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If there are diverse kinds of knowledge and ways of knowing place, then we need to learn to value the different ways each of us sees a single place that is significant, but differently so, for each perspective.
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remembering « Previous | |Next »
June 11, 2007

In this review of Marc Augé 's Oblivion (trans. Marjolijn de Jager, Minneapolis, 2004) in Culture Machine Les Roberts says:

In order to remember it is necessary at the same time to forget. The process of remembrance – the ‘flowering’ of the past in the present – is thus as much a process of negation as it is that of retrieval or selection. What is lost in oblivion is not the past (which is already absent) but the traces of its remembrance (its rendering as present), leaving other traces – other remembrances – to flourish and take root in their wake.

Roberts says that tending time and memory in this way is literally manifested in actual ‘gardens of remembrance’, landscaped monuments to personal and collective memory in which oblivion is ritualised in the symbolic and performative context of everyday practice.

BluffVH.jpg
Gary Sauer-Thompson, Rosetta Head, Victor Harbor, 2007

If oblivion is a loss of remembrance then it needs to be connected to place.

Roberts says that the relationship between life and death, memory and oblivion can to some degree be observed or ‘staged’ in the flat, empty seascapes of coastal resorts frequented by the elderly. The practice of ‘taking in the view’, in effect a gazing at nothingness sprawled out towards the horizon,

Bluff1VH.jpg
Gary Sauer-Thompson, Rosetta Head #1 Victor Harbor, 2007

We don't gaze at nothingness. We are immersed in a natural time that is quite different from the clocktime of industrial and postindustrial capitalism that defines our work life.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 12:49 PM | | Comments (2)
Comments

Comments

oh, how amazing, I am going to look at this review.
I am currently trying to put together something about this very topic, and have been struggling to relate my constant reference to horizons and seascapes (in my paintings and drawings)
to the process of remembering, and trying to write about this.

"We don't gaze at nothingness. We are immersed in a natural time that is quite different from the clocktime of industrial and postindustrial capitalism that defines our work life."

and also a kind of multiple temporality, of all time, of the past within the present, of times when this horizon may be crossed, the horizon a liminal place, where one thing becomes another. A metaphor for the possiblity of edging beyond "industrial " time.

Love the photos, love the writing.

Fiona
In the review Roberts mentions Gaston Bachelard's challenge to the Bergsonian notion of time as duration (durée) in 'Duration and Simultaneity' and 'Matter and Memory.'

Bachelard is interesting. He critiqued our old idea of space as a neutral dimension in which matter moves about was hopelessly mistaken. Similarly, with time--it could not be seen as a kind of 'line' stretching from the future to the past along which events occur. His argument is that lived time is essentially fractured, interrupted and ‘teemed with lacunae’. He posits a dialectical temporality made up of rhythms and discontinuities. Lived time is fractured, interrupted and not 'single' and continuous. Bachelard argues that there is no one underlying thread - that time is multiple and discrete.

I don't know Bachelard's The Dialectic of Duration (Manchester, Clinamen Press, (2000) Do you?