Is there memory in the head,in the wild?

The question of existence

Although you might think that one of us, by virtue of our disciplinary background, is more likely to raise the question of existence, we both have been asking: can we imagine memory outside the head in the same way as memory inside the head? We are not alone. Journalist and author David Rieff (2016), for instance, is adamant that memory does not exist outside the heads of individuals, and is not the property of groups or communities or social systems:

Quite simply, the world does not have memories; nor do nations; nor do groups of people. Individuals remember, full stop. (pp. 54–55)

To understand individuals as remembering in motivated and wilful ways and as possessing such memories over time requires us only to recognise these goal-driven needs and uses in our own minds. But to imagine a group or society as having and using memories in similar ways requires greater reliance on the part of the modifier, rather than the isolated concept, of memory: collective, public, cultural, organisational and so on.

The location and direction of memory seem important here: where does it start and where does it go? And, thus, what are the mechanisms by which memory is translated from one domain to the next, from head to wild and back again? There is much written, for example, on the idea of cognition being ‘extended’ beyond the mind and outside the head via various external scaffolds, be these objects, artefacts or other people, and then circuiting or looping back to the self again (Barnier et al., 2008; Clark, 2008; Menary, 2010). In this way, there is a continuousness to the individual’s aides memoires, constantly available to be called upon such that the brain is never alone.

But locating memory (solely) in the wild seems an even more challenging task. Consider, for instance, the ways in which the social sciences and humanities in the past decade increasingly have characterised memory in terms of its supposed mobility, as ‘mobile’ (Hirsch, 2014), ‘travelling’ (Erll, 2011) and ‘multidirectional’ (Rothberg, 2009). Its movement is considered as important as the memory itself, perhaps even more important. However, as the media of the digital era have become increasingly networked and accessible, it is not so much the movement of memory that defines it, nor where it is located in time and space, but that its essential quality is its ‘connectivity’ (Hoskins, 2011) and its working ‘on-the-fly’ (Hoskins, 2014). Memory in the digital wild seems everywhere but nowhere.

Even if it is not settled where memory is when it is outside the head, and despite Reiff’s scepticism and the conceptual confusion he points to, we see value in thinking of both memory in the head and in the wild. But are they equivalent kinds of memory?

The question of equivalence

Perhaps unlike the memories of individuals, the value and force of the most common form of memory said to exist in the wild – collective memory – is often couched in terms of moral obligation. The need for remembrance most notably is attached to a belief in memory as a guardian of the future. For example, the fourth stanza from Laurence Binyon’s poem ‘For the Fallen’, which was published in the opening year of the First World War and is incorporated in the ‘Ode of Remembrance’, has been ritualised in memorial ceremonies throughout the world:

They shall grow not old as we that are left grow old

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn

At the going down of the sun, and in the morning

We will remember them.

The persistence of knowledge about past human suffering, particularly from genocide and warfare, is meant to diminish the likelihood of such acts being repeated via ‘lessons learned’: ‘lest we forget’. Thus, the twentieth century’s era of mass warfare ushered in a kind of moral contract of mass remembrance; a collective motivation embodied in the ‘memory boom(s)’ (Hoskins, 2018b; Winter, 2006, 2017) to officially and publicly honour the millions dead and to instil lasting reminders that help prevent such carnage again.

It follows then that, unlike individual forgetting, ‘a collective failure of remembrance is often presented as if it were an invitation to moral or political disaster’ (Rieff, 2016: 55). Perhaps the difference in part is a matter of scale. The weight, strength or burden of memory carried by the group or society is often seen as greater than the individual, and thus requires special attention and/or protection.

But for millions of individuals, they remembered their individual experiences of war far too well, far too intrusively and far too vividly. At other times they denied, silenced or did not speak of their individual memories. There are lessons here too, otherwise why would memory track our past so assiduously and project us into the future so compellingly? But are these forms of public and private remembering and forgetting equivalent? David Rieff (2016) argues at least that they should not be considered so. In fact, he argues that individual memory is the only fundamentally real memory, and that the idea of collective memory has no right to be held up as somehow more worthy:

… collective memory is often spoken of as if it were indeed on a par with individual, which is to say genuine, memory, and not infrequently, though almost never explicitly, as if it morally outranked it. (pp. 54–55)

Rieff (2016) challenges the powerful moral impulse to collectively remember and asks if at some times and in some places it actually is too risky and comes at too high a price than merely forgetting (pp. 57–58). Here he refers to abuses of collective memory in relation to the bloody conflicts he covered as a journalist around the world, and not least in Bosnia, the subject of his book Slaughterhouse.

Considering the moral stakes of remembering – whether as individuals or as groups – is one way to think about equivalence of memory in the head and in the wild. Another way is in terms of mechanisms. Are the mechanisms of remembering and forgetting in the head recognisable in the mechanisms of remembering and forgetting in the wild? That is, are the memories of individuals and groups traceable from one to the other? Can we scale-up individual memory via known mechanisms? Can we trace back collective memories to individuals? Or is there a gap between them that we cannot yet bridge?

The question of traceability

The answer to this question of traceability depends on who you ask. Cognitive psychologists, who traditionally focus on the memories of individuals, would not usually attempt to scale-up their concepts and methods from individuals to dyads to small groups and larger collectives (Barnier et al., 2008). But in work 30 years ago, social psychologist Daniel Wegner proposed his theory of transactive memory. He argued that people in intimate relationships become cognitively interdependent and form joint memory systems. Their shared memories are the result of individual memory mechanisms working in concert. But Wegner also believed that transactive memory has emergent properties that are not traceable to any of the individuals (Wegner, 1986). More recently, Alin Coman, a cognitive psychologist who is part of a surging literature on ‘collaborative remembering’ in psychology (Meade et al. (eds), 2018), has argued that macro-level social processes such as collective memory can and should be traced back to individual-level psychological processes; to individual patterns of memory accessibility albeit influenced by social interactions such as in conversations (Coman et al., 2016).

Meanwhile, in the social sciences, some scholars would argue that group memories are not traceable to individuals because of the ways in which the collective transforms individual memories. This view is captured well, for instance, in the writings of Maurice Halbwachs (1980 (1950), seen as the founding father of the study of collective memory:

Don’t we believe that we relive the past more fully because we no longer represent it alone, because we see it now as we saw it then, but through the eyes of another as well? (p. 23)

According to Halbwachs (1980 (1950), the stability, strength and endurance of collective memory is not some accident, but depends upon ‘an interest, a shared body of concerns and ideas’ (p. 119).

Motivation then, which is a key driver of individual remembering and forgetting, also shapes memories held or lost by the group. However, it is difficult to articulate or make visible collective memory as some kind of continuous or internal self-state, in the same way that personal identity is intimately intertwined with a deeply felt sense of autobiography, of a coherent, emergent trajectory of self. Our individual selves are fundamentally constituted from a belief in an inner and core memory, which smooths (rather than displays) its holes and contradictions. Memory in the wild, by contrast, is never reducible to a sole arbiter. Contradictions and contestations sometimes are never resolved, but compete in plain sight, as with the growing ‘radicalisation’ of memory in the United States, where ‘rememberers’ are deeply divided over the function of markers and monuments of a racist past (Hoskins, 2018a).

Returning to our three essential questions then, does memory in the wild exist? We think it does, but it is challenging to locate. Is memory in the head and in the wild equivalent? If we mean are they motivationally or morally equivalent, there are cases for arguing yes or no. Perhaps the better question to ask is: does (individual or group) remembering or forgetting achieve its functional end – of learning lessons and guiding behaviour – whether for individuals or for collectives? Can moral weight be claimed for memory in the wild if it cannot perform the role ascribed to it? Finally, how are memories in the head and in the wild related? This is a crucial question for building a bridge between our disciplinary approaches. If we believe that these forms of memory inhabit different conceptual universes and are not traceable from one to the other, then is there value in our dialogue? If, however, we believe that although not the same, they are similar, then we have much to learn from both our distinct traditions and our interdisciplinary conversations.