The Forgotten Memory: Working Class Struggle versus Neoliberal Memories of Transformation (original) (raw)
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Obstinate Memory: Working Class Politics and Neoliberal Forgetting in the UK and Chile
Memory Studies, 2022
In the forty years since Chile and the UK became the crucibles of neoliberalization, working class agency has been transformed, its institutions systematically dismantled, and its politics, after the continuity neoliberalism of both the UK Blair government and the Chilean Concertaçion, in a crisis of legitimacy. In the process, memories of struggle have been captured within narratives of ‘capitalist realism’ (Fisher) – the present, past and future collapsed into Walter Benjamin’s ‘empty homogenous time’. This paper explores ways in which two traumatic moments of working-class struggle have been narrativized by the media in the service of this “presentism”: the 1973 coup in Chile, and the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike in the UK. We argue that the use of “living history” or bottom-up approaches to memory provides an urgently needed recovery of disruptive narratives of class identity, and offers a way of reclaiming alternative futures from the grip of reductive economic nationalism.
This research aims to understand how the Chilean post-Dictatorship generation (born between 1990 and 1996) utilizes both shared inherited memories of the dictatorship, and the Chilean welfare state prior to the Dictatorship, in anti-neoliberal social mobilization. The researcher uses Marianne Hirsch’s theory of postmemory (1997) to understand how shared postmemories influence current social struggles in Chile. After conducting a series eleven of semi-structured interviews, it is clear that members of the Chilean, intellectual left are mobilizing against a neoliberalism they trace back to the Dictatorship, and use shared post memories to mobilize against neoliberalism. The researcher came up with three findings that aim to explain how memory, which is one of the many reasons the respondents are inspired to mobilize, influences current social struggles. The researcher concluded that respondents are inspired to change the system due to a shared nostalgia for the historical Left, stories they have heard from family and friends, and their distance from the dictatorship and subsequent lack of fear of repression.
The Affairs of Political Memory. Forthcoming in Angelaki. Journal of the Theoretical Humanities
Angelaki. Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 2019
Self-serving hegemonic visions of history are institutionalised by dominant memory entrepreneurs, simultaneously imposing an authoritative version of 'what happened' and their right to articulate it. These visions and the hierarchies of honour they consecrate are cultivated trans-generationally, aiming to ensure the community's political cohesion, as well as the emotional attachments that can ensure its reproduction over time. This paper has three objectives. First, it brings insights from social epistemology to bear on a conceptualisation of political memory-making and proposes the concepts of 'hermeneutical dissidence' and 'hermeneutical seduction' to capture the critical interrogation of such mythologies. It highlight the obstacles facing any attempt at subverting them, particularly given the resilience of cognitive and emotional investments in particular schemas of perception and understanding in relation to the boundaries of the community and its history. Second, I transplant the descriptive concept of 'affair' formulated by pragmatic sociologists into debates about political memory, infusing it with a dose of normativity in order to shed critical light on various types of hermeneutical dissidence from dominant, emotionally-anchored, exclusionary imaginaries. Third, to render the theoretical proposal concrete, I introduce two 'memory affairs', both triggered by debates over the meaning and gender of political resistance. Key words: political memory, hermeneutical dissidence, hermeneutical seduction, affair, masculinist resistance, Louis Malle, Herta Müller
2015
This dissertation aims to understand how people connect their biographies with historical and recent collective events. Through the concept of generational narratives, life-stories of individuals born after dramatic periods of political violence in Argentina and Chile, are examined. By recounting two generations’ stories in two post-dictatorial countries, political paths, economic divergences, and cultural differences are disclosed. In these contexts, collective memories of and processes of coming to terms with those difficult pasts are entangled in periods of neoliberal economic transformation, political polarization as well as youth mobilization. Every ‘generational site’ brings to the fore a narrative plot which encompasses past events and present processes of meaning attribution. The investigation shed lights on Maurice Halbwachs’ notion of ‘the living bond of generations’, i.e., how past and present times are lively connected through generational bonds, memories and stories.
The poverty of memory: for political economy in memory studies
Memory and economy share unique historical correspondence and conflation in ways that continue to be felt for shaping and affecting our social lives. For a quick illustration we can recall that the apocryphal " discovery " of the method of loci art of memory, as recounted by Cicero, occurred in a moment of economic dispute. Or consider here that the legal genealogy of the modern corporation has its origins in the collegia of Roman law, which included burial societies charged in perpetuity with ensuring the proper observation of memorial rites in the event of a member's death. More crucially many members of society have already begun to feel how so called austerity measures, imposed on public services throughout the world following the 2008 financial crisis, have affected memory in society; from distressing autobiographical memories with redundancy and unemployment to the withdrawal of much needed services for those members of society living with a difficult relation to the past. Memory and economy are fundamentally interwoven. The confluence of these domains has on occasion dispensed our techniques, legal frameworks and psychic conditions for organising economic and mnemonic relations. Even so memory studies has yet to fully elaborate an agenda, along with the requisite theoretical and methodological tools, to properly explain the origins and implications of these dynamics. It is beyond the scope of this editorial, and my own limitations, to deliver here the kind of survey needed to follow all these contours, but I do want to highlight some inroads with the intention of opening further dialogue and debate that problem-poses memory in some way with reference to economic dynamics. Interrogating the intersections between memory and economy opens dialogue to radically develop and expand the conceptual resources that define the field and build authority for commenting and intervening upon pressing social issues. This means continuing to engage with topics that are productively becoming mainstream within the field such as public remembrance and memorial management, memory entrepreneurship, dark tourism and nostalgia industries. However, to delineate a range of emergent memory issues there is considerable prospect and even ur gency now to repurpose many recent advances in economic history, the sociology of work, economic anthropology, ecology and environmental studies, organisation studies, economic geography and feminist studies of technoscience (citing just a few fields that can elaborate our understanding of how economic dynamics affect lives beyond what Halbwach's (1992: 161) called the " zone of technical activity "). Presently these fields share what memory studies lacks, a nuanced and variegated critique of capital. Too often the status of memory is deemed to be too personal, or collectively too sacred, to attend to the dirt of capital under the fingernails of its gravediggers and memorial masons. Against this sentiment, the political economy of memory, if this formation offers little else, must provide a moniker to remind that the sustainability of our project lies in how well the field can borrow and invent concepts to Publication details: Allen, M.J., (2016) 'The poverty of memory: For political economy in memory studies', Memory Studies, Vol. 9(4), pp 371-375 Click here to find this article online