In the late history of modernity, there have been at least two major events that have (un)expectedly converged, interrupting the triumphant march of modernist progress and development. The first event revolved around the socialist modernity project and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, embodying, at least momentarily, "modenity's final bankruptcy as an intellectual and political project" (Outhwaite & Ray, 2005, p. 99). Reflecting on the daily lives of the last Soviet generation, Yurchak (1995) points to the paradox of late socialist societies: "everything was for forever, until it was no more", a belief in an infinite future with a tacit knowledge of arriving change. The ambivalence of this late socialist paradox strikes a chord with another major event today - the climate crisis. While there is a general understanding of the looming climate catastrophe among the public, we still believe that our lives will just go on forever. Both of these events converge in (un)expected ways, forcing us to pause and witness - as if in slow motion - the crumbling of the monolithic idea of modern progress and development: first the socialist one, now the western capitalist one. But would we find ourselves equally 'prepared' for what comes after?
During the 1990s, it became apparent that the millennial generation will be the first one in the history of modernity whose future will be worse off than the generation before. Reflecting on these 'catastrophic times,' Isabelle Stengers (2016) reminds that we "belong to a generation that will perhaps be the most hated in human memory, the generation that 'knew' but did nothing or did too little (changing our lightbulbs, sorting our rubbish, riding bicycles...). But it is also a generation that will avoid the worst – we will already be dead" (p. 10). This presents a major challenge - and an opportunity - for anyone working in the area of memory studies today: How do we remember/forget these moments in history - and our everyday life - when "everything was forever, until it was no more"? How can memory help us, as well as generations after us, 'prepare' for what would unfold after 'forever' finally ends?
In this paper, we draw on memories of childhood, which were produced as a part of the collective biographies (Davis & Gannon, 2006) of Reconnect/Recollect: Crossing the Divides through Memories of Cold War Childhoods project (2019-2021) which brought together scholars and artists of the last socialist and post-socialist generations. We spotlight in memories past's futures of the post/socialist modernity project, the anticipatory visions in the past, such as "Western consumerist abundance" etc. (Nadkarni, 2020, p. 8). We argue that a utopian surplus from these past futures still might be fueling with content the present by keeping up the hope in modernity's path towards progress (Craps et al., 2018). We seek to highlight, make strange and confront these understandings of past futures during the Anthropocene and to highlight memory practices as tools for alternative future-making.
Authors: MnemoZIN
- Zsuzsanna Millei
- Nelli Piattoeva
- Iveta Silova
