Access Denied, A Long History of Madness, Reasonable Doubt

Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Where is Where?

Introduction: Meandering Through Memory Thought

At the heart of this book is memory. This is why I refrain from writing a conclusion. In the end, art is a form of remembering. Since I am insatiably curious, over the forty-some years of my career, my work has been one long journey, going from discipline to discipline to establish connections (‘inter-ships’) between them, turning corners without cutting them, and looking for ever-new ways of testing my ideas in ever-new relationships with others: artists, friends, students, colleagues, actors, cinematographers, photographers. As a result, I have encountered and temporarily journeyed with too many companions to count. The relationship between thinking about memory and remembering companions has been particularly intense, manifold and inspirational. When, twenty or so years ago, I first began to work on memory, it was at the request of other people. Although I had written on memorialists such as Proust, memory had not been a concept that preoccupied me particularly. But when two professors at Dartmouth College, Leo Spitzer and Jonathan Crewe, invited me to work with them to conduct a six-week seminar on ‘cultural memory and the present’, their title immediately made me think about each of its terms. These two colleagues, and the other participants – among whom were noted memory scholars such as Marianne Hirsch, Ernst van Alphen, Marita Sturken and Susan Brison, to name but a few whose work has inspired me especially – became, thus, my first companions. The resulting publication, Acts of Memory, appeared in 1999. Another result of this initial and initiating experience was that I proposed the title ‘Cultural Memory in the Present’ (note the change from conjunction to preposition; from juxtaposition to embedding) for a book series I was invited to co-edit with Hent de Vries for Stanford University Press. This was undertaken within the framework of the institute for cultural analysis (ASCA) Hent and I had then-recently co-founded, and of which I was the academic director and Hent the chair.

Along the way, interacting with students whose critical enthusiasm also greatly helped my thinking, I had embarked on the project that resulted in the book Travelling Concepts in the Humanities.