Ephemeral Textual Collectives
This workshop explores the kinds of ephemeral collectivity that collective memory-work may foster. More specifically, the workshop evolves around two questions: How do written memories, as a liminal technology of text, contribute to this ephemerality? And what emancipatory potentials and pitfalls does such ephemerality harbor? We wish to explore these questions further, as one step towards resituating collective memory-work and its emancipatory aims in relation to contemporary discussions of textual technologies and
collectives of care.
Haug and colleagues’ development of the methodology in the 1970 and 1980s was
characterized by a commitment to long-term research projects with wide and heavy readings, writing and rewriting of memories, and co-authoring impressive texts – all as part of the continuities of feminist and socialist movements (Haug & Blankenburg, 1980; Haug 1999).
Ephemerality does not appear to be a key feature in this context. However, we have ourselves practiced memory-work in relatively brief encounters, such as teaching or counselling sessions, and, rather surprisingly, with what appears to have had some effect in terms of what participants deem to have gained in understanding (e.g., Friis, 2021; Friis & Whiteley, 2023; Khawaja 2022; Nissen & Friis, 2019, 2020; Nissen & Kordovsky, 2021). Our observation of this contrast is the immediate reason for exploring ephemerality – and temporality more widely – as a central feature of how collective memory-work is practiced today. Although this
contrast could appear as simple questions of pragmatics, this temporal dimension entangles with key aspects of textual technology, affect, and collectivity.
Working with memory texts can create a “devised liminality,” pushing memory-workers beyond more familiar forms of recollecting memories and allowing the texts to affectively touch and move each memory-worker (Stenner, 2017). The materiality of memory texts externalizes and exoticizes experience (Verfremdung), allowing memory-workers to grasp the alienation (Entfremdung) of their immediate self-reflection and embodiment. Writing in the past or present tense and from the third or first person perspective are ways to devise this
liminality. We suggest that the emancipatory enlightenment mechanisms of memory-work are constituted with this textual liminality, no matter whether memory-work is practiced as a long-term commitment or not, enabling hauntological moments of reckoning and reflection (Gordon 2008). Textuality is important to consider in relation to ephemerality as it arguably contributes to the appeal of ephemeral memory-work collectives – by enabling engagement with and awareness of our embodied and affective embeddedness in (inter)textual culture while also resituating ephemeral collectives in history.
Another appeal of ephemeral memory-work collectives is that they require less time and are thus easier to form than long-term engagements. They mirror contemporary standardizing and market-based cultures, which provide forms and resources that serve as “meta-stabilities” for the individuation of such collectives (Simondon, 1989). For the same reason, ephemeral collectives are widespread in contemporary capitalism, with disruption and loss of care as a serious consequence. Is the apparent success of ephemeral memory-work collectives a sign of this loss, and ultimately a reproduction of the very mechanisms that counteract more long-term commitments? If so, which implications does this have for the critiques that can be developed in ephemeral memory-work collectives, as well as their emancipatory potentials?
By becoming aware of such reproduction, how can we still create and promote collectives of care by working with the textualities of memory-work? And should collective memory-work engage more explicitly with imagined futures to deal with these questions?
Bibliography
Gordon, A. (2008) Ghostly Matters- Haunting and Sociological Imagination. University of Minnesota Press.
Friis, T. (2021). Recasting ethical dilemmas in participatory research as a collective matter of ‘response-ability’. STS Encounters, 12(1), 89-124.
Friis, T. & Whiteley, L. (2023). Making Voices: Curating Encounters with Personal Experiences in an Exhibition Space. In: Lydahl, D., Mossfeldt Nickelsen, N.C. (eds) Ethical and Methodological Dilemmas in Social Science Interventions. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44119-6_18
Haug, F. (1999). Female Sexualisation. A Collective Work of Memory. London, Verso.
Haug, F. and Blankenburg, U. (1980). Frauenformen. Argument-Verlag.
Khawaja, I. (2022). Memory Work as Engaged Critical Pedagogy: Creating Collaborative Spaces for Reflections on Racialisation, Privilege and Whiteness. Nordic Journal of Social Research, 13(1), 94-107 https://doi.org/10.18261/njsr.13.1.8
Nissen, M. & Kordovsky, J. (2021). Om at lege med tekster i skolen [On playing with texts in school]. Pædagogisk Psykologisk Tidsskrift 58:4, 109-120
Nissen, M., & Friis, T. (2020). Recognizing motives: The dissensual self. Outlines. Critical Practice Studies, 21(02), 89-135.
Nissen, M. & Friis, T. (2019). At Ville Ville. Skitser af et motivlandskab [Wanting to want. Sketches of a landscape of motives]. At: https://wp.me/P84LpE-bv
Simondon, G. (1989). L’individuation psychique et collective à la lumière des notions de forme, information, potentiel et métastabilité. Aubier.
Stenner, P. (2017). Liminality and experience: A transdisciplinary approach to the psychosocial. PalgraveMacmillan.
Contact:
Tine Friis: https://researchprofiles.ku.dk/en/persons/tine-friis
Iram Khawaja: https://pure.au.dk/portal/da/persons/irkh@edu.au.dk
Morten Nissen: https://pure.au.dk/portal/da/persons/mn@edu.au.