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Article Excerpt
COLLECTIVE MEMORY--A SPURIOUS NOTION?
THERE IS NO NEED TO CONVINCE ANYBODY THAT THERE IS SUCH A THING as individual memory; memory attaches to persons in the singular. But does it attach to them in the plural? Although the term "collective memory" has gained currency and a whole new discourse has been built around it that fills extended library shelves, there are still inveterate skeptics who tenaciously deny the phrase has any meaning. It is of course easy to create a new term, but how can we be sure the term corresponds to anything in reality? Susan Sontag, for instance, is one of those who questioned and denied the meaning of this term. =Photographs that everyone recognizes," she wrote in Regarding the Pain of Others, "are now a constituent part of what a society chooses to think about, or declares that it has chosen to think about. It calls these ideas 'memories,' and that is, over the long run, a fiction. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as collective memory." And, she insists,
all memory is individual, unreproducible--it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, that this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds. Ideologies create substantiating archives of images, representative images, which encapsulate common ideas of significance and trigger predictable thoughts, feelings (Sontag, 2003: 85-86).
According to Sontag, a society is able to choose, to think and to speak, but not to remember. It can choose without a will, it can think without the capacity of reason, it can speak without a tongue, but it cannot remember without a memory. With the term "memory," her license of figurative speech reaches its limit: memory cannot be thought of independently from an organ and organism. As part of the brain and its neurological networks, it is tied to individual lives and dies with each person. This commonsensical argument has its irrefutable evidence. The statement is certainly true, but, we may argue, it is incomplete.
There is little dispute that autobiographical memories are what existentially distinguishes us from each other. Experiential memories are embodied and thus they cannot be transferred from one person to another. In stressing the experiential solipsism of individual memory, however, we disregard two important dimensions of memory: interaction with other individuals and interaction with external signs and symbols. Autobiographical memories cannot be embodied by another person, but they can be shared with others. Once they are verbalized in the form of a narrative or represented by a visual image, the individual's memories become part of an intersubjective symbolic system and are, strictly speaking, no longer a purely exclusive and unalienable property. By encoding them in the common medium of language, they can be exchanged, shared, corroborated, confirmed, corrected, disputed, and even appropriated. In addition to that, it is sometimes notoriously difficult to distinguish what one has experienced oneself from what one has been told and afterward incorporated into one's own stock of autobiographical memories. Similarly, what we have experienced ourselves and what we have read about or seen in films can be equally difficult to disentangle. Oral narratives, texts, and photographs are important props of autobiographical memory, which explains why the boundary between individual memory and shared material signs (such as texts and images) is not always easy to draw.
Sontag would probably concede all these points, provided that we introduce the distinction between mind and memory. "Mind" refers to the cognitive part of the brain, in which general concepts are built up, where external knowledge, taken in through texts and images, is assimilated and reconstructed. "There is collective instruction," Sontag affirms (85). Psychologists offer the distinction between "semantic" and "episodic" memory, which may help us to further elucidate the problem (Tulving, 1972: 382-402). Semantic memory is related to the learning and storing capacity of the mind. It is acquired by collective instruction and the site of continuous learning, acquisition, and retention of both general and specialized knowledge that connects us with others and the surrounding world. Episodic memory, on the other hand, enshrines purely personal incidents as individually experienced; though it can be communicated and exchanged, it cannot be transferred from one individual to another without changing the quality of the experience through external representation.
When Maurice Halbwachs (who is acknowledged today as one of the patrons of memory discourse) introduced the term "collective memory" in 1925, he was already aware of a potential misunderstanding. To preempt lingering doubts he connected the concept of collective memory with another term: "social frame." According to Halbwachs, the term "collective memory" cannot be understood without referring to the concept of "social frames." He writes: "No memory is possible outside frameworks used by people living in society to determine and retrieve their recollections" (Halbwachs, 1992: 43). By defining collective memory in terms of social frames, Halbwachs adopted a constructivist perspective, which distances him from collective mythmakers and essentialists (like Herder with his notion of Volksgeist). For Halbwachs, collective memory is not a "spurious notion" but an innovating and groundbreaking concept that has the capacity--as has been proved 60 to 70 years later--to open up an entirely new field of research.
In spite of our sound and justified skepticism of collective mystifications and the political abuse of such notions in racist and nationalist discourse, we must not forget that human beings do not live in the first person singular only, but also in various formats of the first person plural. They become part of different groups whose "we" they adopt together with the respective social frames. A social frame is an implicit or explicit structure of shared concerns, values, experiences, narratives. The family, the neighborhood, the peer group, the generation, the nation, the culture are such larger groups that individuals incorporate into their identity by referring to them as "we." Each "we" is constructed through shared practices and discourses that mark certain boundaries and define the principles of inclusion and exclusion. To be part of a collective group such as the nation one has to share and adopt the group's history, which exceeds the boundaries of one's individual life span. The individual participates in the group's vision of its past by means of cognitive learning and emotional acts of identification and commemoration. This past cannot be "remembered"; it has to be memorized. The collective memory is a crossover between semantic and episodic memory: it has to be acquired via learning, but only through internalization and rites of participation does it create the identity of a "we." This point was made clearly by Margaret Atwood:
When I lived in the rural Ontario countryside north of Toronto, a local man said, "There's the barn where we hid the women and children, that time the Fenians invaded." An individual barn; individual women and children. The man who told me about the barn was born some sixty years after the Fenian attack, but he said we not they; he was remembering as a personal experience an event at which he had not been present in the flesh, and I believe we have all done that. It is at such points that memory, history, and...
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