Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies

The nature of collective memory

Is there such a thing as collective memory, and if so, how is it to be explained? The locus classicus of the notion is the work of Maurice Halbwachs. Halbwachs is mentioned in a number of places in this anthology, but what is not remarked on, and what has important implications for how to construe the subject matter of the field of memory studies, is a certain vacillation in what he means by the term.

On one hand, Halbwachs stresses that even what appear to be purely personal memories can only function within a collective context. The groups to which individuals belong, he argues, provide them with the materials for memory and make it possible for individuals to remember in a coherent and persistent fashion. These materials, called the “social frameworks” of memory, embody norms, traditions, and patterns of social relations that condition and inform personal memories. (An excellent illustration of the role of social frameworks in the construction of personal memories is provided in Chapter 33. Describing the stories that survivors of the 2005 London bombing tell of their experiences, Brown, Allen, and Reavy conclude, “Over time, personal memories become collectively shaped as they accommodate and respond to both the memories of others and to broader narrative frameworks” (p. 439).) Memory, in this construal, belongs to individuals, although the content and form of these memories are influenced by the groups to which they belong and the people with whom they interact. While much of Halbwach’s discussion of collective memory is actually about individual memory socially conditioned, he also wants to attribute memories to groups themselves. For example, in On Collective Memory, he distinguishes between social frameworks and genuinely collective memory as follows: “One may say that the individual remembers by placing himself in the perspective of the group, but one may also affirm that the memory of the group realizes and manifests itself in individual memories” (Halbwachs, 1992: p. 40). Collective memory in this sense presents a philosophical problem for the field of social memory studies in that it raises questions, including how groups themselves, as distinguished from the collection of individuals who belong to them, can and do remember.

Some writers on the subject of collective memory have denied the legitimacy of the notion altogether, maintaining that it is an unhelpful and often misleading metaphor. In my view, however, which is shared by the authors in this collection, there is nothing spurious about this notion, although it requires considerable unpacking. (The title of Chapter 5, “Against Memory,” might suggest an exception, but in fact Jeffrey Goldfarb is only following Nietzsche here in arguing that “the social work needed to forget is sometimes as important as the work needed to remember” (p. 62).) First, unpacking is needed because collective memories are properties of collectives and there are collectives of different sorts, including nations, communities, families, marriages, and organizations. (Organizations have a decisional structure that more loosely or fluidly structured collectives lack. See Thomas Eberle’s excellent discussion of organizational memories in Chapter 9.) Second, collective memory needs unpacking because it refers to both shared memories that are formed through and live in processes of communication and interaction—what Jan and Aleida Assmann call “communicative memory”—and those that are embodied in what Pierre Nora calls lieux de memoire, in the media, institutions, and practices by which groups construct and represent a shared past—what they call “cultural memory.” Collective memory is thus indeterminate in two ways: the type of collective at issue is not specified nor is it specified if the memory refers to events that occurred within the lifespan of living generations or to events that are outside living memory.

Such indeterminacy demands clarification of the notion of collective memory, but it is not sufficient reason to reject it completely. To be sure, none of these collectives has memories as individuals do: collectives do not have minds of their own, separate and independent of the minds of the individuals who comprise them. Nevertheless, a plausible case can be made that there is a difference between collective and individual memories, a difference that partly consists in the fact that the former comprises memories that individuals have as members of a group with which they identify. This does not, however, completely answer the question I raised above, namely, what is it that in all these instances of collective memory explains their collective character? That is, what makes them the memories of the group itself to which they belong? The Handbook takes a few steps toward answering this difficult but conceptually central question, but much more work remains to be done.

According to Barry Schwartz, whose essay (Chapter 1) is one of two that provides the most sustained analysis of the concept of collective memory (Chapter 6 by Ann Rigney is the other), it

refers to the distribution throughout society of what individuals know, believe, and feel about the past, how they judge the past morally, how closely they identify with it, and how much they are inspired by it as a model for their conduct and identity. (p. 10)

How should we understand what he means by this? We can start by noting that there are two senses in which memories can belong to a group. First, we might attribute memories to a whole group because each and every member of the group has the same memories. Collective memory, so conceived, is simply the sum of all the individual memories. Second, memories might be ascribable to a group but not to every, or even most, of its individual members. We might say that the memory of the collective is more than the sum of the memories of the individuals who comprise it. Which sense does Schwartz intend? It seems the second, because “distributed” is not an accurate description of the character of collective memory in the first sense and because he goes on to assert that collective memory is “an emergent entity, a social fact connecting separate and often distant communities” (p. 11). Collective memory is an emergent entity, I take it, precisely because it is not equivalent to individual memories simply summed together. The idea of an emergent property may be a fruitful way to analyze collective memory, but this will depend on whether and how the notion of emergence is explained. Unfortunately, the essay does not elaborate, nor do any of the other essays in this volume address this important theoretical question with the analytic rigor it requires. Rigney, whose essay is theoretically one of the more interesting in the volume, defines collective memory as “shared recollections of the past that rely on media and are linked reflexively to collective identity” (p. 67). But nagging questions remain. How are recollections shared? Are shared memories the same as the memories of a group, and if not, do we need something in addition to shared memories to account for collective memory?

Even if we are not entirely clear about the constitution of collective memory, we are likely to have a better idea of what it is not, namely, history. The relationship between collective memory and history is a conceptual issue that Maurice Halbwachs, Pierre Nora, Aleida Assmann, and many others in memory studies, including some in this volume, address. Roughly speaking, history uses empirical evidence to explain aspects of the past in accordance with standards of scientific method. By contrast, collective memory is bound to normative judgments about the past and enters into the group’s self-understanding and identity. Collective memories have affective, motivational, and moral properties that history, unless taken up by collective memory and transformed by it, lacks. This basic distinction between collective memory and history is amply illustrated by the essays in this anthology. They show how the struggles over collective memory are not about accuracy the way an historian understands it, as much as they reveal deeper issues of meaning and identity that hinge on what and how the past is remembered. At the same time, as Schwartz notes, collective memory and history are not two independent modes of access to the past. To the contrary, they supplement and correct each other. On one hand, collective memory deepens and broadens historical understanding, making it less impersonal and abstract. On the other, history is “one of [memory’s] critical points of reference” (p. 19). Collective memory is vulnerable to historical criticism and revision to the extent that accuracy is one of the criteria by which the quality of memory is judged.

Collective memory is not only answerable to history and subject to historical critique. It can also be contested and amended by a process that David Inglis calls the “trans-nationalization of memory” (p. 149), which he describes at length in his important Chapter 13. This is an increasingly important phenomenon in the age of globalization that represents a challenge to the assumed link between collective memory and the nation. Traditionally, collective memories of events of national significance have been thought to belong to the nation. Their natural home, as well as their object, has been the nation. However, as Inglis argues, the intensified global movements of people, knowledge, and capital have “engendered particular social spaces for transnational actors to engage in practices of memory” (p. 149), practices that can challenge the nation’s ability to contain and police collective memory. What emerges is a new kind of collective memory, a hybrid of the national and the global, that is more complex and possibly more truthful than its pre-globalized predecessor.

A second-order question about the field of memory studies

I want to briefly turn now to the field of memory studies and to what this volume suggests about its current makeup. Here, I would like to follow Jeffrey Olick’s discussion of the sites of memory studies (Chapter 4) but take it one step further. According to Olick, the disciplines that have contributed to memory studies are psychology, sociology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, cultural and literary studies, and history, and this volume provides examples from most of them illustrating where the field currently stands. What is missing from this list is philosophy, and as a philosopher myself, I regard this as a serious problem. A few philosophers are listed among the book’s contributors, but they are vastly outnumbered by representatives of the other disciplines.

Let me mention just two areas where there can be fruitful collaboration between memory studies and philosophy. First, accounts of collectivity and group agency by philosophers such as Margaret Gilbert, Michael Bratman, Christopher Kutz, and Raimo Tuomelo could profitably be brought to bear on the question of the nature of collective memory. They could help answer questions such as the following: What constitutes the phenomenon of collectivity? What differentiates types of collectives from one another? What would a social ontology of memory look like? A second general area that is not explored in this collection is the ethics of collective memory, and moral philosophers can make a significant contribution to this. Here, questions that could benefit from philosophical examination include the following: What specific ethical or moral criteria are there for determining when there is too much or too little memory in the life of an individual or group? What are the moral underpinnings of a duty to remember? Carmen Leccardi’s essay on memory and responsibility (Chapter 10) does explicitly raise ethical concerns, but her account of the deep connections between the two, while extremely suggestive, could be elaborated much further.

Arguably, it says more about the current state of the field of memory studies than about the shortcomings of this volume that these and other philosophical questions are not pursued. Indeed, it is curious and disappointing that the literature in memory studies has so far engaged little with philosophical work in social ontology and moral philosophy and that with relatively few exceptions philosophers have not been particularly concerned about the metaphysics and morality of memory. That being the case, I would like to end with a suggestion for future scholarly work: if memory studies is to be the true multi-disciplinary field that it aspires to be and that the editors of this anthology aim to forge, then philosophers have to become more involved in the study of the nature and evaluative significance of collective memory and its practices and processes.