Memory
Memory
THE USES OF MEMORY IN CHANGING TECHNOLOGIES OF COMMUNICATION
Since the 1980s, collective memory has become an intensely studied topic across the social sciences. This sudden remarkable interest may be attributed to a rising preoccupation with dissolving collective identities in the face of new historical realities—globalizing economic and cultural trends, the reconfiguration of gender relations, and a media revolution with far-reaching implications for the organization of knowledge. The scholarly discourse about collective memory parallels another about the distinguishing traits of a “postmodernism” temper.
Serious efforts in the social sciences to understand the dynamics of collective memory, however, date from the early twentieth century in the research of the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945). He contended that memory must be investigated within its social settings. The present attitudes, beliefs, and traditions of social groups determine the way memories are evoked, and these are continually remodeled as the interests and fortunes of such groups change. The strength of a collective memory is a function of the relative power of such social forces.
By placing his accent on collective memory, Halbwachs took issue with the Viennese neurologist Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), who a generation before had addressed the issue of memory as a task of exploring the workings of the individual mind. Freud believed in the autonomy of personal memory, and developed an analytical technique for recovering repressed memories from the unconscious psyches of his patients. His critics claim that he never worked out a plausible theory of collective memory. For Halbwachs, by contrast, all memory is socially conditioned in that personal memories are always evoked within specific social settings. Without these social props, personal memories tend to fade away.
In explaining the malleability of memory in the face of social forces, Halbwachs proposed that social groups— families, religious cults, political organizations, and other communities—develop strategies to hold fast to their images of the past through places, monuments, and rituals of commemoration. His La topographie légendaire des évangiles en terre sainte (The Legendary Topography of the Gospels in the Holy Land, 1941) was a pioneering case study of the way an imagined past is localized, conflated, and idealized over time in a commemorative landscape. In his theory, the ancient art of memory as a technique of mnemonic displacement was reinvented as a political strategy for anchoring cultural traditions.
For several decades, Halbwachs’s theory of collective memory was largely ignored. But it was rediscovered during the 1970s, to become a working model for burgeoning scholarship in this field. The newfound interest in collective memory has had three principal venues of research: the politics of memory; the changing uses of memory that followed from the invention of new technologies of communication; and a deepening meditation on the memory of the Holocaust.
THE POLITICS OF COMMEMORATION
This interest reflected an emerging critical perspective on modern traditions once naively honored as the remembered heritage of a commonly imagined past. In France, for example, a lively debate emerged during the 1980s about how, and even whether, to celebrate the bicentenary of the French Revolution (1789–1799), hitherto conceived as the enduring moral touchstone of modern French national identity. Many of these studies investigated the making of the identity of the modern state. The most influential was The Invention of Tradition (1983), an anthology edited by English scholars Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger that explored the political uses of tradition in the construction of collective identity. They challenged the long-standing interpretation of tradition as a heritage that impinges on the present through its inertial power and argued that traditions are conceptions of the past invented in the present and periodically refashioned to serve reformulated political goals. Collective memory, they argued, is inspired by present circumstances, and calls into being a serviceable past. In like manner, the anthropologist Benedict Anderson wrote an influential study of the way “imagined communities” are constructed as public memories to give concrete affirmation to otherwise abstract ideals. From a somewhat different perspective, the sociologist Mary Douglas examined the workings of institutional memory, in which bureaucratic solutions to organizational problems are rapidly forgotten only to be invented anew.
By the turn of the twenty-first century, a vast scholarly literature had been produced on the politics of memory, extending investigations beyond commemoration into a wide range of institutional and cultural practices. Noteworthy among these are studies of the making of national identity by Pierre Nora, Les lieux de mémoire (Places of Memory, 1984–1992) for France; Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory (1991) for the United States; Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots (1995) for Israel; and Wulf Kansteiner, In Pursuit of German Memory (2006). All display intellectual sophistication in moving beyond commemorative rites to the many cultural forms in which collective memory is embedded. Over time, the study of collective memory has become an impressive strategy for interpreting cultural history.
THE USES OF MEMORY IN CHANGING TECHNOLOGIES OF COMMUNICATION
A parallel but independent line of scholarly inquiry has explored the cultural consequences of advances in the technologies of communication. This research was inspired by the media revolution of the late twentieth century, which stimulated curiosity about earlier thresholds in the process—notably from orality to manuscript literacy in antiquity, and the democratization of print culture during the eighteenth century. Contributors to this scholarship have been varied—classicists interested in Homer as a collective name for epic storytellers, anthropologists in the living oral traditions of Africa, intellectual historians in the emergence of the republic of letters during the Enlightenment, literary critics in the reflective autobiographical soul searching that print culture for the first time made possible. Less has been written to date on the effects of media on cultural memory, but J. David Bolter has pointed out the way electronic memory localized in the icons and Web sites of the computer screen mimics the organizational technique of the ancient art of memory in its images and places. Though contributions to this field were made by specialists, the cumulative effect has been to produce a sweeping new perspective on cultural history from antiquity to the present.
TRAUMA AND MEMORY
Somewhat apart are scholarly reflections on the painful process through which Holocaust survivors sought to deal with the trauma they had suffered. This topic reintroduced Freud’s psychoanalytic approach in that it exposed the need for survivors to work through repressed memories of their ordeal before the historical meaning of the Holocaust could be adequately addressed. Beyond inventorying such living testimony, scholars raised the question of how these recovered memories might be historicized within the narratives of modern history. This scholarship provoked the “historians’ controversy” of the mid-1980s in Germany about whether such an atrocity could be conveyed within the limits of historical representation. The Holocaust, initially viewed as one among the many horrors of World War II (1939–1945), came toward century’s end to be reconceived as a singular experience whose memory needed to be processed collectively before an account of its nature could be integrated into any acceptable historical narrative.
MEMORY AND HISTORY
The debate about the limits of historical representation shows how the study of collective memory has unsettled the established conventions of historical narration. During the 1970s, the American scholar Hayden White launched an inquiry into the strategies through which historians compose their interpretations, and so shifted historiographical interest from the evidentiary content of historical research to the rhetorical forms of historical writing. One consequence was to reveal the mnemonic character of historical narrative as a technique for selecting and ordering judgments about what is worth remembering out of the past. Challenging the “noble dream” of historical objectivity, historiographers such as Peter Novick turned to the task of exposing the bias, distortions, and omissions of the master narratives of modern history. Novick points out how American historians once naively presented a past they wanted to remember. From the founding of the American Historical Association in 1884 until well into the twentieth century, eminent historians tended to favor a patriotic view of American identity that denied the divisive realities of class conflict, racial and ethnic discrimination, and the diverse viewpoints of an expanding immigrant population.
As this historiography of patriotic consensus fragmented from the mid-twentieth century, a new generation of practicing historians sought to reclaim the forgotten past of women, African Americans, and other marginalized groups, while those with a theoretical bent proposed new categories of conceptualization to frame a more complex historical memory, notably through models for gender studies, the history of collective mentalities, and global history. In the process, they subverted the political identities previously highlighted by modern historiography. The conventional model of a directional modern history, originally conceived as a story of ongoing progress, became an uncertain guide to historical writing. This loss of direction coupled with a sense of accelerating time promoted by larger contemporary trends—advertising that incites the fads of consumerism, the ongoing technological innovations through which global communication approaches the instantaneous—led to the collapse of the future-oriented conception of historical time in favor of one that stresses the urgency of present-day problems. The French historiographer François Hartog has characterized this rethinking of the mnemonics of historical time as a “new regime of historicity,” one that privileges present concerns over past intentions as a point of departure for historical inquiry.
Memory’s subversion of the grand narrative of modern history has legitimized some novel approaches to historical interpretation—an encounter model in global history, a shift from history’s story to history’s topics in historical exposition, the genealogical reading of the past to point out its discontinuities vis-à-vis the present, and efforts to recapture “sublime” moments of historical experience through historical reenactment.
The scholarly discourse about memory across the curriculum in the late twentieth century reveals its essential paradox—the fragility of its representations of the past in relation to the durability of its resources to imagine that past anew.
SEE ALSO Collective Memory; Freud, Sigmund; History, Social; Holocaust, The; Psychoanalytic Theory
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso.
Confino, Alon, and Peter Fritzsche, eds. 2002. The Work of Memory: New Directions in the Study of German Society and Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Douglas, Mary. 1986. How Institutions Think. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.
Friedlander, Saul, ed. 1992. Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution.” Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hartog, François. 2003. Régimes d’historicité: Présentisme et expériences du temps. Paris: Seuil.
Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
Hutton, Patrick. 1993. History as an Art of Memory. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.
Matsuda, Matt. 1996. The Memory of the Modern. New York: Oxford University Press.
Nora, Pierre, ed. 1984–1992. Les lieux de mémoire. 3 vols. Paris: Gallimard.
Novick, Peter. 1988. That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession. Cambridge, U.K: Cambridge University Press.
Ong, Walter. 1982. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen.
Schacter, Daniel. 2001. The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Patrick H. Hutton