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Article Excerpt
IN THIS ESSAY I DISCUSS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MEMORY, identity, and justice. Each of these terms adumbrates a wide field of concepts, with deep practical, literary, and philosophical roots and controversies. Given the unmanageably large range of those concepts, I will focus on social or collective memory as one of the sources of the persistence of a community across time. That continuity, I will suggest, makes possible the community as a subject of justice, specifically as a subject of attribution, a body responsible for its past and (relatedly) able to commit itself to a future (Booth, 2006). Core parts of the underlying perplexities at issue here can be elicited from reflection on questions of the following kinds.
* In what sense does the period of slavery remain on America's ledger? Are reparations owed by modern-day Germany for the crimes of a now long-distant and profoundly different regime? How are we today, in the opening years of the new millennium, the inheritors of a responsibility for a past of which we are not the authors, and from which we differ in so many respects? In general, what if anything do we owe to the past, or for its injustices? Consider now these variants, cast at a different level of agent:
* When we hold a corporation, Philip Morris or Volkswagen for example, accountable for actions committed in the past, what sort of continuity are we assuming in order to be able to make that judgment?
* Finally, at the individual level, in what sense am I responsible for my acts as a child, given the radical changes of all kinds that I have undergone in the intervening years?
These question draw out the following: that underpinning the holding of someone or some community responsible must be a notion of continuity or persistence across time and change. Absent that continuity and instead of an accountable agent there would be multiple selves (see Parfit, 1973: 141). And that persistence must in turn be relevant to the practical work it is called on to do--that is, grounding responsibility. This persistence is what I mean by identity in the following essay: the enduringness through time and change of a subject (individual, corporate, social group or state) capable of being held responsible. Note that this use of the term "identity" does not mean pervasively the same, the same all the way down, so to speak. Nor is the term used in its popular cultural signification, as a sort of individual or collective self-definition. Rather, we mean enduring in a way pertinent to the possibility of attribution and accountability. Related to this, as we shall see, is not only the persistence but the boundedness of that responsible agent, that is, the sense in which the agent (person, corporation, state or society) not only remains the same through time but is distinguishable (again, in a way relevant to accountability) from other subjects of attribution.
LET US TURN FIRST TO THE IDENTITY OF MORAL AGENTS AND THE PLACE of memory in it. "In this personal identity," John Locke writes, "is founded all the right and justice of reward and punishment" (Locke, 1959: 459). Identity of the subject across time is an essential precondition of accountability. And identity and the possibility of attribution are, in this core and much contested part of the canonical literature (especially that associated with Locke's arguments in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding), grounded in memory (Locke, 1959: 444, 449-449, 458, 460). The principal thought here is that memory runs through and binds together the moments of a person's life, giving that life a morally relevant unity that, for example, criteria of physical continuity cannot offer. Needless to say, such psychological identity criteria have been sharply contested, yet at the level of the individual person, there is something intuitively plausible about this claim, or at least about a suitably modest version of it. This becomes apparent when we reflect on the significance of a radical loss of memory. Consider Luis Bunuel's remarks on witnessing his mother's fall into complete amnesia, and of his own failing memory: "You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all.... Our memory is our coherence.... Without it we are nothing" (Bunuel, 1983: 4-5). In one sense, the physical person remains and retains the identity that natural things have as persisting clusters of matter and form. But without memory, the person as a unity, as having a coherent life, ceases to exist. Oliver Sacks describes a patient with deep amnesia, saying of him that he "wasn't aware of ... the loss of himself" (Sacks, 1970: 35). Without memory the person drifts away or is lost.
The above remarks suggest that memory is one key locale of identity, of the unity of a life across time. Of course our physical continuity, the places we inhabit and our relationships, all belong among the sources of identity. Yet memory seems to be that one element that binds these together, and retains them even after they have gone or have been radically transformed over the years. Memory's relationship to continuity also has a particular tie to responsibility, to our capacity for accountability as enduring moral subjects. Memory, in Levinas's words, is the "rectitude of responsibility" (Levinas, 2002: 26). That is so because memory is crucially related to what we call "beating responsibility," the way in which we assume the burdens of our past, acknowledge it as ours and not someone else's, and accept that this "ours" persists through time and change. A person who does not remember, who declines to recall, who in short escapes his past by imagining a caesura between his present and past, is (we think) deficient as a responsible subject.
In this essay I will return to and develop each of these themes: identity, responsibility and (collective) memory. First I want to turn to a microlevel illustration of memory at work in the context of a small and familiar community: The family. I turn to the family so as to make more intuitive, more intimate, these claims about memory, identity, and accountability. Looking at the family as a place of memory, we can also see that in thinking about the memory of a community we are not implausibly transposing reflection on a person and her psychological capacities, including memory, to a collective entity (society) that has no such psychological faculties. The family as a community of memory also suggests the manifold forms that memory assumes. This last point bears emphasis, given the propensity of students of politics to focus their attention on a certain range of memory enactments, those of "state memory": monuments, archives, civic histories, and so on with the result that the role of the volatile, the evanescent, and instrumental in collective memory is magnified and the ways in which memory functions beneath the surface of politics and beyond the reach of our political will are underestimated or neglected (see Nora, 1986: 648).
THE FAMILY AND ITS HOME HAVE LONG BEEN FAVORITE TROPES OF writers about memory. Family spaces, the rooms of the home are (as Bachelard argues) the original and principal locales of memory, and in antiquity, they were also common mnemonic devices (Muxel, 2002; Bachelard, 1957: 24, 26-27, 65; Bahloul, 1992: 9-10; Yates, 1966: 3-4). Here, however, I want to look at another, and equally plain, memorial aspect of the household: the family photo album. That album shares in "one of the oldest ... characteristics" of books: the property of being a site for the conservation of the past, the "lodging of the ancients, the persistent offering of the dead to the view of the living, of the incessant actualization of what is not present ... The gift of absence ... the gift of that which is not" (Quignard, 1990, 87-88). The picture album contains photos of the family, often across years and generations. It thus captures, gathers in, something that otherwise would remain absent: the dead and the earlier years of the living family members. The album as a whole is the memory of the family, the conservatory of its memories, and it affirms its unity across time (Garat, 1994: 7, 22; Muxel, 2002: 150, 176-177; Bourdieu and Boltanski, 1965: 53-54). Yet...
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