Abstract
AbstractIn the multidisciplinary field of memory studies, remembering and forgetting have mainly been analyzed following two ideal-typical models: memory-as-containment (exemplified by the notions of framework and site of memory) and memory-as-flow (epitomized by the notions of afterlife and mnemohistory). These two models are often presented as mutually exclusive and counterposed. Yet, in linking past with present, and when connecting different spaces and generations, memory is always the result of circulation (flow) as well as of local semiotic conditions of production and use (containment). By investigating memory-making and oblivion-making in processes of interpretation, the semiotic perspective elaborated by Umberto Eco allows us to envision memory-as-containment and memory-as-flow in a combined analysis, where the twofold conception of memory – either as movement or as form – merges. The aim of this article is, then, to provide an interpretative theory of memory, and to identify and describe the methodological tools capable of implementing such an approach. The memory of the former Italian concentration camp of Fossoli will serve as an exemplary and illustrative case study.
Highlights
Memory lives in its more or less provisional, semiotic materializations: texts, monuments, images, music, performances, rituals and daily interactions and practices
Lotman worked on the relationship between culture and memory, analyzing structures of texts in order to grasp the dynamics of cultures as well as the functional correlations between different semiotic systems; on the other hand, Eco developed a general theory of culture so as to describe the general movement and production of interpretations, drawing on Peirce’s philosophy of semiosis, he looked at how texts, images and, in general, any cultural artefact shape semiosis locally
In order to link the past with the present and connect different spaces and generations, cultural memory installs itself locally yet continuously breaks away from and out of its provisional frameworks in order to emerge somewhere else
Summary
Memory lives in its more or less provisional, semiotic materializations: texts, monuments, images, music, performances, rituals and daily interactions and practices. Contributing to a growing scholarship and discussion in the field of memory studies, this article argues for an integrated approach, capable of describing remembering and forgetting both as movement and form It will do so by drawing on Umberto Eco’s encyclopedic and interpretative model. A semiotic perspective applied to memory does not aim to study the past per se, but the n possible versions and interpretations of the past that we can locally identify, and their mutual relationships These versions can be either consistent or conflicting and contradictory, co-existent or successive, drawing on different semiotic substances (images, verbal and oral, rituals, etc.), media (cinema, TV, newspapers, etc.), and genres (novels, testimonies, historiography, etc.), each with its own formal rules for production and reception of cultural artefacts and of “forming the world.”. By tracing the use of the word “Fossoli” in Italian newspapers over a time period of 40 years, we will see how this polysemic and multilayered space of meaning makes sense over time, in the selection of knowledge that generates remembering and forgetting as effects of interpretation as well as multiple versions of what Fossoli is and means
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