As I embark on a study of collective memeory and archives, I thought it important to first grasp major ideas about what constitutes memory (or in some cases memories). With the help of Michael Rossington and Anne Whitehead's anthology on memory (Theories of Memory, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), I looked at the conceptualization of memory from the early Classical period to present day. Below are my research notes on from this work and my summarizations of major ideas from each period. If anyone is interested in a full bibliography, please contact me.
This is a rough draft and the citations are incomplete.
Classical Ideas of Memory: Plato, Aristotle & Cicero
- Memory is craft perfected through philosophical dialogue (Plato)
- Memories are imprinted on the mind like a carving on a wax tablet (Aristotle)
- The mind is a storehouse of memories that can be recalled for rhetorical practice (Cicero)
“Wherefore if a man makes right use of such means of remembrance, and ever approaches to the full vision of the perfect mysteries, he and he alone becomes truly perfect.” Plato, Phaedrus 249B-250C.
In Phaedrus, Plato’s (423– 348 BC) main protagonist Socrates tells the story of Ancient Egyptian Thamus, King of Thebes. According to Socrates, Thamus rejected the written word because he believed that externalized memory would diminish mental capacity and could not possibly lead to wisdom. The story draws comparisons to the conception of memory in Plato’s own time as a craft that only wise men had mastered. Memory is earned through philosophical dialogue, not by the rote memorization that rhetoricians were being taught to help trigger their recall of facts during debates. Plato believed that the only way to develop true memory was through reasoned and critical engagement with a text as a deep reflection on the divine origins of the soul.
Like Plato, Aristotle (384–322 BC) studied dialectic memory, although he chose to focus more on how the mind stores memories and less on the search for meaning through memory. Many animals can remember, he argued in De memoria et reminiscentia, but only men are able to recollect. Aristotle drew a distinction between rote patterns of remembering, such as those used by animals to find food stores and indicate danger, and recollection, which requires a deliberate search for memories that help one reflect on the passing of time. This process involves interpretation, reasoning, and tracing patterns of history over time. Aristotle also wrote that perception is of the present, prediction of the future, and memory of the past. Perhaps the most useful contribution by Aristotle on memory was his conception of the wax tablet as a metaphor for the mind imprinted by perception. These imprints form memories if they are inscribed with affect; memory formation and emotion are inherently tied. For this reason, the construction of memory requires stability because imprints are difficult to make when the mind is busy or distress, just like carving wax tablets under water. Aristotle’s wax tablet metaphor is a consistent theme running through the literature of memory studies even today. Until the concept of neuroplasticity was introduced in the late nineteenth century, physicians understood memories to be fixed inscriptions on the mind, whether they are deep wounds or light scrapes. Freud also returned to the idea of the wax tablet (or ‘mystic writing pad’) in his more modern writing on the mind and memories. The discipline of psychology also emphasizes the concept of engrained thoughts or memories in its early development theories.
Notably, Ancient Romans rhetorician Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC) drew upon Aristotle’s concept of the wax tablet for rhetorical instruction. In contrast to Plato and Aristotle’s Greece, the Ancient Romans celebrated the art of rhetoric and young men were trained from an early age to develop skills in mnemonics and debate. Cicero, for example, argued that memory was an active process defined by the activities of collection and recollection, or storing and retrieving. He believed that these activities were the basis for knowledge and understanding and thus, rhetorical memory was knowledge. In an era wherein knowledge was usually conveyed orally, the ability to recall from texts was invaluable in performing duties and engaging in critical discourse with others. In his manual, De oratore & Ad herennium, Cicero instructs his students to develop a series of familiar visualizations that were deeply inscribed in memory, and then to overlay information needed for rhetorical practice on these visual backgrounds. In doing so, he explained, rhetoricians would learn to associate particular memories with objects and images that would trigger their mind to recall long texts. The more organized and arranged visualizations were best for quick recall. Memory created through this visualization process would complement natural memory-keeping abilities. Similarly, Quintilian’s (ca. 35–100 BC) manual Institutio oratoria, instructs boys to build a treasure house of memories that they can draw upon when composing speeches. This is the first articulation of the mind as an archives of memories that can be retrieved wholly for future recall.
Memory in Medieval Cultures
- Memory and the capacity to memorize was advantageous in oral societies (Yates)
- The stomach was a metaphor for memory; texts were devoured and digested by their readers and regurgitated for recitation (Carruthers)
“Ruminatio is an image of regurgitation, quite literally intended; the memory is a stomach, the stored texts are the sweet-smelling cud originally drawn from the meadows of books (or lecture), they are chewed in the palate.” Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory, p. 206
Concepts of memory in Medieval cultures have been explored in depth by Dame Frances A. Yates in her 1966 book The Art of Memory, and by Mary Carruthers in 1990’s The Book of Memory. Both authors acknowledge the utility of memory in pre-literate or primarily oral societies; rhetorical training proved to be a great advantage for those who lived in a time when men’s capacity to recall was highly valued. Yates and Carruthers also discuss the representation of memory as a stomach. According to Carruthers, the early monastic tradition of murmuring (reading aloud to oneself) and repetition of reading allowed monks to familiarize themselves with important texts. These texts were ‘digested’ and ‘ruminated’ in the gut until it was necessary to ‘regurgitate’ them for recall. It is from this symbolism that we retain the language of ‘devouring books’ and the act of reading while eating (breakfast over the morning newspaper anyone?). Interestingly, monastic societies paid more attention to internalizing texts than creating them. The process of meditating on a particular text allowed the words to become part of the person ingesting it; in a sense, he became the author of the text. Modern conceptions of authorship, however, did not apply, as memory was communal and recitation was thought of as communal knowledge and wisdom.
Enlightenment & Renaissance Memory
- The mind functions like an archives or storehouse of ideas and memories
- Memories cannot be reconstituted easily; they are interpreted in the present as recollections
- There is a connection between memory and imagination
John Locke (1632-1704) was one of the most influential writers on memory and identity during the Enlightenment period. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), he identified memory as an anchor for identity coherence and continuity. Following the work of Plato, Locke deploys the language of imprinting and impression, but he recasts memory as a function of the mind rather than a specific place. The mind functions very much like an archives, a storehouse of ideas, a place for mental safekeeping. Unlike Classical thinkers, however, Locke does not conceive of the mind as a library, where memories are neatly catalogued and ready for retrieval; ideas float freely like ghosts haunting the mind. In Book XI of The Prelude (1805), Locke writes that memories do not really exist as ‘things’; they are impressions of perception that can be revived and repainted each and every time we recall the past. Locke anticipates the work of Jacques Derrida, for example, who considered memories to be traces of history that are reconstructed and reconstituted within the present context in which they are recalled. Memories, therefore, cannot be reconstituted easily and never without reinterpretation. On memory and trauma, Locke wrote that pain and pleasure are most sharply remembered because they leave a lasting impression. These memories return easily to consciousness, but are still reinterpreted within our present context and painted anew every time. This is how we fall into cycles of trauma and also how we can languish in memories of happiness past but never regained.
Although Scottish historian and essayist David Hume (1711-1776) is well known for his work on the philosophy of empiricism and skepticism, his contributions to memory studies have also had a lasting impact. In A Treatise on Human Nature (1739-40), Hume explores the relationship between memory and imagination. Like many of his contemporaries, Hume draws on the wax tablet metaphor and suggests that imagination is like a light impression on the mind, whereas memory is a real inscription. He writes, “the difference betwixt [memory] and the imagination lies in [memory’s] superior force and vivacity” (Rossington, 71). If, for example, a particular scenario is imagined again and again, it can carve a deeper impression and this helps explain why liars can actually come to believe that what they are saying is memory. This argument also anticipates more recent studies into the conceptualization of false memories and understanding False Memory Syndrome. Pairing memory and imagination echoes the work of Aristotle, as it situates memory in the same part of the soul as imagination. The uneasy relationship between memory and imagination is what prompts Hume to explore the construction of identity. He does not believe that identity is built and then maintained; rather, he sees identity as a constantly evolving text that can change over time and in context. This is a more contemporary idea than those expressed by Hume’s own contemporaries, many of whom believed that identity was acquired and became coherent over time and during adulthood.
Born just six years before Hume’s death, Georg Wilhelm Freidrich Hegel (1770-1831) has also written about the connection between memory and imagination. In his expansive Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1817), Philosophy of Mind (part III, 1830, trans. 1845), Hegel conceives of memory and imagination as complementary faculties, rather than competing (as Hume had done). In Hegel’s opinion, the mind is a ‘pit’ or ‘night-like mine’ from which images [memories] are rescued by imagination. The mind is thus a storehouse or repository of memories and imagination allows us to recollect and reflect on these memories in the present. Hegel’s conception of memory has influenced poststructuralism, literary theory and psychoanalysis by emphasizing the distinction between memory and recollection. Although he does not use the language later adopted by Jacques Derrida, Hegel conceptualizes memories as ‘images’ (similar to ‘traces’?) that are retrieved or rescued by imagination to reflect on the past in the present. Hegel writes,
“The young have a good memory because they have not yet reached the stage of reflection; their memory is exercised with or without design so as to level the ground of their inner life to pure being or to pure space in which the fact, the implicit content, may reign and unfold itself with no antithesis to a subjective inwardness.” (Philosophy of the Mind, para. 464, 223)
Modernity & Late Modernity
- History is constructed through repetition of ideas (Marx)
- Repetition of the past can prevent us from moving forward; thus, we must learn to live both historically and unhistorically (Nietzche)
- Memory can be non-relfective and rote (habituate) or purposeful and true (pure) (Bergson)
- Freud introduces the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’ metaphor for memory, the conscious and unconscious.
The French Revolution (1789-1799) and subsequent rise of Napoleon Bonaparte demarcate the end of the Renaissance period of dreamy philosophical reflections on memory and imagination. Inspired by the radical social and political upheavals in French and European communities, philosophical writers turned their attention to the construction of history and national narratives. German philosophy Karl Marx (1818-1883), one of the more celebrated voices of the modern period, was highly critical of national histories, arguing that these are narratives that celebrate the oppressors while suppressing alternative voices. Marx argued that we cannot ever achieve freedom if we continue to live under the spectre of our oppressors. Thus, the construction of revolutionary history is problematic because it remains entrenched in the trauma of the past. The story of revolution must therefore be set at the horizon and not in the nostalgia of the past. He remarks in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852):
Men make their own history, but not of their own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted. The tradition of the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living. (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852, republished 1973, p147)
Critics such as Derrida (1930-2004) picked up on this idea that that past can continue to haunt the present; it is thus impossible for revolutionaries to completely sever from their historical context. Marx also anticipates the work of Maurice Halbwachs (1877-1945) and the articulation of collective memory or collective history. Although Marx places his argument within a political economy perspective, his writing suggests that he is aware that the work of identity construction does not start from scratch, but rather builds through time from the experiences of others in our cultural context. Our minds are not empty tablets, as Aristotle would claim, but the product of repetition of history from one generation to the next. Marx seems pessimistic about this, as though these dead people trap us in a circle of oppression. I would argue that Marx fails to see to possibility for community building that can also help individuals create coherent identities that allow them more freedom to challenge oppression. But perhaps coherence is a more modern idea….?
Building on the work of Karl Marx, Frederich Nietzche ( 1844-1900) concentrates on the concept of forgetting with the claim that we can only move on and live in happiness if we learn to forget, to live unhistorically. In the essay “On the Uses and Disadvantages for Life” (1974) he writes, “…the unhistorical and the historical are necessary in equal measures for the health of an individual, of a people, and of a culture.” Using the animal as an example, Nietzche argues that it is possible to live almost without memory—animals live unhistorically, wholly in the moment and honestly. Humans have the ability to remember, recollect and reflect. Yet, it is impossible to live without forgetting, because to remember everything would overwhelm the mind. To ruminate forever on the past (a reference to the Medieval conception of memory), humans would reach the point of paralysis. Nietzche advocates for active forgetting. One must strike a balance, however, between living historically and unhistorically because, without reflection and thinking we are nothing but docile, grazing animals, and without an unhistorical atmosphere, we fear the freedom to create and to explore new territory of the mind and culture and soul. Sounding very much like a precursor to psychoanalysis, Nietzche’s concept of unhistoricism implies that we cannot dwell on the past; we must learn from it and move on.
Nietzche’s contemporary, the French philosopher Henri-Louis Bergson (1859-1941), also focused on the persistence of memories and the repetition of history. However, his focus on individual memory is more consistent with Renaissance thought than modern thinkers. In his second principle work, Matter and Memory (1896), Bergson explored the psychology of memory, its two manifestations (habit and pure), and the metaphysical consequences of these. Habit memory, he explained, was the automatic memory that any animal (including humans) can develop through repetition. This type of memory is not necessarily recognized as having a past upon which to reflect, but rather it utilized for present action. Bergson suggests that habit memory is like memorizing a verse by rote; recitation becomes mechanical and is non-reflective. Alternatively, pure memory is contemplative and spiritual, and registers in the form of imagery in the mind. He suggests that pure memory is like first learning a verse and considering its meaning, an act that cannot be repeated. This is true memory and permits the mind to reflect, consider, and remember. Bergson was a cousin by marriage to the poet Marcel Proust (1871-1922) and was likely influenced by Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (1927). Interestingly, two of Bergson’s best known students, Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) and Maurice Halbwachs (1877-1945) are critical of Bergson’s writing because it fails to acknowledge the influence of the collective mind and does not accept the possibility of a cultural or sociological memory.
Perhaps the most influential writer of the late modern period is the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). In his essay “A Note Upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’” (1925), Freud rejects the model of the mind as an archives or a library in which memories are stored wholly and easily retrievable. He also expresses his discomfort with the idea that the mind is a wax tablet or blackboard on which memory can be inscribed and later erased. He finds a more adequate metaphor in the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’, a children’s toy consisting of a thin sheet of clear plastic covering a waxen board. Using a stylus, the user can press on the celluloid sheet and this action produces a dark trace observable on the celluloid. When the sheet is lifted away, the dark trace disappears. Like a blackboard, the mystic writing pad can be erased. However, the inscription leaves a permanent mark in the waxen board and is a still legible trace of what was written. Freud’s vision of memory resonates with his conceptualization of the conscious (the dark traces on celluloid) and unconscious mind (the permanent inscriptions on the waxen board). Memory theorists Michael Rossington and Anne Whitehead describe Freud’s mystic writing pad as a “performative force which extends beyond the analytical, so that the essay itself is an act at once of inscription and reinscription, or writing and erasure, of remembering and forgetting” (Rossington & Whitehead, 2003, 94).
There is a great description of Freud’s theories and their application to hypertext at the Electronic Labyrinth website, http://elab.eserver.org/hfl0257.html.
The Memory Boom & Postmodern Theory
Before moving from late modernity to the postmodern era, I think it pertinent to note that the development of memory studies, the articulation of (and debates over) collective memory (discussed in the next section), and the emergence of postmodern theory coincide with renewed interest in the work of archives and the growth in archival literature throughout the twentieth century. As Joan Schwartz and Terry Cook (2002) point out, archives have incredible power over memory and the scholarship that arises from archival collections helps shape our autobiographical and cultural identities. Archival scholars such as Brien Brothman (1993; 1997; 1999), Carolyn Heald (1996), and Terry Cook (2001), have written about the challenges that archives face in the postmodern world and the need to revisit positivist thinking about archival methodology. …. Has challenged the use of the term ‘archival science’ altogether, suggesting that, although the archival methodologies can be rigorous and directive, the process of appraisal and the application of arrangement and descriptions standards are inherently subjective. Archives are social constructs shaped through time and space by the people who keep them. Verne Harris (…) has also drawn from postmodern theorists Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault to bring new insight to the work that archives and archivists do. More and more archivists are coming to terms with the new reality that we cannot hide behind objectivity and neutrality, but must admit our own influence on the collections we keep and how we share these with the world. Archives are social constructions and the work of archivists is shaped by the social contexts in which we perform our tasks. It is no surprise that postmodern thought, which emphasizes the plurality of perspective, collective memory, which challenges the singular historical (public) narrative, and archival scholarship have grown up together. Archives provide the corroborating evidence for the development of counter-narrative and these records can be interpreted in any number of ways.
It is not just in the relatively small universe of archival literature that the troika of collective memory, postmodernism, and archives intersect. The concepts have been picked up in the disciplines of computer science (at least in semantics), philosophy, history, cultural studies, media studies, and other areas of humanities research. Sociology, archaeology, anthropology and many of the ‘hard’ sciences have also turned their attention to the power of archives. It is now quite common to discuss archives as both tangible and philosophical entities, whether or not we agree on the meaning of the term. Even the literatures of business studies and economics refer to concepts such as ‘corporate memory’ and ‘the corporate archive’ (…). This archival turn and a renewed interest in memory have been sparked in no small part by the transition from modern positivist thinking to post-structuralism and postmodern thinking.
Michael Rossington and Anne Whitehead (2007) have traced the development of memory studies and the memory boom in their book, Theories of Memory. Originally published as a reader for their course on memory at Johns Hopkins University, the edited anthology now serves as a thorough entry point into the vast and multi-disciplinary literature on memory. According to Rossington and Whitehead, the study of memory forces the removal of the mind-body dualism that has dominated modern thought for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rossington and Whitehead draw on the work of British philosopher Mary Warnock. Writing on morality, education and the mind, Warnock (1987) distinguishes between ‘habit memory’, which can be learned by both humans and non-humans as a skill, response or mode of behavior, and ‘conscious memory’, which involves the recalling and recollecting of past experiences. Recollecting occurs at the intersection of the individual and culture, and memories that are recalled are shaped and interpreted through this cultural lens. Memory is both physiological and psychological; it is individual and collective. Memory has elements of emotion, sub-consciousness, consciousness and rote pattern-making. It is integral to the development and maintenance of personal identity, but cannot be separated from its social contexts.
As Rossington and Whitehead note, the inclusion of the terms ‘heritage’, and ‘memory’ were in the 2005 update to Raymond Williams’ classic study Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (first published in 1976) suggests a renewed interest in memory. Since the late 1980s, the breadth and volume of literature on memory has also grown at a startling pace. This ‘memory boom’ has coincided (and not coincidentally) with the rise of postmodern thought that challenges the notion of a singular history, and the technology boom, which ahs produced novel ways to document experiences. The growth in memory literature has also coincided with the fall o the USSR, the Berlin Wall, and other symbols of trauma that have left the world wondering how best to rebuild the lost heritage of peoples affected by, for example, the Holocaust, the Rwandan Genocide and the Cambodian Killing Fields. The concept of collective memory responds to this need and in doing so, challenges the singular histories that were once held so dear.
Collective Memory
First conceived by French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1859-1917), the concept of collective memory was fully articulated by Durkheim’s protégé Maurice Halbwachs (1877-1945). Halbwachs was greatly influenced by his participation in the Great War as a War Ministry officer, his meeting Durkheim in 1905 in France, and his subsequent return to Germany to teach sociology at the University of Strasbourg. In 1935, he was called to the Sorbonne, where he taught sociology and mentored Durkheim’s nephew, Marcel Mauss. Although Halbwachs became Professeur de Psychologie Collective at the Collége de France in 1944, one of the country’s highest honours, his interest in the work of German philosopher Karl Marx (1818-1887) and sympathy for socialist causes led to his arrest by the Gestapo after the Nazi occupation of Paris and he was deported to Buchenwald. He died in a concentration camp of dysentery the following year. Halbwachs most important contirubtion to sociology, La Mémoire collective (On Collective Memory), was published posthumously in 1950 with the assistance of his widow and the Centre d'études sociologiques. In La Mémoire collective, Halbwachs advanced the theory that societies have a collective memory that is dependent on the frameworks of space, time and culture within which a group is situated in a society. Thus, group memory exists outside of the lives beyond the individual and intersects with and shapes autobiographical memory. As a result, an individual learns to understand the past through a cultural lens ground by socio-historical consciousness. Likely because Halbwachs was witness to the atrocities of fascism, Nazism and other nation-building enterprises, he developed an anti-historical approach and embraced memory as a way to challenge singular historical narratives. For Halbwachs, memory was not a “primitive and sacred” form of historical consciousness, but rather an opportunity to counter master narratives that silenced and oppressed marginalized voices in the name of nation building. Jewish scholar Yosef Yerushalmi (1932-2009) and French historian Pierre Nora (1931- ) have also responded to and engaged with Halbwachs’ work on collective memory, creating a watershed moment for memory literature.
The antihistorical tendency of memory studies has also emerged out of poststructuralism, which describes a number of critical theories that take up the position that identities are not essential categories, but events in language (Rossington & Whitehead 9). Many poststructuralist theories also challenged memory as a essential category related to conceptions of identity. Consequently, the poststructuralist paradigm offers sustained and close readings of orthodox understandings of memory and memory construction that are useful for memory scholars. Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), for example, drew on Freud’s notion that the unconscious is a text and argued that this text is comprised of interwoven traces that can only be recovered through supplementary interpretation. That is, memory cannot be easily retrieved and reconstituted, but is an interpretation of traces held in the subconscious (“Freud and the Scene of Writing” 1978). Michel Foucault (1926-1984) built upon the work of Nietzsche to argue that history was not a simple path from origin to culmination, but that it was unstable and malleable. In his 1971 essay, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” , Foucault claimed that a genealogical analysis could “counter history by drawing out the discontinuity and instability at the heart of identity” (Rossington & Whitehead, 10).
