History and memory

Geoffrey Cubitt

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781847798893
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia britannica

Supplies an accessible and readable introduction to recent work on memory in history and other disciplines, and contributes to debate on the nature and significance of history as an intellectual discipline.

1

HISTORY AND MEMORY: AN IMAGINED RELATIONSHIP

If social memory is the name we give to the processes by which knowledge and awareness of the social past are generated and maintained in human societies, then history, as an intellectual discipline geared to the production and extension of such a knowledge and such an awareness, is obviously part of social memory. And insofar as individual memory also contributes to social memory processes, history has an engagement with individual memory. But ‘memory’ can also be considered as a discursive term that has been repeatedly, but variously, deployed in the debates that have arisen over history’s character as an intellectual activity and over the status of the ‘historical knowledge’ that is its ostensible product. Here, memory’s meanings have often been elusive and ambiguous, but her potency as a rhetorical term has been considerable and sometimes disruptive. One effect of the recent turn to memory in historical studies and in contiguous disciplines has been to bring the issue of history’s supposed relationship to memory once again to the forefront of attention. My aim in this chapter, however, will be less to review a current state of debate than to explore the implications of some longer patterns of argument. For if (as Kerwin Lee Klein puts it) ‘the emergence of memory promises to rework history’s boundaries’, this is not only because, as he points out, ‘history’ is a word that always ‘finds its meanings in large part through its counter-concepts and synonyms’,¹ but also because history and memory have long been terms fashioned in each other’s shadows. I want to start with some general remarks about why this may be so.

Past and present

The broader conceptual context within which the twin vocabularies of history and of memory take on meaning is, of course, that of discourse on the relationships of past to present in human societies. The variety and complexity of meanings that have been assigned to these vocabularies reflect the existence of two radically different ways of describing the basic structure of this relationship. In the first of these, the relationship is understood to be cumulative and causal: the past is everything that precedes the present, and that is deemed, through an infinitely complex set of connections and interactions, to have contributed to making the present what it is – making it this present rather than another. The past, defined in this sense, has a substantial existence that is independent of present consciousness: indeed our present consciousness of the past is to be viewed from this angle simply as one of the features of the present that things in the past have combined to produce. Past is linked to present in a continuous flow of development, and the present is thus to be thought of less as a vantage-point from which the past can be summarized and assessed than as simply the latest moment in an inexorably advancing stream of historical happenings and interactions.

In the second understanding, the relationships are reversed: it is not the past that produces the present, but – figuratively at least – the present that produces the past, through an effort of the creative or analytical imagination. The past, in this understanding, is not the totality of all past happenings – for this is a totality we can never hope to apprehend – but the past that we have a ‘sense’ of, the past as it exists in current awareness, a past constructed through the complex mixture of reflection and recollection, research and imaginative representation, that allows us the feeling of conscious retrospection. The past that is thus constructed may be connected in certain ways to the substantially existing past that the first understanding refers to; at least, the belief that it is connected to such a past is implied by the conviction that what we are registering is a retrospective awareness rather than a fantasy. In its inherent selectiveness, however, and in the kinds of significance that give it meaning, it is to be regarded not as the continuation of the past that has been, but as the past that makes sense for the present.

The central problem for any effort to appreciate the temporal dimension of human existence is to bridge the gap between these two understandings. It seems essential to grasp, on the one hand, the ways in which our retrospective constructions of the past are themselves historically conditioned – shaped, in other words, by the very flow of past events and experiences at which their selective and creative backward gaze is directed. But it seems important, also, to grasp the converse, namely that the development and articulation of ‘the sense of the past’ makes a contribution to the unfolding historical process that is often crucial. It is here that the discourses of history and of memory, in their prevailing modern forms, come into play. Each of these discourses straddles the gap between the two understandings of the past-present relationship that have just been outlined. Looking at their different ways of doing so gives us a possible clue to what may be significant in debates about the history–memory relationship.

The discourse of history, as it has classically been elaborated in connection with the modern historical discipline, posits a separation of past and present that is overcome through a particular kind of critical encounter. The separation is evident in the two quite different senses that the term ‘history’ is recognized as bearing, in the first of which history denotes the continuous stream of happenings that constitutes ‘the past’, and in the second of which it denotes the accounts of the past that historians produce as a result of their critical labours in the present. For the more radical critics of the historical discipline, the relationship which ‘history as written’ bears to ‘history as lived’ is intrinsically problematic: since the past is gone for ever, our reconstructions of it are unverifiable and therefore intrinsically arbitrary.² For defenders of the discipline, however, a truly significant knowledge of the past is made possible by the historian’s regular and repeated application of critical methods to the (usually mainly documentary) objects that are the surviving traces of past events and experiences. Historical knowledge has its foundations in the magic of these critical encounters, in which intellects grounded in the present interrogate the debris that the past has bequeathed. This is how the modern professional discourse of history bridges the cognitive gap that otherwise separates past and present.

Yet, as historians themselves are generally well aware, this is obviously an incomplete account of what contributes to the production of historical knowledge. Focusing on the historian’s magic moments of critical interpretation, it ignores the complex longer processes by which these moments have been prepared. Historical sources are not just evidential objects that passively await the historian’s critical scrutiny: often, at least, their production and survival reflect earlier efforts either to hold on to elements of a past or present reality that might be in danger of being forgotten, or to influence the retrospective judgements of posterity. Historians, for their part, are not just the critical agents of a present consciousness that seeks to overcome its disconnection from a past that has definitively receded. They, and their skills, and the prior assumptions about the past (and about things and life in general) that guide their application of those skills, are all products of the historical process, caught up in the very flow of events and experiences whose earlier phases they seek to recover and to interpret. We are all relativists now, at least to this extent: we know that our historical knowledge and understanding and curiosity – and indeed our conceptions of historical method – are themselves historically positioned. But once we recognize this, we require a more fluid conception of the production of historical knowledge than the conventional professional discourse of history has tended to offer – a conception that allows us more fully to explore the subtle transformative processes by which ‘history as lived’ and ‘history as written’ (or history as understood) influence each other’s production.

It is at this point that memory becomes a seductive concept for historians to think about. This is partly because we may see memory itself – the phenomena that the term is commonly used to designate – as playing a significant part in the broader processes that have just been described: historians’ approaches to historical study are influenced by what they themselves remember, and memory operates on numerous levels in the transmission both of the information that ends up by being encapsulated in historical source materials and of the ideas that shape the way these materials are interpreted. But it is also because memory as a discursive concept offers a facility for thinking freshly about the process more generally. In its commonest acceptations at least, ‘memory’ seems to capture a sense of the fluidity that the conventional research-focused discourse of professional history tends to exclude, but that a broader appreciation of the production of historical knowledge seems to require. Where the discourse of history poses the question of how the present can achieve knowledge of a past from which it is separated, the discourse of memory posits a more intimate or continuous connection between past experience and present consciousness. At its most obvious, the continuity is personal: the continuity of the individual mind which retains and later reproduces the memory of its past impressions and experiences. But even where – as in talk of ‘collective’ or ‘social’ memory – the concept of memory is less precisely focused on the individual, the implication is of the existence of structures – whether mental or social – that have a power to retain and to transmit, to ensure the persistence of certain impressions, and to impart a moulding to present consciousness through the medium of such survivals. Such an emphasis need not exclude the idea that memory transforms and reconstructs the past that it remembers: such a transformation is presented, however, as the effect not of the focused critical engagements that are the hallmark of historical study, but of an evolving process of reflection rooted in the continuities of human existence. The discourse of memory haunts and shadows the discourse of history, now offering to complete it and reinforce it, to expose its inadequacies and fragile pretensions. It is in this ambiguous relationship that the more concrete arguments that historians and others have used in debating the history–memory relationship are rooted.

History and memory: connections and separations

Two opposing tendencies can be detected in these past debates: on the one hand, a desire to associate the idea of history with that of memory; on the other, a desire to disconnect them or differentiate them. A quick sampling of writings on the nature of history by historians and philosophers produces a host of passages in which the ideas of history and of memory appear closely connected. ‘The parts of human learning’, wrote Francis Bacon, ‘have reference to the three parts of Man’s Understanding […]: History to his Memory, Poesy to his Imagination, and Philosophy to his Reason.’³ Modern authors, without replicating Bacon’s general categories, have often seemed to echo his assumption that history is somehow characterized by its relationship to memory – that it is, in effect, the intellectual form under which memory spills over into organized knowledge. ‘History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory’, wrote the philosopher George Santayana.⁴ John Lukacs writes of history as ‘the remembered past’, Peter Burke of ‘history as social memory’, Patrick Hutton of ‘history as an art of memory’.⁵ For Ludmilla Jordanova, ‘the writing of history is about the transmission of memories’; indeed, ‘the practice of history is, after all, a highly specialized form of commemoration’.⁶ Many things separate these authors, but all insist on a rhetorical coupling of history and memory as concepts: history is an extension of memory, or a form of memory, or a codification or arrangement of memory, or at the least is somehow meaningfully similar or analogous to memory.

A similar trawl, however, produces a contrasting string of quotations. For the philosopher Leon Goldstein, ‘what we assert on the basis of memory is not asserted as established in the historical way’.⁷ For David Lowenthal, ‘History differs from memory not only in how knowledge of the past is acquired and validated but also in how it is transmitted, preserved and altered.’⁸ For Michael Bentley, the difference amounts to outright opposition: ‘history is precisely non-memory, a systematic discipline which seeks to rely on mechanisms and controls quite different from those which memory triggers and often intended to give memory the lie’.⁹ For these authors, memory is, so to speak, history’s defining ‘other’ – a contrasting and radically different form of knowledge.

The juxtaposition of these two sets of quotations, taken unashamedly out of context, no doubt conceals as much as it reveals: it ignores a host of qualifying nuances and obscures the fact that both key terms have diverse possible meanings, so that ostensibly similar statements coupling them can sometimes turn out to mean quite different things. The juxtaposition does, however, reveal a tension at least at the level of rhetorical formulations, which can alert us to deeper cleavages and ambiguities in the way that history has been thought about.

It is not hard, on one level, to see how such a tension arises. One does not have to think for long about what historians do and about the conditions under which they do it to begin to perceive, on the one hand, ways in which the production of historical knowledge intersects with activities of remembering, and on the other, ways in which it may diverge from those activities. One of the commonest arguments asserting the connectedness of history and memory affirms the fundamentally memory-based character of the (usually documentary) source materials on which historians base their claims to knowledge. History differs from other branches of scholarly inquiry, the argument implies, in having an object of study – the past – that has already gone for ever. Inherently unobservable, past events and circumstances can be approached only through the memories of them that have been encapsulated in documentary source materials. The knowledge that historians are involved in producing is a knowledge at second-hand, to which the memories of others make a decisive contribution. Such an argument contains an element of truth, which will not, however, bear the kind of weight that the bolder exponents of the ‘history as memory’ view have sometimes sought to place upon it. Historians do depend heavily on documentary sources, and sources of this kind do require memory of some kind for their production. The scribe who records a trial proceeding must possess a procedural memory of the techniques of writing, coupled with the kind of short-term memory that enables him to retain the impressions of each moment for long enough to commit them to record. These requirements are, however, not in themselves sufficient to give to such a source the kind of status as a personal or autobiographical recollection of past events or experiences that would be necessary to support the assertion that history is essentially a reworking of other people’s memories. No doubt, sources embodying such recollections – eye-witness accounts, diaries, memoirs, etc. – are often important for historians, but they are seldom the only sources available, and need not always be the ones that do most to influence the historian’s perceptions and lines of argument: economic historians may be as interested in account books and industrial archaeology, military historians in manuals of infantry tactics.

Source materials are, in any case, not the only ingredients in the production of historical knowledge and historical understanding: we must consider also the mental instincts and procedures that are put to work in the use of such materials. The specification of these is, however, another area in which strikingly different emphases have been apparent. These can be approached by briefly contrasting positions adopted by two still influential philosophical thinkers on historical knowledge, R. G. Collingwood and Wilhelm Dilthey.

For Collingwood, history was radically dissimilar from memory. This was so ‘because history is a certain kind of organized and inferential knowledge, and memory is not organized, not inferential at all’:

If I say ‘I remember writing a letter to So-and-so last week’, that is a statement of memory, but it is not an historical statement. But if I can add ‘and my memory is not deceiving me; because here is his reply’, then I am basing a statement about the past on evidence; I am talking history.¹⁰

For Collingwood, then, historical knowledge was distinguishable by its obligatory relationship to citable evidence. The inferences that a historian drew from the evidence might be mistaken or contestable, but the possibility of showing the evidence on which they were based brought them into the public arena: historical knowledge was, in principle, shareable and verifiable. Memory, by contrast, was entirely subjective: the knowledge derived from it had no point of reference outside the personal consciousness of the rememberer, who alone could experience its authority. The moment remembered knowledge was justified by reference to external evidence, and thus became admissible as a contributor...