Culture is Memory Engaged

Merle Molofsky's Culture is Memory, Memory is Culture begins with emphasizing the interrelated significance of psychoanalytic exploration of the unconscious mind and artistic presentation or representation of unconscious effects in human behavior. When artistic production is literature, there is the primacy of the use of language, words, as conveyors of meaning. Something similar is true of music, in that both are irreducible vectors for the communication of thought and feeling that is humanly shared, whether as a sense of identity, community, or togetherness. Perhaps the primacy of what has been experienced is what implants in memory, in the way that experiences of emotional resonance are internalized. What has been recalled finds voice in the forms of artistry that preserve it, giving it a cultural identity and continuance. Thus, this process gives rise to Molofsky's trope, culture is memory, memory is culture.

The unconscious possession of such cultural memory seems to be the source of its value and performance, a reservoir of all that has been beautiful, ennobling, or meaningful, as well as disturbing and painful, inseparable from the experience of being alive. Perhaps too it is contradictory aspects of conflict-laden feelings imbedded in this process that consign it to the unconscious. What we come to love may be painful to hold, expressing helplessness that we have been forced to confront. We cannot always remember, but we cannot fail to remember either. This is the material held in the unconscious waiting for the time when it can be accessed and brought into memory and consciousness again. It is the unconscious emotional inheritance being referred to when Molofsky cites Freud's statement that “the poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious. What I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.” We appreciate the difference between the artist's presentation of unconscious effects in our behavior, and the scientist