How is the 'Past' remembered, represented and reconstructed?

Foraging ledges and rummaging racks for an insightful study on the fledgling field of Memory Studies, for quite some time now, I had a chanced rendezvous with a delightful wonder-read of sorts, on the Ashgate series, where i found the various takes on Memory quite absorbing, appealing and astounding by all means!

Titled, The Ashgate Research Companion to Memory Studies, the book has many wonderful articles from cultural critics, historians and scholars in memory studies!

Well, the book discusses quite a lot of important concepts in the field of memory studies, and offers a comprehensive view of Memory in all its rich and diverse usage!

Starting with Walter Benjamin’s beautiful take on the ‘process of remembering’, to how forgetfulness played a very vital role in the political life of ancient Greece! (any semblances to the present is pure-o-purely incidental!), to how past events are remembered, misremembered, understood, contested, forgotten, learned from, and shared with others, to insights on the first historian Herodotus, to interesting takes on concepts that include collective memory, mentalities, cultural memory, monuments, museums, tradition, trauma, nostalgia, historical consciousness, forgetting, silence, commemoration, cosmopolitanism, narrative, mnemohistory, myth, event, modernity and hauntology, and how reflections and memoirs have their own history, bordering sometimes on the confessional, self-reflection or self-promotion, this wonder-companion has got it all!

Since memories are fluid and change over time, what is remembered or forgotten follows different paths, trajectories and vectors.

In its various permutations as cultural memory, mnemonic practices, multidirectional memory, politics of memory, postmemory, prosthetic memory, remembrance, social memory and transcultural memory – and whether collective memory qualifies as a ‘travelling concept’!

For this and for everything else connected with Memory Studies, this book is a real treat to the ‘memory studies’ connoisseur!

This excerpted piece is a take on this ever-dynamic concept of Memory by Siobhan Kattago.

So here goes –

Memory has long been a subject of fascination for poets, artists, philosophers and historians.

When recalling the past, it is impossible to fully capture the complexity of memory. Instead, as Walter Benjamin noted, the process of remembering seems to unfold like a fragile and unending fan.

He who has once began to open the fan of memory never comes to the end of its segments; no image satisfies him, for he has seen that it can be unfolded, and only in its folds does the truth reside!

According to Greek mythology, Mnemosyne was the mother of the nine muses, one of whom was Clio, the muse of history. And yet, remembrance also includes what is forgotten – either deliberately or accidentally.

Indeed, forgetfulness played a very important role in the political life of ancient Greece.

If the altar to Lethe on the Athenian acropolis symbolized the importance of forgetting for the political unity of the polis, the river Lethe embodied the importance of forgetfulness in the afterlife.

Memory Studies stems from two sources: the insights of the first historian Herodotus and the etymology of the word ‘companion’.

In Travels with Herodotus, Ryszard Kapuściński reminds his readers that for Herodotus, the purpose of history was to keep the memory of both the Greeks and non-Greeks alive.

Indeed, his famous quotation, ‘To prevent the traces of human events being erased by time’ was a motif that Kapuściński kept with him on his voyages and reportages around the world.

Herodotus understood that the desire to preserve glorious events of the past was not simply a generous gesture but also a double-edged sword.

The injunction to remember and prevent time from erasing the memory of hostilities can just as often become the cause of future violence.

‘Without memory one cannot live, for it is what elevates man above beasts, determines the contours of the human soul; and yet it is at the same time so unreliable, elusive, treacherous’.

Following in the footsteps of Kapuściński and Herodotus, the interdisciplinary field of memory studies includes those scholars who emphasise the continuity of heritage and tradition and those who focus on the memory of hostilities, traumas and painful events.

Herodotus was one such companion for Kapuściński during his many travels. In its most simple meaning, a companion is one who shares with another!

Which thinkers and conceptual ideas inspire the growing and diverse field of memory studies?

Who are some of the thinkers that accompany contemporary intellectuals as they think about how and why the past is remembered, represented and reconstructed?

Corresponding concepts include collective memory, mentalities, cultural memory, lieux de mémoire, monuments, museums, tradition, trauma, nostalgia, historical consciousness, forgetting, silence, commemoration, cosmopolitanism, narrative, mnemohistory, myth, event, modernity and hauntology.

Likewise, Nabokov’s memoir, Speak, Memory weaves reflections on memory with the story of his life.

Philosophical memoirs are a genre in themselves: from Rousseau’s *Confessions* to Nietzsche’s Antichrist and Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other.

Pierre Nora’s concept of ego-histoire is intriguing because he asked French historians to reflect not only on their historical research but also on themselves as historians within a particular generation.

His project thus reflects the interests of certain French historians during the 1970s and 1980s.

Ego-histoire is connected with a history of the present in which the historian reflects on him- or herself within the present.

What is Collective Memory?

Although the term ‘collective memory’ was first coined by Maurice Halbwachs in 1925, the study of memory has much in common with historical consciousness, nostalgia, tradition and myth.

The idea of historical consciousness is decidedly older than the concept of collective memory, with roots in German philosophy of history and time.

Likewise, Durkheim’s conscious collective and collective representations have interesting overlaps with the Annales school of mentalities, because both emphasise representative images of a group as well as the continuity between past and present.

As Hutton and Fritzsche highlight, nostalgia evokes deep longing for a past that has been lost.

In addition, collective memory shares much with tradition and myth, particularly in the way that foundational events are remembered as sources of collective identity.

As Pettai argues, political myth is ‘a simplified narrative’ that is not necessarily false. Rather political myth ‘describes a form of collective memory’ visible in state policy and public commemoration.

In response to academic and popular interest in memory, Susan Sontag and Reinhart Koselleck criticise the very notion of collective memory as a meaningful concept.

Sontag writes: ‘What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds’.

Granted her examples are visual ones and based primarily on documentary photographs, but Sontag’s critique is well-worth thinking about.

Photographs that everyone recognizes are now a constituent part of what a society chooses to think about, or declare 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 – part of the same family of spurious notions as collective guilt. But there is collective instruction.

It makes no sense to say that remembering is collective – only individuals are able to remember, not groups. However, ‘collective instruction’ is only possible when individuals speak the same language and can understand one another.

Similarly to Sontag, Koselleck argued against the salience of collective memory. ‘I can only remember what I myself have experienced.

Memory [Erinnerung] is bound up with personal experience’.

As a German prisoner of war, he witnessed the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army. When reflecting on International Holocaust Remembrance Day (27 January), he distinguished collective memory as the ritualised commemoration of historical events.

‘As day of remembrance, as re-commemoration, it is semantically a fully different memory from that which I have kept in my memory as a witness [Augenzeuge] of the initial news’.

The larger framework of days of remembrance and commemorative reflection are ‘semantically’ different from his lived experience.

Likewise, Koselleck asks who is the subject who remembers?

Individuals are influenced by: ‘the 7 P’s’: professors, priests, preachers, PR specialists, the press, poets and politicians.

‘There are as many memories as there are people and each collectivity, convinced they are the only one, is, in my opinion, a priori ideology or myth’.

Arguing against the concept of collective memory, he claims that there are ‘collective conditions’ enabling individual memory.

‘There is thus no collective memory; there are collective conditions which make memory possible’.

And it is precisely here, that he comes closest to the formative ideas of Maurice Halbwachs and Aby Warburg in the first half of the twentieth century because such ‘collective conditions’ are what enable individuals to understand one another.