In his concluding chapter of Oblivion( entitled“ A Duty to Forget),” ethnographer and social theorist Marc Augé echoes Nietzsche’ s case against the kinds of fixed memory that disable life. But here he extends this critique by reminding us that because memory and oblivion“ stand together, both [ ] necessary for the full use of time,” only together can they enable life( Augé, 89). Even survivors of the Nazi concentration camps, who do not need to be reminded of their duty to remember, may have the additional duty to survive memory itself. And to do this may mean to begin forgetting, according to Augé,“ in order to find faith in the everyday again and mastery over their time”( 88). In this view, the value of life in its quotidian unfolding and the meaning we find in such life are animated by a constant, fragile calculus of remembering and forgetting, a constant tug and pull between memory and oblivion, each an inverted trace of the other.“ We must forget in order to remain present, forget in order not to die, forget in order to remain faithful,” Augé concludes.“ Faithful to what?” we ask. Faithful to life in its present, quotidian moment, I say.
In my new book, The Stages of Memory( from which this lecture was adapted), I recount a handful of memorials, memory-themed exhibitions, and museum-debates that took place between 1991 and 2014, which when regarded together, might trace what I call“ the arc of memorial vernacular” connecting the dots between Maya Lin’ s design for the Vietnam Veterans’ Monument, Berlin’ s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, and the National 9 / 11 Memorial located on the site of the former Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. The“ stages of memory” here refer both to the public staging of these memorial projects and to the incremental sequence( or stages) of these memorial processes as they unfold. In every case, the emphasis here is on the process and work of memory over what we might call its end result. With this in mind, I would even suggest that as great and brilliant as Michael Arad and Peter Walker’ s realized design for the National 9 / 11 Memorial at Ground Zero may be, its true foundation is the process that brought it into being, which includes the hundreds of thousands of hours spent by the other 5,200 teams in their offices and studios, at their families’ kitchen tables. The“ stages of memory” at Ground Zero necessarily include both the built memorial and the unbuilt proposals, which deserve and will surely have their own public showing one day.
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