Charity Scribner: Requiem for Communism (2003)

“In Requiem for Communism Charity Scribner examines the politics of memory in postindustrial literature and art. Writers and artists from Europe’s second world have responded to the last socialist crisis with works that range from sober description to melancholic fixation. This book is the first survey of this cultural field.

Today, as the cultures of Eastern and Western Europe merge into the Infobahn of late capitalism, the second world is being left behind. The European Union has pronounced obsolete the structures that once defined and linked industrial cities from Manchester to Karl-Marx-Stadt—the decaying factories and working collectives, the wasted ideals of state socialism and the welfare state. Marxist exponents of global empire see this historical turn as an occasion to eulogize “the lightness and joy of being communist.” But for many writers and artists on the left, the fallout of the last century’s socialist crisis calls for an elegy. This regret has prompted a proliferation of literary texts and artworks, as well as a boom in museum exhibitions that race to curate the wreckage of socialism and its industrial remnants. The best of these works do not take us back to the factory. Rather they look for something to take out of it: the intractable moments of solidarity among men and women that did not square with the market or the plan.

Requiem for Communism explores a selection of signal works. They include John Berger’s narrative trilogy Into Their Labors; Documenta, the German platform for contemporary art and ideas; Krzysztof Kieslowski’s cinema of mourning and Andrzej Wajda’s filmed chronicles of the Solidarity movement; the art of Joseph Beuys and Rachel Whiteread; the novels of Christa Wolf; and Leslie Kaplan’s antinostalgic memoir of women’s material labor in France. Sorting among the ruins of the second world, the critical minds of contemporary Europe aim to salvage both the remains of socialist ideals and the latent feminist potential that attended them.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2003
ISBN 0262194880, 9780262194884
245 pages

Review (Mary A. Nicholas, The Slavic and East European Journal, 2004)
Review (ArtMargins, Hans J. Rindisbacher and Larissa Rudova, 2004)

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Bob Snyder: Music and Memory: An Introduction (2001)

This far-ranging book shows how human memory influences the organization of music. The book is divided into two parts. The first part presents basic ideas about memory and perception from cognitive psychology and, to some extent, cognitive linguistics. Topics include auditory processing, perception, and recognition. The second part describes in detail how the concepts from the first part are exemplified in music. The presentation is based on three levels of musical experience: event fusion (the formation of single musical events from acoustical vibrations in the air, on a time scale too small to exhibit rhythm), melody and rhythm, and form. The focus in the latter is on the psychological conditions necessary for making large-scale—that is, formal—boundaries clear in music rather than on traditional musical forms. The book also discusses the idea that much of the language used to describe musical structures and processes is metaphorical. It encourages readers to consider the possibility that the process of musical composition can be “a metaphorical transformation of their own experience into sound.”

The book also touches on unresolved debates about psychological musical universals, information theory, and the operation of neurons. It requires no formal musical training and contains a glossary and an appendix of listening examples.

Publisher MIT Press, 2001
ISBN 0262692376, 9780262692373
313 pages

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André Leroi-Gourhan: Gesture and Speech (1964-65–) [ES, IT, EN]

“André Leroi-Gourhan (1911-1986) was an anthropologist and paleontologist whose theoretical endeavors extended well beyond those realms to encompass the culture of the twentieth century and its most advanced developments. His bold and coherent revision of both analytic and archaeological methods revolutionized the study of prehistoric culture. His adoption of the structuralist method for the analysis of prehistoric art enabled a radical rethinking and clearer understanding of its nature, with resulting implications for the understanding of the art of our own times, and for a broad range of contemporary issues.

Leroi-Gourhan was, for example, concerned with questions of communication, particularly the ways in which new techniques of communication reshape our understanding of language and writing. His work in this field has proved catalytic for the thinking of other major theorists, among them Jacques Derrida. Gesture and Speech combines in one volume Technics and Language and Memory and Rhythms, which are the cornerstones of Leroi-Gourhan’s comprehensive theory of human behavior and cultural development.

In Technics and Language, Leroi-Gourhan looks at prehistoric technology in relation to the development of cognitive and linguistic faculties, expanding on the cultural ramifications of erect posture, a short face, a free hand during locomotion, and possession of movable implements.

Memory and Rhythms approaches its subject from the standpoints of sociology and aesthetics. Here Leroi-Gourhan addresses the problems of instinct and intelligence. He defines the relationship between aesthetic behavior, on the one hand, and species attitudes and the personalization of ethnic groups, on the other, and undertakes a sweeping aesthetic analysis from visceral perception to figurative art, including a discussion of the ‘language of forms’ that makes figurative art an abstract expression of language.”

Originally published in French under the title Le Geste et la parole (t.1: Technique et langage; t.2: La mémoire et les rythmes), Albin Michel, Paris, 1964 and 1965.

Translated by Anna Bostock Berger
Introduction by Randall White
Publisher MIT Press, 1993
October Books series
ISBN 0262121735, 9780262121736
453 pages

Publisher (EN)

El gesto y la palabra (Spanish, trans. Felipe Carrera D., 1971, 20 MB, added on 2015-2-19)
Il gesto e la parola (Italian, trans. Franco Zannino, 1977, 9 MB, added on 2015-2-19)
Gesture and Speech (English, trans. Anna Bostock Berger, 1993, 10 MB)