Biography of the body

One of the remarkable aspects of the memoirs of prisoners of concentration camps is that their memory as a bodily memory of the victims of violence exists next to their historical consciousness, and not inside it. As an illustration, the words of A. Appelfeld can be given, which was a child in a concentration camp of the so -called transnistria, fled from there and hid for three years in Ukrainian forests: “More than fifty years have passed after the war.

I forgot a lot, even what concerned me directly - especially the place, date and names of people - and yet, every part of the body I feel those days. When it rains, it is cold or a furious wind blows, I return to the ghetto, to the camp or to the forest where I spent many days. It seems that the memory took deep roots in the body. One gets the impression that body cells remember better than the memory intended for this ...

The war penetrated my bones ”[Appelfeld, 50]. Analyzing the books of Varlam Shalamov, V. Prejog notes that for “... Shalamova, the only memory will be bodily memory, only it can objective herself - this is the memory of hands, smells, taste sensations, skin irritations, labor and torture influences, and memory of pain. This kind of memory is called “always with you” and is able to bring to suicide, as happened with the writers-outputs of the Nazi camps Jean America in this regard, Freudian analysis of the phenomenon of “obsessive repetition” is remembered: Freud noted that some patients are inclined to “...

repeat the displaced as the current experience, instead of remembering him, as a part of the doctor, as part past ”[Freud,]. In our work, we will focus on the following issues. How is the interaction between them and what is the space of their interaction? And finally, what are the functions of body memory and biography in historical culture? Body memory, traces of the past and historical experience of the body are a special case of memory, in which a purely biological interweaving is intertwined with the human actually, and unconscious with the conscious.

The time here is grasped through those changes that are rooted in the biological existence of a person, in his movement from infancy to old age. The human body turns out to be a territory where time leaves visible traces - growing up, aging, certain events. This forces us to turn to age as a “special environment” of perception of time within the framework of bodily existence.

At the same time, age is marked not only by milestones of birthdays, anniversaries - it represents the form of the relationship of external, natural and purely human time. This means that growing up and aging is felt by a person through changes in the usual forms of life, where the influence of time on the body and on the past itself manifests itself in the form of “traces”.

Kozeleku [koselleck], the “trace” belongs to both the past and the present. Already with one existence, he specifies the past, distinguishing from the boundless “everything that was” only certain events, images and phenomena. And by this he provokes us to some extent: he erases the border between what was and what is, turns out to be a bridge between the past as something really existing and the past as a constructed object, dependent on our ability to see, perceive and interpret it.

The specificity of the “trace of memory” as a body memory is to combine the ideal trace as a trace of consciousness and material traces - these are tangible objects. And a person is a creature that is able to see in what is, what was, or, in the words of J. Droizen, to see in the present “being such” Das Gewordensein. We are talking about the ability to see more in the “traces of the past” than they directly show, that is, about the ability to “read traces”.

He, of course, can’t take out of this “camera” from this “camera”, but he can describe and reconstruct what she hides or stores in herself. True, the traces are only “reminiscent” - they never “tell” anything. But, recalling, they also destroy the usual ways of a linear description of the past. In this regard, the “past as a trace” in a certain sense confronts the “past as a rut” by R.

That is why, for example, the traumatic experience of the victims of the camps is so difficult to comprehend. The bodily memory does not completely fit into the Autobiographical memory space, the sequence of individual epizodes of which is set by the plot, the semantic line of life, but it is a source of a special kind of continuity of the historical identity of a person: “...

the continuity of bodily existence creates a form of memory that does not allow to recall individual episodes, but in a certain sense it resurrects the whole past personality in its current body ... The fundamental continuity of the subject of the personality does not grow out of the totality of the exact knowledge of his biography or short -term representation in the memory, but rather from the story that accumulates and defends in the memory of the body ”[Fuchs, 61–62].

Thus, in the case of body memory, we are not talking about theoretical, but about the practical, “real” knowledge of the past. Here the concept of “historical experience” comes to the fore. Historical experience is that it is always “with me”, which is not amenable to theoretical explication, but as an everyday background is present when addressing the past and changes in time [1].

The Anchorsmith notes, however, that a person feels the fundamental oddity and even the terribleness of the past, when it is not a construct of reason, but a reality that is found in experience with spontaneity and directness - the past is set in this experience with what we are essentially, and not what knowledge we have [Anchorsmit,]. In this case, it is generally difficult to say where our past ends and where we ourselves begin.

The perception of the past in the context of bodily experience is the genus of experiences [2], in which the subject, merging with the object, creates a “history” - a story where a certain, “its” present is merged with “its” past, forming a certain semantic whole. Such a story is, on the one hand, an emotional rethinking of what was, but, on the other hand, - and in all cases, without exception, the experience of a particular moment of the present.

It is the present moment that is the determining element in which any past is constituted, which is evidenced by an example of personal human memory - “autobiographical memory”, which can not be ephemeral or incorporeal, because personal memories are also the memories of the body that literally retained both joyful and bitter moments of life. Dilthey pointed out that “... human biography consists of individual moments and experiences that are in conjunction with each other.

Each separate experience belongs to a certain self, an integral part of which it is; It is structurally interconnected with other experiences ”[dilthey,]. As for autobiographical memory, it “... is defined as the highest mental function, organized according to the semantic principle, operating with personally assigned experience, which ensures the formation of a subjective history of life and experiencing itself as a unique in time of the life path” [Nurkova, 3].

The category of interconnection is a key category of both human biography and memory: not only the past life was unfolded as the process of complex interactions, but in complex interactions the actual perception of this process is also carried out. Therefore, autobiography is a non -linear, assuming diversity of combinations building a “relationship” of linearly occurring events that turns the biography into a situational product of a particular moment of the present.

Memory and biography sets out his own biography by a person, as a rule, correlates a built story with his current position. For example, having been in a police station, he will serve it as the situation of the police station requires this. For his beloved girl, he will describe his past differently. For children, he will have another version of the biography, which, of course, will differ from the first two.

On the version of history - the basis of which are quite definite and unchanged events - on the accents arranged in it, is also affected by the age and experience of the author of the "narrative". Such a situation is a mirror reflection of a more general: in the same event of the past, for example, the revolution, society can see a “epoch -making event”, which led to a powerful leap in development, or, on the contrary, the “tragedy of the people”.

An autobiographical or historical story is a kind of person’s response to the requirement of “present moment” - nothing more than a situational “picture of the past”. The narrator uses in his history only those elements - the facts and events of the past - which are important for his current situation. For this reason, no autobiography includes all the events stored in the memory of its author: only what is required to be presented now.

But if the biography function is to show who a person would like to be what he wants to appear before others, then the memory function is to prevent a person from forgetting who he really is. Between the narrative of autobiographical memory and memory, thus, there is competition or even a struggle for the past, in which victory does not always get a narrative.

Memory, and first of all, uncontrolled memory of the body, has such a force that, in contrast to any intentions and attitudes of the individual, to dictate their conditions - these are “unbearable memories” causing suffering. What makes autobiographical memory in a certain sense “control” the memory of the body? The answer, in our opinion, lies in the field of social practices of reproduction and development of the past, which in recent years are interpreted in the context of the concept of “historical culture”.

What is historical culture? English historian D.Wulf notes: “... Historical culture generates and nourishes the official historical description of the era and, ultimately, is exposed to its opposite impact ... Historical culture consists of the usual ways of thinking, languages ​​and means of communication, models of social conventions, which include the elite and folk, narrative and non -warning types of discourse.

The characteristic features of historical culture are determined by material and social conditions, as well as random circumstances that, like traditionally studied intellectual influences, determine the manner of thinking, reading and talking about the past ... This process of exchanging elements of historical culture can be called social circulation for convenience ”[Woolf, 9-10]. According to J.

Ryuzen, historical culture is, in fact, a historical consciousness captured in action, which represents all forms and methods of perception of the past in the context of the present and future. It covers all cases of the "presence" of the past in everyday life. Ryusen’s remark that historical culture covers all cases of the “presence” of the past in everyday life is extremely important for us.

After all, the mutual influence of the memory of the body and autobiography is carried out precisely through historical culture. And this applies to both the influence of body memory on the biography, and the reverse influence of the biography on the memory of the body. In this case, the analysis of culture undertaken in the works of representatives of the activity approach is important for us.

A person in this case refers to his own essence, to himself as a tribal creature. And, add, as a historical essence. In this regard, the judgment of V. Davydov is important: “In order for one generation of people to convey to other generations such their really manifesting skills of abilities, it must first create and accordingly arrange their socially significant, universal standards.

There is a need for a special sphere of social life, which creates and forms these standards with a linguistic way - they can be called ideal forms of guns, things, real communication, that is, the forms of things outside of things. This is the sphere of culture ”[Davydov, 37]. M. Cole has practically the same thing, speaking about the culture “... as an intermediary and context, as what surrounds and, at the same time, intertwines” [Cole,].

And here we see that the “traces of the past” are perceived and comprehended precisely as “traces of the past” depending on the development of historical culture, its ability to articulate them as “traces” and consider historical experience precisely as historical. Historical culture enables the subject of historical memory to perceive the “traces of the past” and historical experience as something coherent and that fits into the space of various forms of memorization autobiographical memory, family memory, and cultural memory.

If the culture is unable to provide tools for the appropriate practice of memorization, then such forms of relations with the past as oblivion or conflict enter into their rights. Historical culture is not just an intermediary, but an active environment, which, in particular, interacts between the memory of the body and the autobiographical memory of a person. This means that the memory of the body and the autobiography, which, at first glance, look different sides of the deeply individual historical experience of a person, in fact interact through the mechanisms of historical culture, turn out to be its internal sides.

The body as a memory and biography in historical culture as the majority of works on the philosophy of the body of A. Bergson, Merlo-Ponty, M. Foucault, D. Fuchs, the body must be considered as a sociocultural phenomenon. This means that from the “memory of the body”, in a certain sense, we turn to the “body as memory”, to the body as a space of memory and oblivion in historical culture.

And in this sense, the body's memory is an integral side of historical culture, which through bodily practices reproduces the experience of the past. The relationship between bodily memory and historical culture can be represented in two angles. If you look at the historical culture from the point of view of the memory of the body, then the space of memoirs translated by our gaze unfolds through the body itself as a carrier of traces of the past, the world of things acting in material bearers of memory - for example, the spaces of the house - and, finally, those “places of memory” to which the historical identity of a person is attached.

If you look at the memory of the body from the point of view of historical culture, then we are revealed to those practices that act as ways to interiorization of social historical experience into a person’s personal historical experience. In this case, we indicate the traditions of labor, the life of food, the practice of home life, clothes and leisure decorations of the body, the practice of entertainment, and the traditions of celebrations.In this case, the boundaries of bodily memory go beyond the body itself and are a continuation of historical culture.

The death of a person only changes the nature of the relationship between the body and the historical culture. The memory of the body leaves, and the body and what is connected with it remains as memory, turning into an element of cultural memory and historical culture. Through graves and burial, historical culture also continues to remember.