Retrotopia: Post-memory and a “Reactionary Choice of the Past”

Abstract

The article considers the relationship between memory and post-memory through the lens of translating the experience of generations. The author takes Z. Baumann’s term “retrotopia” as the basis of the research. As a new mode of referring to the past retrotopia he treats it as the phenomenon of reaction in socio-psychological and political meanings. The escape of the obsessive retrotopic past is visible in the ability to have a dialogue (Z. Baumann), and things that link to the experience of previous generations play here a vital role. The paper analyzes variants of things’ behavior in their inter-generation interaction: the mode of tactility in collecting things serves the setting “total recall” (M. Stepanova “To the memory of memory); interaction with other people’s things (the movie “Khrustalyov, the car”) when a live dialogue of generations is impossible. The refusal of things to converse is a symptom of guilt in losing the past. Retrotopia coordinates with another important concept — post-memory with the cult of accumulating and preserving heritage interpreted as the result of ideology and upbringing. The cult of legacy testifies to real anxiety of survival. Post-memory as a cult of heritage strives to reproduce historical experience in the effects of representation, and discourses of collective memory and traumas effectively suppress and replace real memory of the historical experience. Thus, it substantiates the transition from retrotopia to utopia, from heritage to oblivion. Retrotopia is a form of oblivion that forces one to delve into the past. It is not for the sake of the past, but to forget the impending terrible future. Present-day digital media create a new arrangement of memory based on the value of the concrete and the individual. History starts to converge with memory coinciding in the limit with infinitely changing fragments and connections that memory organizes not by the principle of cause-and-effect but by associations and similarities. This program has features of principally different ways of managing the heritage: retrotopia (the goal is to save and preserve), and utopia (to put the past to rest).