Rethinking History

Vol. 11, No. 4, December 2007, pp. 597 612

FORUM

Which Prosthetic? Mass Media,

Narrative, Empathy, and
Progressive Politics
James Berger

While Alison Landsbergs argument for a politically progressive prosthetic

memory made possible by modern media and global capital is theoretically
provocative and politically appealing, it is ultimately unsustainable. What she
describes as memory might better be called a combination of knowledge and
empathy. And her account of the prosthetic quality of movies and experiential
museums is equally applicable to more traditional verbal texts and, indeed, to
symbol use per se. Nevertheless, Landsbergs book (Prosthetic Memory: The
Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture,
Columbia University Press, 2004) presents a valuable new way of thinking
about the problem of representing and responding to events one did not
experience.

Keywords: Empathy; History; Media; Memory; Narrative; Politics

Let me first thank David Harlan and Rethinking History for the invitation
to contribute to this special issue, and for giving me the occasion to read
and enjoy Alison Landsbergs fascinating and genuinely provocative book.
To take seriously the idea of prosthetic memory requires that we revise
how we regard much contemporary culture. Even if one ultimately does
not accept her argument, the act of entertaining it, of tentatively employing
it, changes ones perspective. I am greatly in sympathy with the books
politics, though, as I will explain, I find its attitude toward consumerism
overly optimistic. Ultimately, however, I do not find the books argument
ISSN 1364-2529 (print)/ISSN 1470-1154 (online) 2007 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13642520701652152
598 J. Berger
sustainable. The phenomenon Landsberg describes as prosthetic memory is
not a form of prosthesis (or is not a unique and literal form of prosthesis in
the way that Landsberg argues); nor is it truly a form of memory. It is,
however, something real and important, and I will try to make clear what I
take it to be.

In Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the

Age of Mass Culture, Alison Landsberg (2004) describes how, in an age of
mass communication and global capital, historical understanding can more
effectively be transmitted across boundaries of time, space, and culture. In a
surprising and refreshing way, Landsberg discards the elegiac tone
whether celebratory or criticalin which historians have often written
about memory. Memory, as she redescribes it, is not an archaic mode of
consciousness that has either vanished completely or been revived in
politically problematic forms. It is, rather, a product of modern mass media
and can help construct progressive public spheres wherever global capital
extends. A quick comparison with the thinking of Pierre Nora can
provide a useful point of departure in considering Landsbergs innovations.
Like Nora, Landsberg takes as her starting point the rapid social and
technological changes that characterize modernity. And like Nora,
Landsberg regards social memory as a form of consciousness that informs
and is informed by lived experience. Affective and immediate, memory is
thus distinct from history, which both she and Nora describe as detached
from life, mediated, and critical. For Nora, this shift from memory to
history produced by the forces of modernity is an epochal rupture, an
irrevocable break (Nora 1989, p. 7), after which memory survives only as
material trace, archive, and text. Noras tone is ambivalent. He is a
historian, committed to historys intellectual and secular production, its
analysis and criticism (Nora 1989, p. 9). Yet his writing seems tinged with
a post-apocalyptic nostalgia for that vanished form of relation to the past
which, he writes, is life . . . in permanent evolution . . . unconscious of its
successive deformations (Nora 1989, p. 8).
Landsbergs argument at this point decisively diverges from Noras. She
agrees that modernity has produced the disruption of family, kinship, and
community ties (Landsberg 2004, p. 19) that were the foundation of social
memory, but does not see this in apocalyptic or nostalgic terms. Indeed, the
same social and technological changes that made traditional social memory
untenable, now, Landsberg argues, create the possibility for a new form of
social memory that combines the immediate, lived qualities of memory
with a democratic pluralism and openness to others memories that
traditional social memory lacked. Traditional social memory, as first
 Rethinking History 599
theorized by the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1992), existed as distinct
and separate for each national, ethnic, or religious group. Thus, it
was insular and inherently conservativea mode of consciousness
characteristic of premodern, agrarian, traditionally hierarchical societies.
Prosthetic Memory, on the contrary, proposes a new option altogether: a
relation to the past that is (like traditional social memory) lived, affective,
and physical; and yet available across cultures. The conditions of possibility
for this new form of social memory are mass media, global capitalism, and
an ideology like the one described by Nora that regrets the loss of
traditional social memory and desires a more immediate relation to the
past than that provided by written history. While the lieux de memoire
described by Nora are physical traces of the past reconstituted and given
meaning through the discursive and institutional mediations of historical
consciousness, Landsbergs prosthetic memories are the real thing, only
better. They are genuine social memories, and yet, because mass mediated
memories are not premised on any claim of authenticity or natural
ownership (Landsberg 2004, p. 9), Landsberg writes, they make possible
greater empathy between different groups and so increase the possibilities
for progressive political alignments (Landsberg 2004, p. 21). Furthermore,
and corollary to this argument, Landsberg urges progressive intellectuals to
embrace mass media and global capitalism in new ways, and in particular to
abandon residual feelings of puritanical Frankfurt School distaste for mass
culture. Commodification, she argues, is what makes possible the
production, distribution, and consumption of prosthetic memories and
thus the potentially counterhegemonic public spheres she believes these
memories can construct (Landsberg 2004, p. 21).
Landsbergs provocation, then, is three-fold. First, she has shifted the
tone of discussion away from the elegaic or post-apocalyptic and begun a
serious consideration of historical memory in the present. She takes
seriously the possibility of a technologically mediated contemporary social
memory. Second, she argues that mass media, popular culture, and the
system of global capital that underlies them not only can produce a new
form of social memory but that this form of memory will have progressive
(i.e. democratic, egalitarian) political consequences. I should note that
these first two provocations are not so new. In making them, Landsberg is
building on a now longstanding scholarly literature that finds subversive,
counter-hegemonic, liberatory potentials in popular and mass culture.1 It is
Landsbergs third provocation that is most original, and most problematic;
and that is her central idea of prosthetic memory itself. Landsberg proposes
that new, more physically and emotionally engaging, forms of media
cinema and experiential museumscan enable people to take on or
600 J. Berger
inhabit (Landsberg 2004, p. 48) or be sutured (Landsberg 2004, p. 14)
into other peoples memories. In this way, she argues, people now possess
an unprecedented ability to experience an event or a past without having
actually lived through it (Landsberg 2004, p. 48, emphasis in original). This
is a remarkable claim, that Landsberg makes with differing degrees of force,
and while we may consider her arguments on the political value of mass
cultural products without reference to the theory of prosthetic memory,
that theory is the books most important invitation to further thinking.
Landsberg presents prosthetic memory through three distinct types of
example. First, she uses the science fiction films Blade Runner and Total
Recall to serve as models illustrating prosthetic memory in the most literal,
schematic form. In these films, memories (sometimes of real people,
sometimes invented) are somehow inserted into a human or artificial
consciousness and then lived as the actual memories of that individual.
Second, Landsberg discusses novelistic and film narratives (e.g. Mary
Antins The Promised Land, Henry Roths Call it Sleep, Toni Morrisons
Song of Solomon, Julie Dashs Daughters in the Dust, and John Singletons
Rosewood) as demonstrations of how prosthetic memory works in social
settings more realistic than those of the science fiction texts. Landsbergs
goal in presenting these models and demonstrations is to establish that
prosthetic memory exists as a plausible concept and to show how it works
inside these selected fictional frames. Finally, Landsberg introduces actual
instances of prosthetic memory texts in contemporary culture: the TV
miniseries Roots, the film Schindlers List, and the National Memorial
Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. These three modes of explanation
are not entirely compatible. Clearly, a visitor to the Holocaust Museum
does not acquire memories of the Nazi genocide in the same way that
Arnold Schwarzeneggers character is given memories of a fictional life in
Total Recall. Landsberg acknowledges that the processes depicted in the
science fiction films are, of course, not possible (Landsberg 2004, p. 48).
Thus, the model illustrated through the science fiction examples is a
schematic, literalized metaphor for a much weaker process. Likewise, the
fictional narratives that serve as demonstrations, that show how fictional
characters encounter and incorporate others memories, do not actually
depict the processes at work in viewers experiences of museums and
popular film. A key difference is that the encounters with alien memories
depicted in the fictional texts are central to the characters lives, as opposed
to being encounters with a cultural commodity. Prosthetic memory in the
fictional demonstrations is the result of years of struggle with memory and
history. It is lived experience. This is certainly the case in Song of Solomon.
Milkman Dead does, in some very strong sense, encounter and incorporate
 Rethinking History 601
memories of his ancestors, but he can only do so through an extended
journey which is his life. Morrison (1987) does not indicate that such a
process is possible through watching a television miniseries, though we
might infer that Morrisons novel itself provides a path for gaining
knowledge of forgotten histories and engaging in an empathetic response to
them. Interestingly, Landsberg does not discuss Morrisons novel as a
possible purveyor of prosthetic memorythe written text, in Landsbergs
argument, is not sufficiently experiential to serve this purpose. These
fictional demonstrations, like the science fiction models, do not actually
represent prosthetic memory in the sense that Landsberg finally intends.
They are, rather, metaphors for prosthetic memory as it actually occurs,
and they present it in a stronger, more literal sense.
But if Landsbergs argument for prosthetic memory is to succeed, it must
hold out for prosthetic memory in that strong sense. The logic and language
of her argument demand that people, in fact, take on and experience the
memories and experiences of others by means of mass cultural products.
Otherwise, the resulting memories will not be prosthetic in the way
Landsberg intends. They will be something else; certainly, something is
experienced in the encounter with or consumption of such products. But is
it memory exactly? Is it prosthetic? If, in fact, prosthetic memory is a
metaphor for more conventional processes of cultural transmission
acquiring knowledge, for instance, or responding with empathy to a
narrativethen Landsbergs argument loses much of its provocative power.
Landsberg is not the first to use the term prosthesis with reference to
cultural products. Pierre Nora used the term when referring to historical
archives. No longer living memorys more or less intended remainder, he
writes,

the archive has become the deliberate and calculated secretion of lost
memory. It adds to lifeitself often a function of its own recording
a secondary memory, a prosthesis-memory. The indiscriminate
production of archives is the acute effect of a new consciousness,
the clearest expression of the terrorism of historicized memory.
(Landsberg 2004, p. 14)

Nora expresses here again his nostalgia for archaic, living memory and
his acknowledgment of the irrevocability of its passing. For Nora, though,
the prosthetic quality of the archive is always a secondary effect. It aids in a
historical reconstruction of the past, but does so as part of the process of
historicization; it can never become living memory. Not implanted or
experienced, it is an addition to, not a part of, life. Nora insists on the
artificiality of the prosthesis rather than its integration with the organic body.
602 J. Berger
Another notable recent usage of prosthesis as a theoretical term occurs
in the work of disability studies scholars Stephen Mitchell and Sharon
Snyder. Mitchell and Snyder coin the term narrative prosthesis to describe
how canonical works of western literature have consistently relied on
figures with disabilities to make clear their ethical, philosophical, and
theological points. The representation of disability, they write, has been
used throughout history as a crutch upon which literary narratives lean for
their representational power, disruptive potentiality, and analytical insight
(Mitchell & Snyder 2000, p. 49). Disability, they continue, is a narrative
devicean artistic prosthesisthat reveals the pervasive dependency of
artistic, cultural, and philosophical discourses upon the powerful alterity
assigned to people with disabilities (Mitchell & Snyder 2000, p. 51).
Mitchell and Snyder are explicit about their metaphorical intention. They
use the metaphor of prosthesis (a crutch upon which literary narratives
lean) in order to critique the uses of human disability as metaphor for
other qualities. While the prosthesis metaphor serves to delineate an
ideology of ableism that is widely internalized, then expressed and further
disseminated through literature, Mitchell and Snyder maintain a distinction
between the metaphor of prosthesis and the intricate and extensive
processes by which ideology or any cultural construct becomes part of
individual or social consciousness. Prosthesis is a heuristic, an idea that
helps us understand how ableism is disseminated through literary texts.
Landsberg, I believe, intends prosthesis in a sense more literal than that
intended by either Nora or Mitchell and Snyder. Her prosthetic memory is
not external or secondary; it is incorporated and lived. And it is not a
metaphor for some other process; it is the thing itself.
Landsbergs notion of prosthesis relies in part on an argument regarding
memory as affective and sensory, rather than merely cognitive. Memory, in
this view, is an experience in a way that just thinking about a past event is
not. Because memory works in this way, if one can internalize anothers
memory, one will truly experience that others experience. And because
media like cinema and experiential museumsin contrast to written
textsreach audiences through physical sensation and emotional identi-
fication, the experience of these media is truly the experience of anothers
memory, and so these memories are, in a literal not merely a metaphorical
sense, prosthetic. While I agree with Landsbergs depiction of memory as
sensory and affective, I disagree with her strict division between feeling and
cognition. Evolutionary neurologists Antonio Damasio (1999) and Gerald
Edelman (1989), for instance, reject a strict separation of cognitive from
sensory-affective faculties, and both place memory in a pivotal position in
the development of human consciousness that draws on both sensation and
 Rethinking History 603
cognition. Damasio and Edelman, using slightly different terminologies,
each delineate a core (or primary) consciousness that evolved earlier than
did symbolic functions; core consciousness processes impressions and
emotions with respect to an immediate and remembered present, but is not
capable of long-term memory. Subsequent extended (or higher-order)
consciousness, which relies onand was in part created bysymbol use, is
built on top of the earlier version of consciousness and is never severed
from it. But long-term memory in humans is a function of extended,
symbol-using consciousness.2
I would also point to recent research using sophisticated brain scanning
technology that has identified what neurologists call mirror neurons.
According to this research, the synapses in the brain that are activated when
a person performs certain actions are also activated when the person sees
those actions performed by someone else, or even when he reads a
description of them being performed. Thus, for contemporary neu-
roscience, thought and feeling cannot be detached from each other.
Thought is physical; sensation is mental. Therefore, if cinema or the
experience of visiting a museum like the Holocaust Museum is more
conducive to emotion or physical sensation than is, for instance, reading,
this difference is one of degree not of kind, and these media do not possess
some special, unique prosthetic quality.3
And yet, as Landsberg asserts, it is true that somehow people are able to
know and, to some degree, experience other peoples feelings and
experiences. We are able, in some sense, to incorporate other peoples
memories. Empathy is a fact; knowledge of others minds is a central reality
of human life. How is this possible? How do we know and feel these things?
It would seem that some sort of mental prosthesis does existand I believe
it does. But I would argue that this actually occurring emotional and
narrative prosthesis is nothing other than ordinary human symbol use per
se, combined with the more visceral, sensory abilities included in the core
consciousness provided by our mammalian inheritance. On the whole,
today, and for the past half million years or so, we know what other people
are thinking and feeling because they tell us, and because something in their
tone, manner, or peculiar choice of words and gestures provides
connotations beyond the messages informational component. Our brains
are equipped to encode our thoughts, feelings, memories, and experiences,
to transmit the encodings in tangible forms, to receive into our bodies the
transmissions of others, to decode them, and to be physically and
emotionally changed by them. This extraordinary process constitutes the
original prosthesis. All subsequent technologies of the symbolwriting,
print publication, cinema, television, museums, the Internetare elabora-
604 J. Berger
tions, not fundamental changes in how we conceive, transmit, and receive
others mental products. A fundamental change in this process, a genuinely
novel form of prosthesis, would require a fundamental change in human
neurology.4
I would conclude, then, that we can regard Landsbergs notion of
prosthetic memory as prosthetic if we regard it either as metaphor or as
prosthetic in the broad sense that all symbol use is prosthetic. The
argument she makes for a literal and unique sense of prosthesis with regard
to cinema and museums, however, seems to me untenable.

What, then, of memory? When people watch Roots or Schindlers List or visit
the Holocaust Museum, is it memory that they encounter or experience? I
have tried to demonstrate that an understanding of prosthesis as a sensory,
affective, unmediated process of implanting is misplaced. People do have the
capacity to access the mental products of others, but this capacity is largely a
function of human symbolic capacities (which, at the same time, are closely
connected to affective, sensory processes). Whatever it is we are experiencing
or encountering in the events Landsberg describes, it is highly mediated. We
encounter images, descriptive and narrative language, objects in symbolic
contexts. In a word, we encounter representations. And, as I have argued,
there is nothing deficient in this; to experience the world through
representations is precisely what our prosthesis of symbol use has evolved
to let us do. Nor is there anything strange, or requiring a further theory of
immediate access via new technologies, in the fact that we can identify with
or feel empathy for figures encountered in these representations. Of course, it
is strange, astonishing, and, even with the insights of neuroscience,
fundamentally unaccountable that symbolic products should affect us the
way they donot just cognitively, or by way of information, but
emotionally, physically, and ethically. But this is an old story: Whats
Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba?
Landsberg herself at certain points approaches similar conclusions, and
so, I think, draws back somewhat from the stronger version of her thesis.
Describing the site of prosthetic memory as a transferential space,
Landsberg writes, while the parameters in which the experience takes place
are artificial, the experience itself is quite real (Landsberg 2004, p. 120).
This seems to me exactly right, and it sounds like the description of a work
of art, akin to Marianne Moores imaginary gardens with real toads. What
could the parameters Landsberg refers to be but the symbolic construc-
tionwhich would include social and historical contextsof a past event?
If this is the extent of Landsbergs claim, it seems to me far more
sustainable, but less novel or provocative. In its less provocative form,
 Rethinking History 605
Landsbergs argument asserts that certain recent mass media products have
been particularly successful providing information about and, more
importantly, creating empathy for the historical narratives of people
different from the viewers. This empathy is not different in kind than that
produced by written texts. Nor is it even necessarily more powerful. The
main difference between the literary and the mass cultural product is
simply that the latter reaches more people.
This difference, however, is important, and is crucial to Landsbergs
political argument. If new forms of mass media might create bonds of
empathy and solidarity across boundaries of race, class, gender, and nation,
this would be a development of enormous significance no matter how it is
described theoretically. Given the global reach of electronic media, its
pervasiveness, particularly in the developed world, and the genuine affective
power of many of its products, it is not so implausible to share at least some
of Landsbergs optimism. But I do have reservations. Products of mass
media about the past are not, I have argued, prosthetic and are not exactly
memories. Whether they originate with the testimonies of witnesses or
retrieval of other documents or presentation of artifacts or fictional
reconstructions, these products are representations. To label them
memory, I would argue, is simply to place them in a particular genre of
representations of the past. If this is the case, memory as representation or
genreand, in particular, memory as Landsberg describes it, as product of
corporate capitalist mass mediamust be subject to processes of ideology
just as are other mass media products. The power and motive of the
producer of the cultural product must be taken into account, and so must
the collective states of mind of the audiencethe ideological conditions for
reception. The historian Alon Confino asks the very relevant questions,
Why is it that some pasts triumph while others fail? Why do people prefer
one image of the past over another? (Confino 1997, p. 1390). And, Who
wants whom to remember what, and why? (Confino 1997, p. 1393).
In calling attention to questions of power and ideology, I am not
contesting the power and value of the cultural products Landsberg
discusses. The Holocaust Museum is wonderful as a memorial and as an
educational facility, and it seems free of gross ideological manipulation.5 I
think, however, that much of its value lies in an area that Landsberg
minimizes: the transmission of knowledge. While this museum and other
instances of what Landsberg calls prosthetic memory encourage the
empathetic identification that is at the center of Landsbergs argument,
much of what she calls memory would better be called knowledge.
Indeed, the merely affective aspect of this phenomenon would be empty
in fact, would be dangerousif it did not also convey accurate
606 J. Berger
information. Behind the participatory, experiential part of the Holocaust
Museum lies a scholarly apparatus based on archival research and peer
review that is absolutely essential to the museums authority. A memory
production industry that relies only on the mechanisms of consumer
capitalism, as Landsberg seems to suggest is possible and desirable, would
not have the motivation to be so scrupulous with regard to its content.
Such lack of scruple about historical truth, the linking of historical
reconstruction to ideological fantasy, is widespread in contemporary
culture. What, for example, is the social memory of Richard Nixon as
transmitted by the American media? He was a great man, a wise and
prescient leadera man with flaws, a complex man, a man who suffered; a
man, perhaps, more sinned against than sinning; is there any doubt,
according to American mass media in the years following Nixons death,
that Richard Nixon was a Great American? We might note also that Ken
Burns (1990) documentary The Civil War, while in many ways admirable
and informative, almost completely ignored Reconstruction and the
consequences of its failurethus presenting a view of the conflict as a
grand saga of tragic division followed by reconciliation. As historian David
Blight writes of historical memory, its lifeblood is mythos (2002, p. 4).
Indeed, Burns has referred to himself as Americas Homer, singing the epic
verses of his people (in Blight 2002, p. 213).
Landsberg recognizes these problems, acknowledging, for instance, in her
chapter on immigrant narratives that a reactionary, mythologizing amnesia
can be a key component of historical memory. And she emphasizes several
times that her theory is not meant as a justification of capitalism. Her
argument seems rather to be that global capitalism is the mode of
production and dissemination that we have, that it is firmly in place, and
that we must make the best use of it that we can. Just because these
memories are themselves products of capitalism, she points out, does not
mean that they will be used to further capitalist logic (Landsberg 2004, p.
152). These points, I think, are at least partly valid. Contemporary global
capitalism is not (certainly not yet) a totalized system whose every gesture
and product serve a single ideological purpose. There still exist, in various
forms, public discursive spaces and countervailing forces and voices.
Nevertheless, Landsberg seems to me overly optimistic about the future
progressive uses of capitalist mass media. It would be helpful if she would
take into account in her discussion the fact and implications of the growing
consolidation of media by a small number of large corporations. As this
corporate control over media increases, the possibilities for truthful, anti-
mythological portrayals of history will diminish. This diminution is already
apparent when we consider the sorts of documentaries aired on public
 Rethinking History 607
television. While there has been in recent years a small boom in
commercially released, politically motivated documentaries with varying
degrees of historical content (Michael Moores Fahrenheit 911, Alex
Gibneys Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Errol Morriss The Fog of
War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara), it is today
almost impossible to imagine public television events like Eyes on the Prize
(Hampton 1987) or Vietnam: A Television History (Vecchione 1983). A
telling factor in the vastly increased timidity of the Public Broadcasting
Service surely is its growing dependence on corporate underwritingthat
is to say, its increased commodification.6
Finally, I would like to see in Landsbergs account a more extended
discussion of the roles of trauma and symptom in historical transmission.
The events whose narratives are being transmitted through the representa-
tions under discussion are, in large part, traumatic: migration and the loss
of cultural heritage, slavery, genocide. With reference to the Holocaust
Museum, Landsberg writes of how the experience of the museum instills
symptoms in the visitor, and at one point equates the symptom and the
prosthetic memory (Landsberg 2004, pp. 135 136). I found this equation
mystifying but, on reflection, it seems apt. The problem regarding the
cultural transmission of trauma is the same as that of the cultural
transmission of memory. That is, how can traumaor, more properly, a
symptom of traumabe transmitted to someone who did not actually
experience it? And, as with memory, the discussion of traumatic
transmission necessarily moves into a discussion of representation.
Perhaps, ultimately, the central question posed by Prosthetic Memory is,
can a representation be charged with traumatic/symptomatic force? Or
rather, how is it done? How does it work? For it seems clear that
representations do transmit traumatic effects; they can produce in readers
or viewers effects that resemble traumatic symptoms. And, as responses to
traumatic events, representations can themselves be symptomatic. Repre-
sentations of traumatic events can be traumatized and traumatizing. They
also, as parts of the broader social-symbolic environment, will be
ideological. The traumatic symptom in symbolic form cannot simply cut
through its social-symbolic environment and imprint itself directly into the
body or the psyche. The transmitted symptom is impure; it is a thorough
mixture of traumatic effects and other features bearing on contemporary
social concerns, generic histories, economic motives, fantasies of healing,
terrors of disintegration. Indeed, the traumatic effect itself is not palpable
except through these other features. And yet it is feltas the cumulative
force, and also in excess, of these features. It is difficult to avoid mystifying
languageof the sublime, the sacred, jouissance, transcendence, the abject,
608 J. Berger
the Lacanian realwhen speaking of representations of trauma. It may be
that Landsbergs prosthesis is another term to add to this list of attempts
to put into language that part of a representation that seems so
unmistakably to evade or surpass its symbolic, mediating component.7
Alison Landsberg concludes her book with a statement that her project
describes a utopian dream in which politics and ethics converge, and she
urges us to take seriously the mass cultural technologies that foster the
acquisition of prosthetic memories, as they might well serve as the ground
on which to construct new political alliances (Landsberg 2004, p. 155).
While I have tried to argue that a theory of prosthetic memory is not
necessary in order to imagine new extensions of social empathy, I very much
share Landsbergs vision of new political alliances and her hope that mass
media might participate more actively and creatively in the formation of a
genuine public sphere. Given the current trends toward corporate media
consolidation, I cannot say I am optimistic that the mass media will act in
this role. But hope, as Cornell West has often reminded us, is not the same as
optimism, for it involves the determination to work toward a goal that
appears impossible or utopian (West 2004, pp. 16ff.). Landsberg reminds us
in a new way, using a new terminology that possesses a vivid metaphorical
force, that narrativein all its wide variety of modes and genrescan foster,
among groups with different histories, forms of empathy that I hope will
contribute to new political understandings, policies, and institutions.

Notes
[1] Theories of postmodernism in the 1980s coming from literary and philosophical
traditions (and in the 1960s and 70s from critics of art and architecture) defended
the products and ethos of popular culture. (See, for instance, Foster 1983; Ross
1988; McRobbie 1989 and Modleski 1986this last containing the exemplarily
titled essay Theodor Adorno Meets the Cadillacs (Gendron 1986)). Regarding
visual art and architecture, see Venturi et al. (1977) and Wallis (1994). This
direction of thought, which seeks also to blur the boundary between popular (or
mass) culture and the culture of high art and theory, is now an important part of
scholarship on modernism. (Cf. North 1994, 1999; Weiss 1994; Armstrong 2005;
Mao & Walkowitz 2006.)
[2] Summarizing his view of the relation between consciousness, symbolization, and
memory, Edelman writes, primary consciousness is limited to the remembered
present. It is necessary for the emergence of higher-order consciousness, and it
continues to operate in animals capable of higher-order consciousness. Higher-
order consciousness arises with the evolutionary onset of semantic capabilities,
and it flowers with the accession of language and symbolic reference. Linguistic
capabilities require a new kind of memory . . . . The speech areas mediating
categorization and memory for language interact with already evolved conceptual
areas of the brain (pp. 149 50).
 Rethinking History 609
[3] Mirror neurons, write Giocomo Rizzolatti and Michael Arbib, represent a system
that matches observed events to similar, internally generated actions, and in this
way forms a link between the observer and the actor. They thus provide a
necessary bridge from doing to communicating, as the link between actor and
observer becomes a link between the sender and the receiver of each message
(1998, p. 188). See also Iacoboni et al. (2005).
[4] See also recent clinical, philosophical, and literary research on theory of mind, a
term denoting the nearly universal human ability to recognize that others possess
minds like ones own and therefore will be likely to respond to similar events or
circumstances in roughly similar ways. (Cf. Baron-Cohen 1995; Baron-Cohen
et al. 2000; Zunshine 2006).
[5] The principal objection that can be raised against the Holocaust Museum, I think,
is its presence in the nations capital juxtaposed with the absence there of a
museum dedicated to the history of American race relations and the crime and
catastrophe of slavery. Landsberg addresses this issue by referring to African
American students visits to the museum and to the museums power to teach
ethical thinking, generate empathy, and thereby reconfigure a persons worldview
(2004, p. 138). These are important points, yet the fact remains that Washington,
DC contains a major museum dedicated to what is a Jewish and European event
and does not have a museum reminding and educating visitors and residents
about slavery. Slavery is a central event in American history; the Holocaust is not.
It is therefore odd that the nations capital has a museum for the latter and not the
former. This seems to me a significant instance of ideological evasion, amnesia, or
denial.
[6] See the work of Robert McChesney (2000, 2004) for a thorough account of the
history and consequences of corporate media consolidation in the USA. The
existence and dominance of a corporate media governed by market imperatives
and the accompanying commodification of informationMcChesney argues, has
severely damaged American public discourse and democratic processes. Robert
Kuttner (1997) likewise argues that if Americans are to reconstruct a democratic
polity, this task must be accomplished in a realm other than that of consumption.
It is true that McChesney and Kuttner, whose broader arguments are historical
and structural, do not acknowledge the sorts of cultural products at the center of
Landsbergs discussion. They would, I think, have to acknowledge the value of
particular media products, but would still maintain that the trajectory of corporate
domination of media has resulted in a narrowing of opportunities for democratic
expression. For a more technical critique of the neoliberal ideology in which
market freedoms supplant political ones, see David Harvey (2005). McChesney,
Kuttner, and Harvey all, I think, would argue that Landsberg ignores the systemic
bases and consequences of the commodifications of history and memory she
discusses.
[7] Kerwin Lee Klein (2000) describes how contemporary discourses of historical
memory tend to invoke theological categories. Memory, he writes, projects an
immediacy that we feel has been lost from history (p. 129) and that fairly vibrates
with the fullness of Being (p. 130). Klein also points out ways in which these
archaic forms (p. 132) have been taken up by directions of postmodern theory
an observation that would seem to apply to some degree to Landsbergs argument.
Dominick LaCapra (2004) unpacks the notion of experience, of which memory
610 J. Berger
is a prominent part (indeed at times a metonym) (p. 67), as counter-symbolic
placeholder: a kind of residual conceptwhat remains . . . when meaning and
language do not exhaust their objects. The notion of experience as undefined
residue might be argued to hold a position analogous to that of divinity or the
sacred in negative theology (p. 39). With regard to the textual transmission of
trauma, see my After the End (Berger 1999), as well as work by LaCapra (1994,
2001), Caruth (1996), Hirsch (1997), Rothberg (2000), and Mandel (2006). For an
insightful critique of much of the scholarship on text and trauma, see Amy
Hungerford (2003).

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