www.fernanda.digitale-grafik.com Open in urlscan Pro
167.235.16.63 Public Scan

Back to summary

URL:
https://www.fernanda.digitale-grafik.com/
Submission: On October 22 via api (October 22nd 2024, 1:39:02 pm UTC) from US — Scanned from CA

Form analysis
0 forms found in the DOM

Text Content

[ LOADING … ]

Start Index About

* Fluid Landscape Conditions explores how memories change over time, much like
Antarctica's shifting environment.
Can we eternalize the physical and mental solidity and keep it forever?
Perhaps there is neuroprotection in the endless ice landscape. By looking at
memory and how it affects society, this project considers bigger issues of
sustainability and societal resilience.
As with remembering and forgetting, design can be clear and understandable at
times but also elusive, slipping away and functioning only in specific
situations, intentions, and contexts. One may be more suitable than the
other, allowing for ambiguous, time-specific, and individual observations.

Practical Master Thesis by Fernanda Braun Santos 2024, Klasse Digitale
Grafik, HFBK Hamburg.

Special Thanks to:
Traveling Stranger, for telling me your story on the way to Antarctica with
your freezer and tools, and for being the main impulse and inspiration for
this project;
Kim Kleinert, Emanuel Strauß and Paula Oltmann for your thoughts.

Typefaces:
Isobare, Clémence Fontaine
Signa, Pauline Heppeler
MIP, Dennis Grauel
Löcher, Lina Kaltenberg
Authentic Sans, Christina Janus and Desmond Wong
4 fromages, fonderie.download
Domino Mono, Sun Young Oh
Ballet, Omnibus-Type and Maximiliano Sproviero
Waterways Seafarers, Jellyka Nerevan
Alpina Condensed, Grilli Type
Aktiv Grotesk
Rubik Variable, Rubik Burned, Rubik Bubbles
And: Citytags, Chaos Times, Mixed Fancy, Waterpark, Static Buzz, North Point,
Dingdong

Graphic Design, Programming, Editing, and Concept:
Fernanda Braun Santos

©2023 the authors, Fernanda Braun Santos.
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part
in any form.

* Introduction
* Funghi, Ice and Alzheimer
* A fiction of existence: Remembering
* (no)Archive
* Sing with me: Bioorganism of Memories
* I am often Stuck by a Desire
* MyPhotoalbum
* Fictions
* 30 million cubic meters
* Distortions
* Aleida Assmann: Plunging into Nothingness: The Politics of cultural memory
* Solid Liquid Gaseous
* Sources

menu
0

Start

About

Sources

Intro
duction

Funghi, Ice and Alzheimer

A fiction of existence: Remembering

(no)
Archive

Sing with me: Bioorganism of Memories

I am often
Stuck
by a Desire

My
Photoalbum

Fictions

30 million cubic meters

Dist
orti
ons

Aleida Assmann: Plunging into Nothingness: The Politics of cultural memory

Solid, Liquid,
Gaseous

FLUID LANDSCAPE CONDITIONS

ABOUT THE SOLIDITY OF A MEMORY

→

ABOUT THE
SOLIDITY

OF A MEMORY

Fernanda
Braun Santos
2024
HFBK Hamburg

OPEN ON PHONE

Like the antartic memory is a landscape that changes and transforms constantly.

The lived moments change their meaning with time, with our body.

The memory can also change the way we think and feel about what we remember.

It is the solid condition, which becomes liquid or even gaseous depending on the

circumstances around them →

Like the antartic memory is a landscape that changes and transforms constantly.

The lived moments change their meaning with time, with our body.

The memory can also change the way we think and feel about what we remember.

It is the solid condition, which becomes liquid or even gaseous depending on the
circumstances around them.

Sing along this wayX

From here on, some are permanent

while others are condemned to degradation →

From here on,

some are permanent while others are condemned to

DAN
GER
DAN
GER

degradation

welcome to

the end of the world →

to the beginning →

Welcome
to the
End
of the
World

Or to
the
Beginning

FUNGHI, ICE AND
ALZHEIMER

Yo creo que la memoria tiene
fuerza de gravedad,
siempre nos atrae.
Los que tienen memoria
capaces de vivir
en el frágil tiempo presente.
Los que no la tienen
no viven en ningún lugar.

— Patricio Guzmán
(Nostalgia de la luz, 2010)

Antarctica has been isolated for 23 million years and has flora, fauna and
micro-organisms with unique characteristics, thanks to their evolutionary
mechanisms and phylogenetic pathways. Thus, there is the possibility of
discovering biomolecules and natural products with relevant applications in
biomedicine that have been developed by Antarctic organisms in response to
different environmental stimuli.This is the reason why studies of fungi have
only focused on symbiosis with organisms uch as lichens or systematics in
climate change scenarios. But not on extracting their natural products for
potential uses in biomedicine. Therefore, the study of these fungi with unique
characteristics is a contribution of great importance for cellular studies in
neuroprotection of Alzheimer’s among other diseases of relevance in our country
and in the world.

A fiction of existance: Remembering →

FUNGHI , ICE
AND
ALZHE
IMER

Yo creo que la memoria
tiene fuerza de gravedad,
siempre nos atrae.
Los que tienen memoria
capaces de vivir en el frágil
tiempo presente.
Los que no la tienen no viven
en ningún lugar.
— Patricio Guzmán
(Nostalgia de la luz, 2010)

A ntarctica has been isolated for 23 million years and has flora, fauna and
micro-organisms with unique characteristics, thanks to their evolutionary
mechanisms and phylogenetic pathways. T hus, there is the possibility of
discovering biomolecules and natural products with relevant applications in
biomedicine that have been developed by Antarctic organisms in response to
different environmental stimuli. T his is the reason why studies of afungi have
only focused on symbiosis with organisms uch as lichens or systematics in
climate change scenarios. But not on extracting their natural products for
potential uses in biomedicine. T herefore, the study of these fungi with
unique characteristics is a contribution of great importance for cellular
studies in neuroprotection of Alzheimer’s among other diseases of relevance in
our country and in the world.

Is this real? →

A FICTION OF EXISTANCE: REMEMBERING

Since the configuration of the colonial matrix of power, the Western civilising
process has been marked by an archetypal colonial difference, the separation
between two zones: a zone of being and a zone of non-being (Fanon). These are
the two faces of modernity, constituted by a highly asymmetrical dependency, in
which, in order for the zone of being, with all its devices of personal comfort
and satisfaction, to exist, there must necessarily exist alongside it a zone of
non-being, which lives in permanent conditions of structural humiliation, abuse,
dispossession and violence. The problem is that the zone of being is ultimately
an imaginary creation of the modern Western economic-political system, this
privileged zone being a fiction that everywhere shows its own crisis with
planetary dimensions. Capitalist modernity offers no real solutions to the
various crises of the modern Western system — there are no possible solutions to
the ecological, economic and cultural problems. We cannot have as an ‘ideal
model’ or ‘imaginary to imitate’ an economic-political system that is basically
a fiction, i.e. the systematic concealment of the empirical supremacy of some
over others, leading in reality nowhere, only to global civilisational and
ecological disaster.

(no)Archive →

A FICTION OF EXISTANCE: REMEMBERING

Since the configuration of the colonial matrix of power, the Western civilising
process has been marked by an archetypal

colonial difference, the separation between two zones: a zone of being and a
zone of non-being (Fanon).

These are the two faces of modernity, constituted by a highly asymmetrical
dependency, in which, in order for the zone of being, with all its devices of
personal comfort and satisfaction, to exist, there must necessarily exist
alongside it

a zone of non-being, which lives in permanent conditions of structural
humiliation, abuse, dispossession and violence.

The problem is that the zone of being is ultimately an imaginary creation of the
modern Western economic-political system, this privileged zone being a fiction
that everywhere shows its own crisis with planetary dimensions.

Capitalist modernity offers no real solutions to the various crises of the
modern Western system — there are no possible solutions to the ecological,
economic and cultural problems. We cannot have as an ‘ideal model’ or ‘imaginary
to imitate’

an economic-political system that is basically a fiction, i.e. the systematic
concealment of the empirical supremacy of some over others, leading in reality
nowhere, only to global civilisational and ecological disaster.

(NO) ARCHIVE

Text from Julietta Singh in
"No Archive Will Restore You"

There are at least two ways to understand the emergence of a desire: one is
through a moment, when something shifts and the way you act and react, the way
you turn things over, is fundamentally altered. The other is through accrual,
how over time and repetition our histories draw us toward certain practices and
ways of feeling and wanting. My desire is the idea of the archive. Or, more
accurately, it is the idea of what the archive might have to offer. While I know
that my desire for the archive is in reality a long accrual, I imagine it as
this single solitary moment.

We were scrambling toward the archive. We knew it was crucial, but I suspect
that few of us knew what it meant, or where it was, or what to do with it.

“Nothing is less reliable, nothing is less clear today than the word ‘archive,’”

writes Jacques Derrida,(1. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian
Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago & London: University of Chicago
Press, 1996).) who begins his meditation on the archive (and its particular
relation to psychoanalysis) by turning us to arkhē, the linguistic root of the
word. Arkhē, Derrida explains, articulates both commencement and commandment. In
the first iteration, arkhē is the place from which everything emerges, the
location from which the thoughts and things of the world spring forth. In the
second, it is the place of authoritative law, from where authority is exercised
and externalized. How, the philosopher asks, can we hold these two meanings
together? What is this place – the archive – where the beginning of things and
the authority to govern over them both emerge? For Derrida, the archive is
troubling; it marks a series of secrets between the public and the private, but
also and most intimately, “between oneself and oneself.” (2. Ibid., 90.)

Early in his famous book Archive Fever, Derrida worries over the novelty and
value of his meditation on the archive, pausing to confess from the outset that
in the end I have nothing new to say. Why detain you with these worn-out
stories? Why this wasted time? Why archive this? Why these investments in paper,
in ink, in characters? Why mobilize so much space and so much work, so much
typographical composition? Does this merit printing? Aren’t these stories to be
had everywhere? (3. Ibid., 9.)

Derrida’s rumination on the archive turns out for him to be an irresolvable
problem from which a whole host of intellectual projects sprung forth. Did they
offer something new? Did they merit printing? Whether or not this proliferation
of Derridean archival engagements were themselves useful expenditures I cannot
say. To be sure, I have never understood how to constitute usefulness. But most
certainly they became part of the archive’s archive, marking a moment in
intellectual history when none of us understood the archive, and none of us
could stop reaching for it.

Is it too bold to say that the time of the archive has passed? The archive as an
intellectual desire seems by now to be cliché. Cliché. A senior professor in
graduate school once told me off-handedly that “cliché” is a French
onomatopoeia, originating from the sound produced by a

particular kind of printing. The sound of something being repeatedly reproduced.
Our professional relationship had briefly turned into a silly affair – something
entirely predictable and utterly foolish. As I watched his mouth sound out the
definition of cliché, I wondered if he knew that he was commenting on our
relational breach.

Years later when I confessed with deep shame to a feminist mentor that I had
done something so utterly cliché as having an affair with a male professor, she
replied: “But of course it’s cliché! It’s cliché because it is continuously
reproduced! You are part of a reproductive machine!” It is a story that is “to
be had everywhere,” the gendered power dynamics of intellectual mentorship. I
was fully aware and critical of these dynamics, and fully reproduced them while
imaging myself as unique. Just as our archival chase seems to reproduce a
structure of knowledge over and over and over again.

sing with me: Bioorganism of Memories →

(NO)

ARCHIVE

TEXT FROM
JULIETTA SINGH IN:
NO ARCHIVE WILL
RESTORE YOU

We were scrambling toward the archive. We knew it was crucial, but I suspect
that few of us knew what it meant, or where it was, or what to do with it.

“Nothing is less reliable, nothing is less clear today than the word ‘archive,’”

sing with me:

BIOORGANISM OF MEMORIES

VERSE 1:

I’m the keeper of memories, stored in my bioorganism,
Each moment etched in my mind, never to be forgotten.
From the first time we met, to the songs we used to sing,
Every memory we created, like a precious diamond ring.

CHORUS:

I’ll remember forever, everything we’ve been through,
The laughs, the tears, the stories that we knew.
In this bioorganism, our memories will never fade,
I’ll hold them close, for eternity they’re saved.

VERSE 2:

The time we got lost in the city, and laughed until we cried,
Or the late-night conversations, where we bared our souls inside.
From dancing in the rain, to the secrets we would share,
In this bioorganism, our memories will always be there.

CHORUS:

BRIDGE:

Through thick and thin, our bond will never sever,
In this bioorganism, I’ll cherish you forever.
Every memory, every moment, a piece of our story,
In the tapestry of time, we’ll always shine in glory.

CHORUS:

OUTRO:

So let’s keep making memories, for our story’s not yet done,
In this bioorganism, our journey has just begun.
With you by my side, I know I’ll never be alone,
Forever in my heart, our memories will forever be known.

I am often struck by a desire →

sing with me:

BIOORGANISM OF MEMORIES

VERSE 1:

CHORUS:

VERSE 2:

CHORUS:

BRIDGE:

CHORUS:

OUTRO:

I AM OFTEN STRUCK BY A DESIRE

to return to the beginning of this love, to those first textual missives between
us that mark the site of our inaugural contact. But I would have to scroll
forever to reach them. I have a suspicion that even if I were to spend that
endless time jutting my thumb up the screen to go back and back and back in
time, my iPhone would refuse to permit me into that virtual past. Has this
device archived my romance, or imprisoned it?

MyPhotoalbum →

I
AM OFTEN STRUCK
BY
A DESIRE …

… to return to the beginning of this love, to those first textual missives
between us that mark the site of our inaugural contact.

But I would have to scroll forever to reach them.

I have a suspicion that even if I were to spend that endless time jutting my
thumb up the screen to go back and back and back in time, my iPhone would refuse
to permit me into that virtual past.

Has this device archived my romance, or imprisoned it?

MY PHOTOALBUM

MyMemories

This is me holding an apple.

The time you broke the ice between us two

▶︎

This is D. having a shit after the Rave in T.

This was our car in Berlin 3 years ago,
R. painted it light blue.

This is my friend V. and I
making out on the Lake, it was winter.

▶︎

This is my mom pam, she forgot
to brush her hair that day.

Fictions →

MY
PHOTOALBUM

MY
MEMORIES

This is me holding an apple.

The time you broke the ice between us two.

This is D. having a shit after the Rave in T.

This was our car in Berlin three years ago, R. painted it light blue.

This is my friend V. and I making out on the Lake, it was winter.

This is my mom pam, she forgot to brush her hair that day.

FICTIONS

Were they lying to us all this time?

30 million cubic metres →

FICTIONS
WERE THEY LYING TO US ALL THIS TIME

???

30 MILLION CUBIC METRES

Area

14,200,000 km2

Population

1,300 to 5,100 (seasonal)

Population density

0.00009/km2 to 0.00036/km2 (seasonal)

Countries

7 territorial claims

Time zones

All time zones

Internet TLD

.aq

Largest settlements

McMurdo Station, Other research stations

Antarctica

…is the highest, driest, coldest and windiest continent on Earth.

… covers 14.2 million square kilometres.

…'s ice sheet is the largest ice store on earth.

…'s landmass covers 14 million kilometres.

…'s mass is 30 million cubic metres.

…'s average depth is 2,160 metres, with a maximum depth of 4,776 metres.

…s' Ice covers roughly 98% of Antarctica, which equates to 90% of the Earth’s
ice and 70% of our fresh water.

Show Chapter 12 →

30 MILLION CUBIC METRES

Area

14,200,000 km2

Population

1,300 to 5,100 (seasonal)

Population density

0.00009/km2 to 0.00036/km2 (seasonal)

Countries

7 territorial claims

Time zones

All time zones

Internet TLD

.aq

Largest settlements

McMurdo Station, Other research stations

Antarctica …

…is the highest, driest, coldest and windiest continent on Earth.

… covers 14.2 million square kilo-
metres.

…'s ice sheet is the largest ice store on earth.

…'s land-
mass covers 14 million kilo-
metres.

…'s mass is 30 million cubic metres.

…'s average depth is 2,160 metres, with a maximum depth of 4,776 metres.

…s' Ice covers roughly 98% of Antarctica, which equates to 90% of the Earth’s
ice and 70% of our fresh water.

want to know more? →

DISTORTIONS

Why does Antarctica look so big on a map? As we’ve established, Antarctica is
indeed plenty large, but not that large. Every flat map misrepresents the
surface of the Earth in some way. No map can rival a globe in truly representing
the surface of the entire Earth. However, a map or parts of a map can show one
or more — but never all — of the following: true directions, true distances,
true areas, true shapes.

Antarctica’s a gloriously big place, and certainly the largest expanse of
terrestrial wilderness left on our planet.

Antarctica is the fifth-largest of the world’s continents, covering some 14.2
million square kilometers in area. That extent includes Antarctica’s islands and
its fringing ice shelves, which are the floating coastal extensions of interior
glaciers that front about 75 percent of the White Continent’s seacoast and
account for roughly 11 percent of Antarctica’s area. If you exclude ice shelves
and islands and just take the outer margin of the White Continent to be the
so-called “grounding line” where shelf ice meets bedrock, Antarctica covers
about 12.3 million square kilometers.

The ice shelves of Antarctica are primarily freshwater features created by the
seaward advance of glaciers draining the continent’s great ice sheets. In
contrast, Antarctic sea ice is formed by the freezing of seawater and undergoes
a striking annual expansion and retraction that creates a highly variable
“second coastline” of Antarctica.

At the seasonal minimum of Antarctic sea ice, it covers between two and three
million square kilometers. But by the end of the winter, the sea ice around
Antarctica has typically expanded to about 19 million square kilometers. That’s
larger than the continent itself.

This effectively means that when taking into account sea ice, Antarctica
approximately doubles in size each winter. No surprise then that the continent
has also been called the “pulsating continent” due to this dramatic seasonal
change in areal extent.

Aleida Assmann: Plunging into nothingness: The politics of cultural memory →

DISTORTIONS

DISTOR
TIONS

Antarctica’s a gloriously big place, and certainly the largest expanse of
terrestrial wilderness left on our planet.

ALEIDA ASSMANN

PLUNGING INTO NOTHINGNESS: THE POLITICS OF CULTURAL MEMORY

We learn from neuro-scientists that there exists a part in the forebrain that is
responsible for the transformation of short-term memories into
long-term-memories. This part is called the hippocampus. To put it more
technically: due to a new chemical synthesis in the region of the brain,
temporary alterations in synaptic transmission are transformed into persistent
modifications of synaptic architecture. This process of forming long-term
memories in the brain is called 'consolidation'.

In this essay, I will ask questions such as these: what is the equivalent of the
hippocampus on the level of culture? What are the mechanisms of selection and
consolidation in cultural memory? It is safe to assume that on the societal
level, these mechanisms are at least as complex as in the brain. They involve
difficult decisions which are always controversial and which are backed up by
power relations but are also, to a certain extent, unforeseeable and contingent.
Who makes his or her way into, and who remains outside the cultural memory? What
are the principles of inclusion and exclusion? These questions are necessarily
related to questions of acquiring and maintaining power; which means that a
change in power relations will also produce a change in the structure of
cultural memory. Equally important agents of change, however, are the long-term
changes of consciousness and values. In order to better understand the cultural
politics of memory, I will look at this problem from various angles, revisiting
important turning points in the history of literature. My point of departure
will be the theme of male ambition, fame and immortality and its manifestations
in the writing. of John Milton in the leventeenth century. From there I will
move to the shock of recognition among Romantic writers who discovered that the
rural populations are cateBorically excluded from cultural memory, an insight
that was repeated and politicized by women and black writers in the beginning
and the middle of the twentieth century. I will end by describing their efforts
to fight their way back from a state of exclusion and amnesia, from their
"plunge into nothingnell" back into cultural memory.

1. TWO KINDS OF IMMORTALITY

In spite of its long history, fame is a late addition to the arts of cultural
memory. The secular notion of an afterlife based on individual deeds and
achievements was known already in Ancient Egypt and developed in Ancient Greece
and Rome. While the claim to personal fame had been a privilege of rulers and
the ruling class in earlier civilizations, this privilege, was extended in
Greece and Rome to non-political domains such as science, the arts or sports.
Whereas the commemoration of the dead, the obligation to remember one's deceased
family members, seems to be a universal cultural institution, the cult of fame,
the desire of the individual to ,gain secular immortality on the basis of a
continued estimation of his or her life-time achievements, is certainly not. The
cult of fame, for instance; has no root in Christianity but entered Western
culture only in the Renaisance with the influx of classical texts and
traditions. The Christian notion of religious immortality was based on faith; it
was long considered incompatible with the notion of a secular immortality based
on fame. In the process of secularization, the vision of a religious afterlife
of souls redeemed after the last judgment was increasingly replaced by the
vision of a secular afterlife in the memory of future generations. Shakespeare
was among those who eagerly absorbed the Renaissance "poetics of immortality"
(Curtius, 471-472): He repeatedly defined his sonnet in the Horatian manner as a
'monument' in which the fleeting moment of the beauty of the beloved is safely
enshrined:

Your monument shall be my gentle verse.
Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read;
And tongues-to-be your being shall rehearse,
When all the breathers of this world are dead:
You still shall live - such virtue hath my pen -
Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men. (Sonnet 81.9-14)

As breath is the fuel oflife,flatus vocis, speech, communication is the fuel of
an.afterlife. To live on in memory means, for Shakespeare, to continue to be
talked about and recited. Immortality is thus the product of 'communicative
memory'. In the couplet of another sonnet, Shakespeare brilliantly parallels the
two conflicting visions of Christian and Classical afterlife, of faith and fame:

So, till the judgment that yourself arise, You live in this, and dwell in
lovers' eyes. (Sonnet 55.13-14)

A generation after Shakespeare, Sir Thomas Browne, the famous physician and
religious prose writer of the seventeenth century, thought little of a secular
afterlife. He believed that the world was soon coming to an end and that human
aspirations towards fame were manifestations of vanitas. in the double sense of
the term: a foolish pride and an empty hope. He summed up the conflict between
Christian eternity and secular afterlife with concise precision:

The greater part must be content to be as though they had not been, to be found
in the Register of God, not in the record of man. (Browne, 282)

2. MONUMENTAL MEMORY

2.1 NIETZSCHE'S CONCEPT OF MONUMENTAL HISTORY

The term 'monument' usually refers to architecture, texts or works of art that
have achieved an eminence that elevates them beyond their historical contexts. I
want to take here a slightly different approach to the topic by following
Nietzsche's theory of 'monumental history'. In his reflections on uses and
abuses of the past, he presents three types of historiography that manage to set
limits to the overpowering multiplicity of historical data by creating a
meaningful narrative. One of these is what he calls 'monumental history'. For
Nietzsche, the term 'monument' is not confined to concrete objects such as
buildings, statues, museums and memorials. He conceives of the 'monumental' in a
much wider sense, taking it as a mamier of framing, as a specific format that is
retrospectively applied to works of art, ideas, human beings and events of the
past. He looks at monuments less from the standpoint of production, asking who
created them and with what Intention, but rather from the perspective of
reception, asking why they are selected, accepted and needed. His interest is in
the construction of the monument, focusing not on those who left something
behind but on those who pick it up.

For Nietzsche, 'monument' is first and foremost a memory format that stands for
techniques of elevating and enlarging objects, events and persons. He is clearly
aware of the constructed character of the monument and investigates the
strategies which are used to transform a transitory historical moment into a
lasting monument. For Nietzsche, however, the analysis of the constructedness of
this format does not automatically entail its 'deconstruction'. Although he is
himself a revolutionary thinker, subversion is not his one and only concern. He
points to various operations that are involved in the process of transforming a
moment into a monument.

2.1.1 SELECTION AND EXTRACTION OF THE EVENT FROM ITS CONTEXT

Selection is the first and foremost step, and it always implies a paradoxical
act of forgetting: "Whole tracts of it are forgotten and despised; they flow
away like a dark, unbroken river, with only a few gaily coloured islands of fact
rising above it. There is something beyond nature in the rare figures that
become visible; like the golden hips his disciples attributed to Pythagoras"
(Nietzsche, 16). A monument, according to Nietzsche, is an event cut off from
its cause; it is taken out of the "real historical nexus of cause and effect" by
focusing on the event (or text) as an "effect in itself' (15). An acute
perception of the differences in historical settings and consequences would
necessarily weaken its normative impact.

2.1.2 TRANSLATION FROM A SMALL SCALE TO A LARGE SCALE

The monument, according to Nietzsche, is created not only by selecting an event
of the past and disconnecting it from its context, but also by rendering it on a
larger than life scale. 'Greatness' is the eRduring quality of the monument
which is achieved by altering an event and touching it up, thus taking away some
of its factual authenticity and bringing it 'nearer to fiction'. Events that are
memorized in the format of a 'monument' are compared by Nietzsche to 'myth';
both bring the past to life, both create meaning and exert a normative or
motivational power on the present.

2.1.3 TRANSLATION FROM THE PARTICULAR TO THE GENERAL

The 'monument' in monumental history is singled out from the uniform chains of
events as an encouraging example, as an inspiring model to be imitated and
emulated. To raise an event or deed of the past to the status of a lasting
example, it must be generalized to become a compelling match for various
upcoming occasions. In this process, "many differences must be neglected, the
individuality of the past i. forced into a general formula and all the sharp
angles broken off for the sake of correspondence" (Nietzsche, 14). Only if a
striking similarity can be detected between past event and present occasion,
will it exert a motivating influence on the present. In this process, the past
event (or text) is 'assimilated' (in the literal sense of the word) to the
situation of the present.

While the 'moment' is embedded in historical time, the 'monument' is embedded in
the timeless zone of immortality, which is the product of the construction of
fame. Nietzsche closely connects the construction of 'the monument' with the
'construction of fama'. For him, the production and reception of greatness in
cultural memory are intimately related because it is by "gazing on past
greatness" that the gazer hopes to become great himself (13).' Creative
imitation is for Nietzsche the only viable strategy available to the artist to
achieve fame. He who imitates greatness "has no hope of reward except fame,
which means the expectation of a niche in the temple of history" (13). 1 Harold
Bloom has absorbed Nietzsche's ideas in his concept of the Western Canon. He
emphasized the principle of creative imitation and combined it with the an
agonistic principle: the texts within a Canon are "struggling with one another
for lurvival" because "in Western history the creative imagination has conceived
of Itlelf II the most competitive of model, akin to the solitary runner, who
races for his own Glory" (34). After having secured for himself a safe place in
this temple, he will exert a similar influence on posterity, which will in turn
hopefully imitate his example. The constructions of fame and immortality are
backed up by his credo that monuments "form a chain, a highroad for humanity
through the ages, and [that] the highest points of those vanished moments are
yet great and living for men" (Nietzsche, 13). According to Nietzsche, this
"highroad for humanity through the age,s" is upheld and maintained by only a few
great minds.

One thing will live, the sign manual of their inmost being, the rare flash of
light, the deed, the creation; because posterity cannot do without it. In this
spiritualized form, fame is … the belief in the oneness and continuity of the
great in every age, and a protest against the change and decay of generations.
(14)

Nietzsche knew very well, however, that in spite of this oneness and continuity,
immortality was not the product of cooperation but of competition. He emphasized
that "the fiercest battle is fought round the demand for greatness to be
eternal". The battle is so fierce because the secular religion of fama is
extremely exclusive. Nietzsche's pantheon holds "No more than a hundred men" of
an age and it requires no more to keep up the tradition (13).

2.2 MILTON'S WILL TO FAME

Let us look more closely at one of these "hundred men" who fought the fierce
battle for fame and greatness. I will focus on Sir Thomas Browne's contemporary,
the poet John Milton, who became a supporter of Cromwell and the Puritan
revolution at the time of the civil war. The poet grew up in a sheltered home,
which provided him with a room of his own, with a great supply of books and
ample time for reading. He profited from an excellent education including
ancient languages, theology and history. As a staunch Puritan, Milton was
clearly a Christian writer, but he was also a Renaissance humanist who could not
suppress a strong yearning for greatness and secular fame. On the eve of his
twenty.third birthday, he wrote a sonnet in which he expressed his anxiety about
the tardiness of his expected career:

My hasting days fly on with full career, But my late spring no bud or blossom
shew'th. (29)

He described his yearning for great achievements and fame in more general terms
as

an inward prompting which now grew daily upon me, that by labour and intent
study (which I take to be my portion in this life) joyn'd with the strong
propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave something so written to aftertimes,
as they should not willingly let die. These thoughts at once possesst me, and
these other. That if I were certain to write as men buy Leases, for three lives
and downward, there ought no regard be sooner had, than to God's glory by the
honour and instruction of my country. (236, my italics)

Both Browne and Milton were eminent Christian men of letters of the seventeenth
century; the one, however, fashioned himself as a private, the other as a public
man. Milton, the public man, aspired to a place in cultural memory and dedicated
his whole life to that goal. His vocation was built on specific prerequisites
(such as inclination and special talents) and required a specific sacrifice
("labour and intent study"). Milton hoped for something that until then had been
possible only through legal contracts: to create lI; lasting impact for three or
more generations after his death. He countered the hubris of intellectual pride
(superbia), which lurks in the pagan project of self-immortalization by bowing
to higher values and dedicating himself and his achievements to the service of
God and country.

But, as Browne soberly reminds us: very few people can strive for fame, and
still fewer achieve it. There are always two sides to fame, the production side
and the reception side, which can be compared to a message in a bottle.
Something has to be sent off aiming at the future as 'prospective remembrance',
and something has to be taken up in the future as 'retrospective memory',
looking back into the past. The problem is: How can one exert an influence, let
alone pressure on the generations to come? How can one make them accept the
offer of one's work and prevent them from willingly letting it die? Nietzsche
was rather confident on this point; he was convinced that posterity would accept
the gift because it #cannot do without it" (14). Virginia Woolf was much more
skeptical and even diffident. What can you do, she asked, .against the world's
notorious indifference?" (60).

By invoking the model of a legal contract, Milton connected the present and the
future in a bond of mutual obligation. In doing so, he gave his written work the
status of a testament. Amazingly enough, Milton's ambitious hopes were not
defeated, and the degree of his canonization is quite re.I.Parkable. He was
himself a despised and discarded relic of the Puritan Revolution, suffering
contempt, negligence and forgetting when he wrote his ambitious epic Paradise
Lost at the time of the Restoration. Only one generation later, however, at the
dawn of a new secular era of political and aesthetic emancipation from religious
authority, was his 'message in the bottle' recovered and the manuscript
translated into a new cultural context. His text, which had been designed as
'monumental' to begin with, was fashioned by later generations as a monument by
lifting it from its context and transforming its message to make it resonate
with new issues, values and discourses. Most of all, Milton's text served
enlightened and Romantic generations in formulating their own poetic agendas.'
In the course of the nineteenth century, Milton's text was introduced into the
channel of the English school system through which he reached a wide reading
public. His poems and epics became canonical texts for social and moral
education and a common point of reference (an important lieu de memoire of
Bildung) for English culture in the British Empire.

A later stage of Milton's fame is reflected in one of James Joyce's short
stories, written at the beginning of the twentieth century. Gabriel Conroy, the
protagonists of the story #The Dead", is a literary scholar who gives a dinner
speech which forms the climax of a New Year's party organized traditionally by
his aunts in Dublin. In this speech, Gabriel quotes Milton's words about fame
and afterlife; in doing so, he presents himself as a rather introverted 2
Milton's. canonical status lasted through the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries , when he wa. al.o deployed not only in the homeland but also in the
cultural politics. orthe Brltlsh Empire, until T.S. Eliot dumped hilshares at
the literary stock market In the early twentieth century. and erudite man who
airs his somewhat antiquated Bildung. This Bildung is just above the level of
that of his audience, but, what is worse, Gabriel highlights an icon of English
culture, thereby proving his estrangement from Irish cultural traditions. He
does so in a rather melancholic way, however, aware that "the shadows lengthen
in our evening land" arId that this English tradition is already declining
(Bloom, 16). It has lost its invigorating energy for the future and become a
faint afterthought, a pure retrospection. Gabriel's speech is steeped in
nostalgia when he describes himself as the last adherent of a great but fading
tradition. At a moment and in a place where the world is more than willing to
let this tradition die, he is the last one to reaffirm it once more. Milton had
once pondered the risks and possibilities of time-travel for his own writing,
wondering who would receive his manuscript in the bottle; Gabriel Conroy speaks
from the other end, 250 years later, as one who has received the message but
notices that it is fading and vanishing. In Gabriel's speech, the notion of fame
and immortality is turning more and more into a retrospective memory of the
dead. He looks back to days which

might, without exaggeration, be called spacious days: and if they are gone',
beyond recall, let us hope, at least, that in gatherings such as this we shall
still speak of them with pride and affection, still cherish in our hearts the
memory of tho'se dead and gone great ones whose fame the world will not
willingly let die. (Joyce, 201)

3. OUTSIDE THE GROOVE OF HISTORY

3.1 "THE SHORT AND SIMPLE ANNALS OF THE POOR": THOMAS GRAY

By selecting and highlighting a particular work or event. the monument
automatically creates a halo of forgetting. Nietzsche already emphasized this
effect on our perception of history: "Whole tracts of it are forgotten and
despised; they flow away like a dark, unbroken river" (15). I will shift my
focus now from the monumental to the momentary and gaze for a while at the dark
unbroken flow of the river Lethe. What about those who are not selected and
forgotten? While Milton's question: "How can I create for myself a lasting
memory?" is a very old one, the complementary question: "Who can aspire to a
place in cultural memory?" is a rather recent one. In an early version it was
asked by the English poet Thomas Gray in the middle of the eighteenth century in
his poem "An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (1751). When the persons
contemplates the Inscription. on the tombstones, he becomes concious of the fact
that none of those buried there could lay claim to an afterlife in the cultural
memory of the living. Death is of course the great leveler, a common destiny for
the rich and the poor, but some are more dead than others. Apart from their
names and dates, nothing is known of these "unhonour'd dead:"

Pull many a gem of purest ray serene, The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear:
Pull many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the
desert air. (Gray, 61·66, II. 49-53)

The dead of the churchyard must indeed - in Thomas Browne's words - "be content
to be as though they had not been, to be found in the Register of God, not in
the record of man" (Hydrotaphia, ch. 5). The poet goes on to imagine the life
stories of these peasants, which were narrowly constrained by their basic needs.
He realizes that none of them had the privilege of an education, which might
have developed their talents and given them a chance to launch a career. ,in
science, arts, or politics. Gray muses that "some mute inglorious Milton here
may rest" (59). According to his Romantic view, the peasants of the village in
their rustic simplicity belong to nature and not to history. Time in nature is
circular; its rhythms are determined by the cycles oflife and their eternal
repetition. Nature leaves no traces and thus no evidence for Itory, history or
memory. History, by contrast, is a,form of memory that is based on traces and
records. There are, of course, or;i memories tied to the country churchyard, but
these do not exceed the narrow circle of the community. In his "Essay upon
Epitaphs," the Romantic poet William Wordsworth wrote a generation later, a
country churchyard "in the stillness of the country, is a visible center of a
community of the living and the dead" (127). The living memory, which Wordsworth
encountered in the graveyard, is based on ties of family piety within a
neighborhood community. The dead of the village live on for a while in the
memories of two or three generations, but these social bonds are narrowly
circumscribed; they remain enclosed within the 'communicative memory' of the
village and are not transferred into the public domain of cultural memory.

Gray's poem provides an acute critical reflection on the shadow-line that
separates the "honoured dead" that achieve fame and become part of cultural
memory from the "unhonoured dead" of the village community. Without great works
or deeds there is no claim to honor and fame"; both were, for Gray, still
exclusively male privileges. While the simple rustics were cut off from these
privileges, they were sanctified and compensated for this lack in the vision of
the Romantic poet with the values of nature and Innocence.

3.2 FEMALE INVISIBILITY AND ANONYMITY: VIRGINIA WOOLF

It was not until the beginning twentieth century that Gray's question was asked
from a female point of view. Women became interested in the invisible boundary
between the honoured and the unhonoured dead, which, for them, separates not
only the elite from the lower classes, but also the men from the women. Similar
to Gray's vision of the ancestors of the village population, the lives of women
had long been considered to be cyclical, ordinary, and close to nature, thus
cutting them off from histqry. The feminist project was therefore to restore at
least some of them to the canons of art and to re-inscribe them into the
"records of man." 3 Where Virginia Woolf detected empty spaces in the libraries
she consulted there are now whole libraries filled with historical research
about women. A few random examples of publications of the year 20005 are: Bonnie
Smith, ed. Women's History in Global Perspective. 3 vols (Urban., Ill.:
University of Illinois Press , 2005);

The invisibility of women is an immediate consequence of patrilinear genealogy.
The privilege to be remembered is anchored in the family name, which is what a
woman has to give up when getting married. Although biologically, there is no
generating without women, their part in this process is systematically elided,
as for instance in the long genealogical lists in the Hebrew Bible, where men
regularly generate men. In a patriarchal culture, women are not entitled to
retain and perpetuate their name across generations. By giving up their name,
they abandon a significant ',part of their identity. We can refer to this
unquestioned relinquishing of female identity as a process of structural
forgetting. An English legal text from the first half of the seventeenth century
gives a precise description of it, making use of an image:

It is true that man and wife are one person, but understand in what manner. When
a small brook or little river incorporateth with Rhodanus, Humber or Thames, the
poor rivulet loseth her name: it is carried with the new associate; it beareth
no sway … I may more truly, far away, say to a married woman, aer new self is
her superior, her companion, her master. ("The Lawe's Resolution ofWomen:S
Rights' (1632) in Rippl,53)

Just as the trace of a small river is lost as soon as it flows into a larger
one, so the name and identity of the spouse are lost in marital unicm. Her
identity is 'sublated' (aufgehoben) in that of her husband very much in the
Hegelian sense: She can attain a higher level in the hierarchy, but only at the
cost of surrendering her own identity to the name and status of her husband.

This description of the seventeenth century still captures the situation of
women in the nineteenth century. When we turn to the last pages of George
Eliot's Middlemarch, a writer who has preferred to use a male pseudonym for her
writing, we can find an interesting variation of the topos of the river.
Throughout the book, the reader has gotten to know the remarkable qualities of
the heroine Dorothea and therefore knows that she has more potential in her than
she is entitled to develop according to her limited gender role as a helpmate to
her husband. To quote from the novel: "Many who knew her, thought it a pity that
so substantive and rare a creature should have been absorbed into the life of
another, and be only known in a certain circle as a wife and mother" (694).

Dorothea fulfills her genealogical obligations by giving birth to a son. But
this happy ending cannot cover up her lack of visibility, which is the themeQf
the famous last paragraph of the novel. Here, Eliot adapts the Image of the
river in an interesting way:

Her finely-touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely
visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength,
spent itself in channells, which had no great name on the earth. But the effect
of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing
good of the world is'partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are
not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number
who lived faithfully a hidden life, and in the unvisited tombs. (696)

Elliots mind was not rebellious. She acquiesced in her lot and refrained from
aspirations to name and fame. She accepted Dorothea Brooke's invisibility by
turning the defect into a virtue. The invisible, she argues, are known not for
themselves but for their diffuse effects; the good that they do reaches many
lives and destinations like a river that disperses into many streams. This
argument allows her to end her novel on a consoling note.

Virginia Woolf broke with this acquiescence. She was no longer ready to put up
with the structural invisibility of women as prescribed by the laws of
patriarchy. She embarked on a search - not for lost time, as Proust did, but for
those lost in time. She documented her search for women in history in her
seminal essay "A Room of One's Own" (1928). In this search, she became aware of
women's conspicuous absence from written records; their lives, deeds and works,
she noticed, had indeed flown "away like a dark, unbroken river" (NietZiche,
15). Woolf critically analyzed the ways in which the constructions of fame and
cultural memory are determined by male authority within patriarchal, national,
or imperial frameworka of power.

Writing half a century after Nietzsche, Woolf could no longer accept the
principle that it takes "no more than a hundred men" to maintain greatness and
to fill up the temple of fame.

Trying to imagine the life of an Elizabethan woman, Woolf was "held up by the
scarcity of facts. One knows nothing detailed, nothing perfectly true and
substantial about her. History scarcely mentions her" (53). 4 I Woolf notices
that she left no plays or poems, but probably had a number of children. She
writes: "Nothing is kn.own about women before the eighteenth cen· tury" (53).
And she continues: "All these facts lie somewhere, presumably, in parish
registers and account books; the life of the average Elizabethan woman must be
scattered about somewhere." As she detected thematic empty spaces ip the
bookshelves, Woolf considered the project of rewriting history or at least
writing a supplement to history, which was connected with the profession of her
father Leslie Steven and thus an exclusively male domain. Instead of calling it
'history' it had to be called "by some inconspicuous name so that women might
figure there without impropriety" (52-53). 5 Ruth Kluger, when dealing with her
dead family members who were murdered in the Holocaust, had to learn that women
do not figure in Jewish religioul rituals of memory. She also had to learn that
women do not figure as interpreters of history either. In her autobiography she
delcribel how difficult it was to participate in the discourse of male historian
or to have her encounter with 'history' listened to at all. Her husband, a
professional historian and American war veteran, would become "furious because I
dished up memories that competed with his. That's when I learned that wars
belong to the men" For the exclusion of woman from the annals of history, Woolf
did not only blame men but also the mechanisms of silent complicity. In Western
culture, the urge to make a name for oneself is not explicitly forbidden for
women but checked by a powerful social taboo, which is even more effective
because it is deeply internalized. Woolf brilliantly analyzes this mechanism of
female self-censorship by connecting the prolonged desire for anonymity with a
deeper, hidden concern for chastity. "It was a relic of the sense of chastity
that dictated anonymity to women even so late in the nineteenth century …
Publicity in women is detestable. Anonymity runs in their blood. The desire to
be veiled still possesses them" (58).

3.3 "FACELESS FACES, SOUNDLESS VOICES": RALPH ELLISON

While Nietzsche gazed on the temple of fame and the few immortalized great ones
enshrined in it, Virginia Woolf looked for the ones who were neglected and
forgotten, gazing on the "dark, unbroken river" (Nietzsche, 15) of Lethe. Let us
look at this river through the eyes of yet another writer who pondered over the
abyss between moment and monument, trying to remember those that are forever
lost and forgotten. In one chapter of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, the
protagonist tells the story of Tod Clifton, who for a short time had been a
co-member in a Harlem group of communist activists called the "Brotherhood".
Like the protagonist, Tod Clifton is black, but unlike him, he drops out of the
group after a short time. The narrator sees him again by chance in the streets
of New York, where he sells paperpuppets at a corner. As Clifton is not equipped
with a license to sell these toys, the police try to arrest him. There is a
short physical attack in which Clifton tries to escape but is gunned down by
another policeman. The narrator involuntarily becomes a witness to this scene,
but is so numbed by the shock that at first he has only one impulse: to forget
what he has seen: "walking away in the sun I tried to erase the scene from my
mind" (353). He la tormented, however, by his thoughts, puzzled by the behavior
of his friend:

Why should he choose to disarm himself, give up his voice and leave the only
organization offering him a chance to 'define' himself? … Why did he choose to
plunge into nothingness, into the void of faceless faces, of soundless voices,
lying outside history? (353)

What then follows in Ellison's novel is a meditation of the protagonist on the
construction of history and the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion in
cultural memory:

All things, it is said, are duly recorded - all things of importance, that is.
But not quite, for actually it is only the known, the seen, the heard and only
those events that the recorder regards as important that are put down, those
lies his keepers keep their power by. (353)

He then realizes that "the cop would be Clifton's historian, his judge, his
witness, and his executioner, and I was the only brother in the watching crowd"
(353). It dawns on him that people "who write no novels, histories or other
books" will forever remain outside history. Oral life is lost to literal culture
and so is the group of three young African Americans who' enter the subway. He
atares at them in wonder with exactly the same thoughts on which Gray pondered
on his round in the country churchyard. Ellison's protagnist speaks of them as
"men of transition", of "men out of time who would loon be gone and forgotten …
But who knew but that they were the saviors, the true leaders, the bearers of
something precious?" Living outside the realm of history, "there was no one to
applaud their value and they themselves failed to understand it" (355). The
narrator condenses the epiphany of this moment, a revelation that will change
his life, into the following insight: "They were outside the groove of history
and it was my job to get them in, all of them" (357).

CONCLUSION

In my essay, I have looked at the ways in which cultural memories are produced
and at some of the reasons why they are not produced. My aim was to look at
cultural memory both from the inside and from the outside and to find literary
texts that tell us something about the still rather occult mechanisms of
inclusion and exclusion. In the first part, I dealt with the secular immortality
of fame. Following Nietzsche, I examined some of the operations by which a
moment is transformed into a monument. Following Milton and his desire for
immortality, I showed how literary fame is produced and received across time,
undergoing historical changes. In the second part, I looked at the borderline of
cultural memory from the outside, that is, from the point of view of those who
are doomed to remain outside. Cultural, just as individual memory is an
extremely marrow space regulated by rigid principles of selection and
forgetting. Those who examined the borderline - Gray speaking for the poor
peasants, Woolf speaking for women, Ellison speaking for African Americans -
were for the first time calling attention to the structural mechanisms that
exclude whole groups of the population from active participation'in the cultural
memory. They examined the deeply internalized and habitualized logic of cultural
exclusion, focusing on anonymity and invisibility as an immediate effect of
power structures. By critically examining patriarchal, sexist and racist
strategies of remembering and forgetting', both Woolf and Ellison inaugurated
important changes in our perception of social and cultural reality. While Gray
and Eliot mused on questions of inequality still in a rather nostalgic and
subdued way, WooIrs and Ellison's (and in their wake many other writers') anger
opened our eyes and ushered in a new awareness and sensibility. By rendering
visible the social and political economy of cultural remembering and forgetting,
they were already engaged in the process of challenging, changing and
renegotiating it. From them we have learned that if "no more than a hundred" are
needed to fill up the temple of fame, they need not be either all men or all
white.

Aleida Assmann, Plunging into Nothingness: The Politics of cultural memory. In:
Lambert, Ochsner (eds.) Moment to Monument. The Making of cultral Significance.
transcript, Bielefeld 2009 p.35-49

REFERENCES Bloom, Harold. "An Elegy for the Canon." The Western Canon: The Books
and School for the Ages. San Diego and London: Hartcourt, Brace, 1994. Browne,
Sir Thomas. " Hydriotaphia - Urne Buriall or, a Brief Discourse of the
Sepulchrall Urnes Lately Found in Norfolk." The Prose of Sir Thomas Browne:
Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, The Garden of Cyrus, A Letter to a Friend,
Christian Morals, with selections from Psudodoxia Epidemica, Miscellany Tracts,
and from ms notebooks and letters (1658). Ed. Norman Endicott. New York: New
York University Press, 1968. Curtius, Ernst Robert. Europaische Literatur und
lateinisches Mittelalter. Bern: Francke, 1948. BUot, George. Middlemarch. Ed. W.
J. Harvey. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man (1952).
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965. Gray, Tbomas. "An Elegy Written in a Country
Churchyard." (1751). The Complete English Poems of Thomas Gray. Ed. James
Reeves. London: Heinemann, 1973. 61-66. loyce, James. Dubliners (1914).
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. KlUger, Ruth. Weiter leben: Eine Jugend.
Gottingen: Wallstein, 1992. Milton, John. "On Being Arrived at Twenty-three
Years.of Age." The English Poems of John Milton. Ed. H. C. Beeching. London:
Oxford UniVersity Press, 1968. MUton, John. "The Reason of Church-Government
Urged against Prelating." Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Milton. New
York: Random House, 1950. 525-546. Nletzlche, Friedrich. The Use and Abuse of
History. Trans. Adrian Collins. New York and London: Macmillan, 1957 . 'ppl,
Gabriele, ed. Lebenstexte: Literarische Selbststilisierungen englischer ',.""en
in der fruhen Neuzeit. Miinchen: Fink, 1998. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's
Own (1928). Harmondsworth: Penguin, 10°04· Wordlworth, William. "Essay Upon
Epitaphs." Literary Criticism. Wortlsworth's Literary Criticism. Ed. W. J. B.
Owen. London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1974.

Solid, Liquid, Gaseous →

ALEIDA ASSMANN

PLUNGING INTO NOTHINGNESS: THE POLITICS OF CULTURAL MEMORY

In this essay, I will ask questions such as these: what is the equivalent of the
hippocampus on the level of culture? What are the mechanisms of selection and
consolidation in cultural memory? It is safe to assume that on the societal
level, these mechanisms are at least as complex as in the brain. They involve
difficult decisions which are always controversial and which are backed up by
power relations but are also, to a certain extent, unforeseeable and contingent.
Who makes his or her way into, and who remains outside the cultural memory? What
are the principles of inclusion and exclusion? These questions are necessarily
related to questions of acquiring and maintaining power; which means that a
change in power relations will also produce a change in the structure of
cultural memory. Equally important agents of change, however, are the long-term
changes of consciousness and values. In order to better understand the cultural
politics of memory, I will look at this problem from various angles, revisiting
important turning points in the history of literature. My point of departure
will be the theme of male ambition, fame and immortality and its manifestations
in the writing of John Milton in the leventeenth century. From there I will move
to the shock of recognition among Romantic writers who discovered that the rural
populations are cateBorically excluded from cultural memory, an insight that was
repeated and politicized by women and black writers in the beginning and the
middle of the twentieth century. I will end by describing their efforts to fight
their way back from a state of exclusion and amnesia, from their "plunge into
nothingnell" back into cultural memory.

1. TWO KINDS OF IMMORTALITY

So, till the judgment that yourself arise, You live in this, and dwell in
lovers' eyes. (Sonnet 55.13-14)

The greater part must be content to be as though they had not been, to be found
in the Register of God, not in the record of man. (Browne, 282)

2. MONUMENTAL MEMORY

2.1 NIETZSCHE'S CONCEPT OF MONUMENTAL HISTORY

2.1.1 SELECTION AND EXTRACTION OF THE EVENT FROM ITS CONTEXT

2.1.2 TRANSLATION FROM A SMALL SCALE TO A LARGE SCALE

2.1.3 TRANSLATION FROM THE PARTICULAR TO THE GENERAL

2.2 MILTON'S WILL TO FAME

My hasting days fly on with full career, But my late spring no bud or blossom
shew'th. (29)

He described his yearning for great achievements and fame in more general terms
as an inward prompting which now grew daily upon me, that by labour and intent
study (which I take to be my portion in this life) joyn'd with the strong
propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave something so written to aftertimes,
as they should not willingly let die. These thoughts at once possesst me, and
these other. That if I were certain to write as men buy Leases, for three lives
and downward, there ought no regard be sooner had, than to God's glory by the
honour and instruction of my country. (236, my italics)

3. OUTSIDE THE GROOVE OF HISTORY

3.1 "THE SHORT AND SIMPLE ANNALS OF THE POOR": THOMAS GRAY

Pull many a gem of purest ray serene, The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear:
Pull many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the
desert air. (Gray, 61·66, II. 49-53)

3.2 FEMALE INVISIBILITY AND ANONYMITY: VIRGINIA WOOLF

3.3 "FACELESS FACES, SOUNDLESS VOICES": RALPH ELLISON

CONCLUSION

Aleida Assmann, Plunging into Nothingness: The Politics of cultural memory. In:
Lambert, Ochsner (eds.) Moment to Monument. The Making of cultral Significance.
transcript, Bielefeld 2009 p.35-49

REFERENCES Bloom, Harold. "An Elegy for the Canon." The Western Canon: The Books
and School for the Ages. San Diego and London: Hartcourt, Brace, 1994. Browne,
Sir Thomas. " Hydriotaphia - Urne Buriall or, a Brief Discourse of the
Sepulchrall Urnes Lately Found in Norfolk." The Prose of Sir Thomas Browne:
Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, The Garden of Cyrus, A Letter to a Friend,
Christian Morals, with selections from Psudodoxia Epidemica, Miscellany Tracts,
and from ms notebooks and letters (1658). Ed. Norman Endicott. New York: New
York University Press, 1968. Curtius, Ernst Robert. Europaische Literatur und
lateinisches Mittelalter. Bern: Francke, 1948. BUot, George. Middlemarch. Ed. W.
J. Harvey. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man (1952).
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965. Gray, Tbomas. "An Elegy Written in a Country
Churchyard." (1751). The Complete English Poems of Thomas Gray. Ed. James
Reeves. London: Heinemann, 1973. 61-66. loyce, James. Dubliners (1914).
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. KlUger, Ruth. Weiter leben: Eine Jugend.
Gottingen: Wallstein, 1992. Milton, John. "On Being Arrived at Twenty-three
Years.of Age." The English Poems of John Milton. Ed. H. C. Beeching. London:
Oxford UniVersity Press, 1968. MUton, John. "The Reason of Church-Government
Urged against Prelating." Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Milton. New
York: Random House, 1950. 525-546. Nletzlche, Friedrich. The Use and Abuse of
History. Trans. Adrian Collins. New York and London: Macmillan, 1957 . • 'ppl,
Gabriele, ed. Lebenstexte: Literarische Selbststilisierungen englischer ',.""en
in der fruhen Neuzeit. Miinchen: Fink, 1998. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's
Own (1928). Harmondsworth: Penguin, 10°04· Wordlworth, William. "Essay Upon
Epitaphs." Literary Criticism. Wortlsworth's Literary Criticism. Ed. W. J. B.
Owen. London: Routledge • Kegan Paul, 1974.

SOLID, LIQUID, GASEOUS

State diagram for water showing the aggregate state in dependence of temperature
and pressure. The arrows indicate the course of a typical freeze-drying process.

Overview on the three process steps of freeze-drying.

Schematic drawing of water vapour transport in case of a sphere (frozen droplet)
or a cake (vial). In both cases the water vapour has to diffuse from the
sublimation front to the product surface. The dry product layer acts as barrier
with certain resistance.

State diagram showing three integrated drying courses. The drying velocity
increases from process A to process C due to the higher applied product
temperature.

Sources →

SOLID,

LIQUID

GASEOUS

State diagram for water showing the aggregate state in dependence of temperature
and pressure. The arrows indicate the course of a typical freeze-drying process.

Overview on the three process steps of freeze-drying.

State diagram showing three integrated drying courses. The drying velocity
increases from process A to process C due to the higher applied product
temperature.

About

Fluid Landscape Conditions explores how memories change over time, much like
Antarctica's shifting environment.
Can we eternalize the physical and mental solidity and keep it forever? Perhaps
there is neuroprotection in the endless ice landscape. By looking at memory and
how it affects society, this project considers bigger issues of sustainability
and societal resilience.
As with remembering and forgetting, design can be clear and understandable at
times but also elusive, slipping away and functioning only in specific
situations, intentions, and contexts. One may be more suitable than the other,
allowing for ambiguous, time-specific, and individual observations.

Practical Master Thesis
by Fernanda Braun Santos 2024,
Klasse Digitale Grafik, HFBK Hamburg.

Special Thanks to:
Traveling Stranger, for telling me your story on the way to Antarctica with your
freezer and tools, and for being the main impulse and inspiration for this
project;
Kim Kleinert, Emanuel Strauß and Paula Oltmann for your thoughts.

Graphic Design, Programming, Editing, and Concept:
Fernanda Braun Santos

SOURCES

Patricio Guzmán: Nostalgia de la luz, 2010)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7ZoUhXHw3U

Julietta Singh: No Archive Will Restore You, 2018
https://monoskop.org/images/8/86/Singh_Julietta_No_Archive_Will_Restore_You_2018.pdf

Aleida Assmann: Plunging into nothingness: The politics of cultural memory, 2009
https://attachments.are.na/482293/9b34a5d4132c8759f853e85a57eeff5e.pdf?1447524425

https://noticiasncc.com/cartelera/articulos-o-noticias/12/11/cientificos-chilenos-buscan-en-los-hongos-la-respuesta-contra-el-alzheimer/

https://www.cienciaenchile.cl/exitosa-campana-antartica-permitio-encontrar-mas-de-70-cepas-de-hongos-en-investigacion-que-busca-nuevos-compuestos-quimicos-para-enfrentar-el-alzheimer/

https://attachments.are.na/27847090/6bdf5ce1e92326715ef183006d35123e.pdf?1714470540
Prof. Humberto Barrera V.: Observaciones sobre Glaciología Antártica Expedición
Chilena 1947, 1949.

Archivo Digital Biblioteca Nacional de Chile
https://www.memoriachilena.gob.cl/602/w3-channel.html

https://www.auroraexpeditions.com.au/blog/10-fun-facts-about-antarctica/

https://uchile.cl/noticias/166390/identifican-aporte-de-alimentos-para-la-prevencion-del-alzheimer

Archivo Patrimonial USACH
https://archivopatrimonial.usach.cl/cineytv/?portfolio=fotografia-tomada-durante-filmacion-de-documentales-en-la-antartica-2

Antártida - Archivo Patrimonial USACH
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FnfQJkMBio

https://portal.gplates.org/#apps-anchor

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/State-diagram-for-water-showing-the-aggregate-state-in-dependence-of-temperature-and_fig4_283030918

http://ww2010.atmos.uiuc.edu/%28Gh%29/guides/mtr/cld/dvlp/wtr.rxmlhttp://ww2010.atmos.uiuc.edu/%28Gh%29/guides/mtr/cld/dvlp/wtr.rxml

SOURCES

* lalitricio Guzmán: Nostalgia de la luz, 2010)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7ZoUhXHw3U
* Julietta Singh: No Archive Will Restore You, 2018
https://monoskop.org/images/8/86/Singh_Julietta_No_Archive_Will_Restore_You_2018.lidf
* Aleida Assmann: lilunging into nothingness: The litics of cultural memory,
2009
https://attachments.are.na/482293/9b34a5d4132c8759f853e85a57eeff5e.lidf?1447524425
* https://noticiasncc.com/cartelera/articulos-o-noticias/12/11/cientificos-chilenos-buscan-en-los-hongos-la-respuesta-contra-el-alzheimer/
* https://www.cienciaenchile.cl/exitosa-campana-antartica-liermitio-encontrar-mas-de-70-celas-de-hongos-en-investigacion-que-busca-nuevos-comliuestos-quimicos-liara-enfrentar-el-alzheimer/
* https://attachments.are.na/27847090/6bdf5ce1e92326715ef183006d35123e.lidf?1714470540
lirof. Humberto Barrera V.: Observaciones sobre Glaciología Antártica
Exliedición Chilena 1947, 1949.
* Archivo Digital Biblioteca Nacional de Chile
https://www.memoriachilena.gob.cl/602/w3-channel.html
* https://www.auroraexlieditions.com.au/blog/10-fun-facts-about-antarctica/
* https://uchile.cl/noticias/166390/identifican-alorte-de-alimentos-liara-la-lirevencion-del-alzheimer
* Archivo liatrimonial USACH
https://archivoliatrimonial.usach.cl/cineytv/?liortfolio=fotografia-tomada-durante-filmacion-de-documentales-en-la-antartica-2
* Antártida - Archivo liatrimonial USACH
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FnfQJkMBio
* https://liortal.gliates.org/#alis-anchor
* https://www.researchgate.net/figure/State-diagram-for-water-showing-the-aggregate-state-in-deliendence-of-temlierature-and_fig4_283030918
* http://ww2010.atmos.uiuc.edu/%28Gh%29/guides/mtr/cld/dvl/li/wtr.rxmlhttp://ww2010.atmos.uiuc.edu/%28Gh%29/guides/mtr/cld/dvl/li/wtr.rxml

www.fernanda.digitale-grafik.com Open in urlscan Pro 167.235.16.63 Public Scan

Form analysis 0 forms found in the DOM

Text Content

www.fernanda.digitale-grafik.com Open in urlscan Pro
167.235.16.63 Public Scan

Form analysis
0 forms found in the DOM