of delegated my memory to Google, you know, I don't have to remember anything anymore. Because I can always look it up. In a sense, that's a little bit mistaken. Because we've always done that ever since books were invented, people were worried that we become dependent on the book, and lose a sort of innate human capacity for remembering. So there's always been this worry that any form of inscription would take away our ability to recall things consciously, so would take away our voluntary memory. In a way, it's an old story. But I think there is some truth in it. One of the things that's different, let's say Wikipedia, for example, Wikipedia is being edited crowd sourced all the time. What's on the Wikipedia page you look at today could be different from what's on it tomorrow, what's happening when you're consulting these things, it's not this, it's not this sense of something like the Bible or something in this tome of what's supposed to be authorised knowledge, or even the, you know, the Oxford English Dictionary, it's this kind of live and changing thing, but it's still external. I do think that networked memory and networked, crowdsourced memory makes a difference to the way in which we experience our own individual processes of remembering. So we might doubt ourselves more, because there's always the person opposite you could go, I'll just check that, you know, there's always a possibility of a counter narrative being given by somebody else on that subject, we will carry mobile phones on us, and the mobile phone is recording your behaviours. So where you walked today, the messages you sent, even speed at which you walked, and so on. So all sorts of data is being accumulated about your behaviour, if you go on Wikipedia to look something up, but that's also being accumulated somewhere, your search terms in Google all of these things. Now you because your human being will remember some of these bits and pieces and just completely forget others. And that's good. Because if you didn't, you wouldn't be able to function as a human. So forgetting is necessary to you know, you have to narrate your own life and you have to kind of sift what's important from what's unimportant. But in terms of what's happening with all that data, so that the reason why surveillance is a problem when you're thinking about memory, is this is a kind of alternative memory. of your life that's being constructed here. And then that gets used to make profiles. There's a French writer called Antoinette roof, Roy, who talks about it, she calls these digital doubles. And I think that's quite a good phrase. So it's like your sort of data doppelganger, this version of yourself that's been built from all your data that gets fed back to you, and you catch glimpses of it. So if you use Instagram, for example, and you get targeted ads, especially since Facebook took over Instagram, it's become more and more advertising loaded. And what it does, is, so Instagram will be drawn on all sorts of sources, not just your Instagram use to construct a profile of you on the hoof live, if you like, which then is fed back to you. As you know, you're the kind of person who likes these kinds of hair slides, you're the kind of person who might buy these kinds of shoes, you're obviously tempted by this. So at first, you might think, Oh, this is lovely, at least I'm getting ads that interest me, and I'm finding all sorts of interesting things. But then you can, it can become quite creepy, because you're, you're being faced with this thing that's like you, but not quite like you, it's like a weird version of yourself being played back to you. So I think that this alternative memory, or this unrecognisable version of yourself is oppressive, because it's so totalizing because it includes everything because it builds his profile out of everything. And it's also unrecognisable.
Michelle Henning 16:20
Because memory and forgetting are at the very basis of and core of our sense of who we are. So you construct your sense of yourself as a person out of the fragments of memory you have and also out of the way that people reflect back to you who they think you are. And that that sense of identity can be seriously kind of undermined by this digital, double. People are historical, we're fundamentally historical. We're not just essential biological beings, we're shaped by our history or culture, what we find the situation in which we find ourselves. So because of that, we change and adapt to the technologies around us we meet hits this brilliant phrase where he talks about how we meet the film halfway in cinema, for example, you might work in a factory, where you're doing very repetitive labour, doing the same gestures over and over again. And then you go to the cinema, and you're watching something that's been edited in this very structured kind of way that mimics the machinery that you've been working with. So there's a way in which it's the right culture for you because you're immersed in it. In a sense, I'm taking that that concept and applying it to now the sense that we are being shaped by the technologies with which we're engaging, we're meeting them halfway, they're shaped, we're shaping them and they're shaping us. And it's changing the way in which we relate to our own pasts and who we are some good ways some bad ways.
Marie-Anne McQuay 17:44
You've been listening with the Bluecoat, produced by George Maund Marie-Anne McQuay and Sam Mercer with sounds by nil00. Thank you to Garfield Western Foundation for supporting this series. And our core funders Arts Council England, Liverpool City Council and Culture Liverpool. Our public programmes rely on grants for donations and you can support us at thebluecoat.org.uk/donate
