Dis-remembered and mis-remembered A confrontation with failures of cultural memory

The subject of the chapter is the failures of the policy of cultural memory and an attempt to identify solutions to prevent them. The author understands memory as an individual, social and cultural phenomenon. These three dimensions cannot be separated. Memory connects the three times of human consciousness: past, present and future. The author describes the failures of cultural memory in terms of dis-remembering and mis-remembering. The subject of the analysis is video art that initiates a dialogue between both negative forms of memory. A negative reference is the anthropomorphic interpretation of the world presented in the works of film, which consists in identifying each film hero as an embodiment of a concept, leading to the unification, spiritisation, dematerialisation and disembodiment of the work of art, the creative process, seeing and reading. The author considers the video she discusses as an example of an opposite tendency, in which a form is understood as the construction of a visual memory – invoking memory equivalent. Correct interpretation is understood as an act of memory, “form of becoming”. It is an activity that needs to be distinguished from ordinary memory because it is a narrativisation of memory. In the discussed videos, memory is constructed by embracing images by movement, understood as affect. Video is a form of “theoretical fiction”. The topics covered in each video include “music therapy” and “madness iconography”. The author, using the thought of Descartes, as well as Walter Benjamin, Spinoza and Henri Bergson, dismisses as unfounded the belief that we live in a “post-Cartesian era”. As a consequence, it revises the view that memory belongs to the past, pointing out that it belongs to the present facing the future and is at the same time a political act, which is a form of responsibility for the present.