Thursday, January 21, 2010

Memory and History :phenomenon and construct.

“…modern history aims at constructing one unified systematic view of the past and then tends to become normative for the present and prescriptive for the future, whereas historical memory preserves many events as pictures and (re)produces many narratives and stories about the past without attempting to evoke an epimyth”.

Dmitri Nikulin battles with the ideas of memory and history in the eponymous article, and though I find his arguments on the subject convoluted and contradictory in parts, the article touches upon a lot of interesting theories about the past, the nature of analysis and the nature of mind and being. The above quote seems to illustrate my understanding of the two entities – that history is a construct based on careful analysis and conscious judgment while memory is a subconscious phenomenon that is often more emotional than rational and stems from a deeper part of the human psyche.

Maurice Halbwachs explains that “history…. has to be processed within and by a historical memory that is appropriated by an individual memory, which itself has to be first established within a collective memory”. Thus history is presented as a distillation of a layered process which I believe is analogous to Carl Jung’s discourse on the human mind. The collective memory can be viewed as operating from the unconscious mind - what we as a species tend to remember and the categories we tend to place events in come from a collective experience we are often unaware of and which is embedded in our language, cultural imagery and communal practices. It works at a symbolic level, where the symbol always remains more than the sum of all the words that may describe it because it is not concerned with knowledge but with experience. The individual memory may be seen to work at a subconscious level where a person remembers certain things from the past (personal or otherwise) and is often not sure why he remembers that and not something else. This is obviously influenced by the unconscious collective memory but is also dependant on individual subjectivity. The person’s general interests and inclinations subconsciously affect what is remembered and what is forgotten. The historical memory operates at the conscious cognitive level where the individual or historian analyses the past, and memory itself, from an external point of view in order to develop a thesis that is of public relevance and this is where “significant” memories are separated from “insignificant” ones. This distillation that is the historical memory then forms the basis of the discipline of history.

Pierre Nora of the French Memory School says that “history has confiscated memory” and this new school of history centers around what they call memory sites, which may be material or non material but which evoke the past in ways that traditional modern history has ignored. They stress on plurality, since if history is derived from different memory sites they are bound to be varied in purpose and perspective. Hence, they reiterate the postmodernist anthem, that there is no one teleological universal history or narrative that can explain the past as one comprehensive whole, but that instead there are multiple histories which seek to understand and represent the past as best within the limited scope of their specific contexts. However I disagree with Nikulin’s reading that historians such as Halbwachs or Nora are trying to detach memory from history and establish them as mutually exclusive entities. Even Collingwood - where he says “memory is not history, because history is a certain kind of organized inferential knowledge, and memory is not organized, not inferential at all” - is not, I believe, trying to separate history from memory but is merely distinguishing between the two by enunciating certain dissimilarities in the nature of each. More simply I do not perceive the dichotomy between memory and history which Nikulin seems to be battling with and trying to resolve. To me they are distinct from each other, though a large part of each is mutual since they both deal with the past. Memory is obviously embedded in history, but it is also a lot more than history – it deals with the sensory and the emotional in a way that is impossible for history to encapsulate. Similarly history, though initially distilled from memory, is a lot more than just a selection of memories that have been judged significant. History fulfills cognitive and semiotic purposes that are beyond the scope of mere memory, and those characteristics make the study of history valuable.

Another part of the article, which I found interesting, is where Nikulin talks about “what we remember depends on how we remember” and he makes the very important point that “for a history, preserving an imageless name in historical memory is preferable to keeping an anonymous image”, which I believe is one of the cornerstones of the philosophy of archiving. Since words, either spoken or text are the clearest mode of communication we possess, history whose flesh and blood is interpretative narrative depends upon it more than anything else. It brings to my mind an article by Wolfgang Ernst, who argues that in the digital age archiving can be done purely visually based on digital codes, and a textual narrative can be eventually discarded to form a new language of visual information which is less biased and directive. I remember disagreeing at that point and feeling that for any form of knowledge to be accessible the use of textual narrative is imperative. Thus, since history is a system of knowledge, it is invariably based on text – in input or output. Whereas memory is not based on knowledge and certainly not on any system – and so in memory sometimes a nameless image lingers on much after a whole lists of concrete names and dates and facts may be forgotten.

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