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Article Excerpt
There is a whole set of obstacles, of various natures and origins, which hinder the construction and use of cultural memory. Some of these obstacles are traditional, while others are more recent. Some are cognitive, while others concern more widely our way of being in the world. In the first place, I would like to briefly recall some of these obstacles. Then I will explore the means that we have at our disposal to skip or at least bypass them. I will analyze the way that scientific history-making builds and uses memory, then I will present a few reflections concerning its hermeneutic and genealogic conceptions. Each one of these ways of building and using cultural memory aims at resolving one particular category of difficulties, but each one has, as we shall see, its own limitations which further complicate this matter. By going through these various conceptions of our relationship to the past, and by contrasting each to the others, I would like to try to better understand both the general conditions of potential cultural memory and some of its stakes which are not taken into enough account nowadays.
1. The Endangered Memory
The making of memory faces traditional difficulties. Forged documents and temptations to rewrite history according to the interests of the powers of the day have existed for a long time. As early as the Renaissance, Lorenzo Valla demonstrated, with good philological arguments, that the famous "Constantine's Donation," on which the Pope pretended to base his secular theocracy, was a fake document. Likewise, we know how, at the end of the nineteenth century, at the peak of the persecutions against the Jews, the tsarist police forged the famous anti-Semitic pamphlet The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion. But it seems in this matter, as in many others, that the twentieth century has systematized the fake reconstitutions or the erasures of the past. The totalitarian regimes have been masters at rewriting history according to the succession of the clans exercising power. The touching-up of pictures and the disappearance of people fallen into disgrace remain some of the most well-known examples of these manipulations. But the democratic regimes, although more honest regarding their own past, have not been able to hinder similar manipulations. For example, the United States and Australia have had many difficulties incorporating the history of the invasion of Indian or Aborigine land and of its consequences in the academic curricula. In France, many years passed before the myth of a resisting population against Nazism, forged in the aftermath of the war, fell apart. And still many more years went by before the end of the amnesia regarding the Algerian war and the use of torture by the army. In France, as well as in other countries, we have witnessed over the last thirty years a proliferation of negationist writings that try, most recently using the Internet, to erase the memory of the Nazis' use of gas chambers and ultimately the memory of the extermination of European Jews. The examples are numerous, and one could easily cite many more in Germany, Japan, or Arab countries.
To these difficulties, which are more and more frequent but can be addressed by historical critique and democratic debate, we must now add some more insidious impediments, both social and cultural, which in my opinion change the nature of the problems raised by the development and the maintenance of cultural memory. For a long time, Western culture has been under the dominant influence of modern ideals. The latter would imply a permanent surpassing of oneself toward a better future, a projection of individuals and societies into a future to be constructed. This attitude would, firstly, assume a constant expropriation of the present out of itself, but it would also assume a continuous struggle against the traditions and beliefs, in brief, against everything transmitted from the past. De facto, modernism was making it difficult to use memory, even if its abuses have sometimes sparked some strong reactions in the opposite direction as, for example, during the Romantic era. If this modernist pattern has now disappeared from the political world, it remains essential in the economic world and organizes a great part of our social life, especially through work and consumption. In these spheres of existence, people continue to orient their activity exclusively toward the future, waiting for turnover, production, realizations. The entire capitalist system remains based on a kind of unbalanced movement forward, which can only facilitate the progressive erasure of the past, unless it can be a resource for business. Besides, the collapse of political modernism and the development of consumption societies have provoked the growth of a culture stressing the present at the expense of the relationships with the future and also with the past. Thus, postmodern narcissistic individualistic hedonism tends to spread in the rich democracies of the northern part of the globe. But the postmodern individual has an eclectic memory; he lives for the moment and considers his relationships with the past essentially like links, which reduce his freedom of movement. The past is nothing for him but a reservoir, from which he can freely draw some semblance of experience or some ornament for his life.
2. The Scientific Making of Memory
In order to fight the mere oblivion, but also the rewritings and the manipulations of the past, historical research adopted some basic techniques long ago: 1. The establishment of memory begins with the production of archives. The documents concerning the period whose memory the historian would...
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