Deja Vu; The feeling that we've all been here before on Deja Vu: aberrations on cultural memory.

DEJA VU 

THE FEELING THAT WE'VE ALL BEEN HERE BEFORE ON DEJA VU: ABERRATIONS ON CULTURAL MEMORY

By Peter Krapp

Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press 

2004

218 pages

$59.95 (hb)

$19.95 (sb)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Day by day we count the dead and dying
Ship the bodies home while we all keep score....
Did that voice inside you say I've heard it all before?
It's like Deja vu all over again

Deja Vu (All Over Again) by John Fogerty, 2004

"The thing about voting for Bush is that you know what
you're getting."

Overheard at a local Sunoco

Asked if they know a song called "Deja Vu," those of us who frequented strip mall hair salons and roller skating rinks in our youth may recall the pseudo-soul inspired hit by Dionne Warwick and its vague refrain, "Could you be the dream that I once knew? /Deja vu." Those from a generation prior may remember the song title from Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's album, in which the song refers to deja vu as a remembrance of a past life and reincarnation: "we have all been here before," it's just "another time around the wheel." Fittingly, given our current political situation, the phrase has been used most recently by another sixties musician, John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival, as the refrain for his new anti-Iraq war song, in which he suggests that this latest governmental folly is another Vietnam. Dying bodies, a fortunate son, a media cleansed of gory images, deja vu. We have all been here before, haven't we?

In his bold and highly provocative new book. Deja Vu: Aberrations of Cultural Memory, Peter Krapp traces the literary and cultural history of deja vu (literally meaning "already seen"), from its origins in French 19th c, psychoanalytical literature to the present. Historicizing and theorizing the peculiar phenomenon best described as an uncanny sensation that one has previously been in this situation or place--even as one knows that this is impossible, Krapp significantly demarcates the moment in western history at which the definition of deja vu changed from the former meaning to the contemporary one, that of "the overly familiar, the tediously repetitive, the already known, the always present," Krapp posits that it's not simply coincidence that this redefinition occurred shortly after the World Wars released (or some might argue, unleashed) new media technologies of mass distraction upon the globe. Early media technologies, such as photography and telegraphy, made possible a modicum of control over repetition and its effects that 19th c, art forms were not privilege to, so that the new seemed familiar, or the inverse: that the old seemed new, but still reassuringly known. Deja vu, after all, is neither forgetting nor remembering. It is some aberration of memory, a distortion of our frame of reference that media, especially newer technologies such as film, television, video, and computers, "harness" to such great effect. By feeding us back song titles, rock stars, familiar surnames of celebrities (just think of all those Simpsons--OJ, Nicole, Bart, Marge, Jessica, Ashlee) or surnames and visages of presidents, for that matter, the great "man behind the curtain" that seems to be the American mass media machine functions in such a way as to distract us from the ever increasing amount of new stimuli it feeds us. The deja vu effect works precisely because it offers us the false belief that we might know how to navigate the unknowable, and for many Americans, seemingly terrifying, future. As Krapp astutely writes, "deja vu is not just an envelope of false recollection, but by logical extension an opening toward the future: if I have been in this situation, I might know what will happen next."

Krapps's chapters explore the deja vu effect in an impressively diverse range of early and mid-twentieth century examples. By commencing with the Freudian theory of "screen memories," he is able to provide a basis for his astute analysis of the phenomenon in film and memorial architecture, both arenas in which the seductive qualities of false recollection serve their media well. And by skillfully meshing Heiner Muller's hydrapoetics with Andy Warhol's wedlockian relationship to sixties' documentary and surveillance technologies, he is then able to resurrect Muller's hydra as a metaphor for hypertext, in which seemingly familiar heads forever arise to reconfigure our narrative battles. But his theses are also increasingly germane to current and future technological debates, and as excellent scholars do, Krapp provides his own counterarguments. As he writes, "The pessimist's (or technophobe's) view that the fleeting media with their imperceptible manipulation of the command and control over all forms of transmission, archival access, and cultural cohesion are producing pure loss," may be countered with Giorgio Agamben's observation that it would be sheer hell if memory (cinematic or otherwise) gave back to us what truly was. Reading this, I was reminded of an essay by the New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane, in which he suggested that perhaps Hollywood would no longer make mega-cinematic vehicles of death and destruction in the wake of 9-11. Lane believed European cinema avoided producing such spectacles because they had too often seen actual decimation and disaster. Wouldn't repetitive media footage of the twin towers falling, as if lower Manhattan were an elaborate and expensive stage set, squelch our sordid desire for screen catastrophes? Perhaps not, for most of us only saw the horror on a screen, and as Krapp persuasively argues, "screen memories" are only a modalization of the real. Here, he quotes Adorno: "Kitsch contains as much hope as is able to turn the clock back," so it should come as no surprise to us when we see snow globes with a plastic scrim of the towers with "Remember 9-11" emblazoned below, or find small-town monuments of firemen raising the flag Iwo Jima style, or to understand why the Republicans chose to hold their convention in Manhattan. Even in voting for the second Bush, Americans proved that the deja vu effect works, and that kitsch, with its cheapened echoes of a secure and idyllic past, sells best. When G.W. pointed to that "grey-haired lady" during the RNC, he wasn't just acknowledging his mother, he was showing us a woman we've all seen many times before, and we are reassured. We feel we know what we're getting.

Krapp's equanimity towards new media and our response to it is compelling, and refreshing. He sides neither with those in cultural studies who urge that we must vigilantly remember (the Holocaust, American slavery. Pearl Harbor, 9-11), nor with those who in media studies who would sooner ignore cultural history. Instead, taking Walter Benjamin's media theory of modernity as his guide, he proposes that we move beyond the simple dialectic of associating memory with culture and forgetting with loss or regression. As Benjamin suggested, "if forgetting and memory, and everything in between, are best presented from the vantage point of a dialectic of attention and distraction, any appeal against forgetting is an attempt to dictate what people should think." Memory, after all, is not universal, but rather institutionalized: As an American, you do remember the Holocaust, you do not remember Rwanda. As a media baby born after the World Wars. Krapp himself is extremely Knowledgeable about how cultural history can be controlled by the memory industry. You remember what your attention has been directed towards, and that is Krapp's most potent point. As he cautions, "it is paramount to protect our freedom of decision on how attention is paid."

Peter Krapp is an Assistant Professor of New Media at the University of California, Irvine, and his enormously relevant study is proof that new media technologies necessitate new theories. Unfortunately, the book must have been going to press when we most needed Krapp's insights about how these deja vu effects are currently being used to distract our attention away from one memory of the past by directing it towards another.

ALISIA G. CHASE is a professor in the Art Department of SUNY Brockport.