_Everything said here is false...and I refuse to say anything, 2015-2017
In the era of television, world-historical public events penetrate the
private sphere, bringing ordinary people into intimate contact with events outside their lived experience, perhaps even changing what counts as lived experience. When dictators Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu were captured by revolutionaries, brought to emergency trial, and then executed for their crimes, cameramen filmed the proceedings. Those films were broadcast to the Romanian people on national television. Through the mass media, that world-historical event became part of the lives of individual Romanians. Seeing it with their own eyes, at close range, meant that it had visceral
effect. Whether it was shock they felt, or joy, or fear, the event entered their personal archive of experience. Those who saw it remember it,
remember where they were and how they felt when it happened.
I have called these personal, deeply felt public memories of events that one did not experience directly, prosthetic memories. Prosthetic memories are neither purely individual nor entirely collective but emerge at the interface of individual and collective experience. I call these memories prosthetic
because they are not natural, not the product of lived experience, but are derived from engagement with a mediated representation: a photograph, a film, a televisual newscast. These are sensuous memories produced by an experience of mass-mediated representations; like an artificial limb, they are actually worn on the body. Like the memories of actually-lived events, prosthetic memories, too, have the ability to shape a person’s subjectivity, politics and ethics. Because they have a powerful affective dimension, these memories are formative. They shape how we feel and what we think. Even though prosthetic memories do not derive from lived experience in the traditional sense, it is because they touch us deeply and have personal meaning for us, that they become part of our archive of experience and
orient us politically, towards action. They open up trajectories, paths
forward. As Jan Rosseel’s work suggests, these memories have an afterlife, can be reactivated in the present.
Text by Prof. Alison Landsberg
