Memory, Encore! Popular Music, Power and Postwar Memory

Abstract

<p>The open circulation of memory has been employed as a valuable tool for cultural engagement with the past. Following the affective turn in cultural and social studies, memory has been reframed as a form of labor that brings recollection into transformative dialogue with the body. Yet memory work, a process that Paul Ricoeur described as serving a duty to the other, must not be forgotten in the renewed focus on the past as affectively lived in the present. Extending this discussion further to consider memory as an Arendtian form of action, this chapter argues that narratives have an important role to play in pursuing judicial, moral and social progress by setting in motion a change to the existing pattern or fabric of understanding. In cultural representations of the Algerian War, memories are often apparent but inactive because they remain outside or beyond the interpretative practices of individual and collective agents. In Didier Daeninckx’s “Corvée de bois,” the futility of recollection is enacted through the entanglement of violent memories and music. Drawing on the theoretical socioeconomic works of Jacques Attali and Theodor W. Adorno, this chapter argues that the explicit and even gratuitous presentation of war atrocities is entangled with background music, or muzak, to silence or censor memories of the past. Although memories of the war return again and again in political and cultural consciousness, this chapter suggests that the laborious standardization of memory ultimately derealizes historic violence as intangible background noise. Memory action, if it is to take place, requires that we embed narratives of violence into our everyday interpretative structures, not only to understand “what” took place then but also to give shape to “who” we are now.<br></p>