The Politics of Regret

On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility

Jeffrey K. Olick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135909802
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

In the past decade, Jeffrey Olick has established himself as one of the world's pre-eminent sociologists of memory (and, related to this, both cultural sociology and social theory). His recent book on memory in postwar Germany, In the House of the Hangman (University of Chicago Press, 2005) has garnered a great deal of acclaim. This book collects his best essays on a range of memory related issues and adds a couple of new ones. It is more conceptually expansive than his other work and will serve as a great introduction to this important theorist. In the past quarter century, the issue of memory has not only become an increasingly important analytical category for historians, sociologists and cultural theorists, it has become pervasive in popular culture as well. Part of this is a function of the enhanced role of both narrative and representation – the building blocks of memory, so to speak – across the social sciences and humanities. Just as importantly, though, there has also been an increasing acceptance of the notion that the past is no longer the province of professional historians alone. Additionally, acknowledging the importance of social memory has not only provided agency to ordinary people when it comes to understanding the past, it has made conflicting interpretations of the meaning of the past more fraught, particularly in light of the terrible events of the twentieth century.

Olick looks at how catastrophic, terrible pasts – Nazi Germany, apartheid South Africa – are remembered, but he is particularly concerned with the role that memory plays in social structures. Memory can foster any number of things – social solidarity, nostalgia, civil war – but it always depends on both the nature of the past and the cultures doing the remembering. Prior to his studies of individual episodes, he fully develops his theory of memory and society, working through Bergson, Halbwachs, Elias, Bakhtin, and Bourdieu.

Part I

Chapter 1

Introduction

From Collective Memory to the Politics of Regret

The Society of Narratives

In the mid to late 1980s, when I began graduate school, organizations was the watchword for many sociologists in training, particularly at Yale, which was a real center for organization theory. This made a lot of sense. Corporations seemed to be dominating more and more aspects of life, and multinational and nongovernmental organizations were becoming ever more important political forces in the “globalizing” world. Max Weber was clearly the theorist of record, and students were mobilized by Chick Perrow’s (1991) mantra that we now lived in a “society of organizations.”

By the same token, literary theory and philosophy in the prior decades had also been taking a number of dramatic turns — mainly to language and culture. This too made much sense, given the increasing power and complexity of mass media in contemporary life alongside the persistence of sacred rituals — both political and religious — in the midst of the seemingly secularized economy and polity.

For me, the two trends came together in a seminar on symbolic politics taught by David Apter, in which many students were writing papers on activist social movements of various kinds. What struck me as most interesting in that context was that all the movements we were discussing — as well as the more official kinds of political “representation” — were concerned, even seemed obsessed, with stories. Whether the movements were small, local, and haphazard or large, national, and professionalized, movement participants, leaders, and the organizations themselves were investing tremendous time and resources in telling stories about their origins, trajectories, and purposes. These stories usually sought to answer the following sorts of questions: How did the movements come about? What historical events were central reference points? What lessons were learned through these turning points? And what would the future look like? Given the resources they were investing in such stories, even in difficult circumstances or at the cost of other projects, agents of organizations clearly thought such narrative work was exceptionally important.

As much as we live in a society of organizations, then, it seemed to me that it is as true, or even more so, that we live in a society of narratives.¹

The German Case

In my own intellectual narrative, the key turning point through which I emerged from this primordial theoretical soup came when I read a review of a book by the historian Charles Maier (1988) on the so-called German historians’ dispute of 1985–86. Following the return of the Christian Democratic Party to power in West Germany in 1982, a number of neoconservative commentators had become more public with their belief that the centrality of National Socialism in German historical narrative had exceeded its natural life. It was time, they argued, that this particular past pass away (Nolte 1987). If Germany was to be a healthy nation, one prominent historian argued, its natural sympathies would turn not to the victims of the “final solution,” but to the suffering of the German army on the Eastern front (Hillgruber 1986), and German history, Chancellor Helmut Kohl repeatedly intoned, included many highs as well as lows and could not be reduced to those few terrible years of Nazi rule. In contrast, the critical theorist Jürgen Habermas (1987) charged the critics — and the conservative Kohl government, which was also pursuing a number of controversial museum projects at the time — with a sort of conspiracy to rework the foundations of West German political culture. For Habermas, the centrality of Nazi crimes in German historical and political narrative was not only not a barrier to a healthy German national identity, but was its sine qua non. The attempted changes in the national narrative therefore had to be pushed back.

Though this historians’ dispute — and Maier’s (1988) trenchant intellectual history of it — interested me substantively in many regards, what was most important in this first exposure was that this case seemed to provide an especially perspicuous window on what I was trying to understand about narrative and identity. Though writers ranging from David Carr (1991) and Alisdair MacIntyre (1984) to Robert Bellah (1985) and Immanuel Wallerstein (Wallerstein and Balibar 1992) or even the psychologist Robert Coles (1990) were providing me with general statements about the importance of stories to life, here, it seemed, was a place and a way to study the process as a sociologist — not just to make theoretical pronouncements, merely gather examples, or make functionalist assertions but to specify the changing roles of stories in political legitimation and identities. How so?

If narrative is constitutive of identity, an instrument of politics (i.e., rhetoric) and an expression of culture (i.e., representation), what happens when an organization — small or large, family, social movement, or nation-state — cannot tell such stories in an unproblematic fashion? Germany, it seemed to me, was a great case for building sociological theory because the past posed unique problems there. If states and their spokespersons usually tell heroic stories about their collective pasts to underwrite identity and legitimate contemporary programs, what happens when a state does not have recourse to an unproblematic past? All nations, of course, have aspects of their pasts they would prefer not to acknowledge. But the problem seemed much more significant in Germany; given the extent of public discourse about the relationship between the Nazi past and the German present — not least in the historians’ dispute but in virtually every other context of German commentary — this conclusion seemed fairly obvious.

What I found as I began my empirical work on Germany, however, produced a much more complex picture than any of my theoretical apparatus — again, comprised mostly of general assertions about the importance of narrative for identity — had led me to expect or had enabled me to handle. Speakers said an enormous variety of things in different times and places; that variety changed in remarkable ways over time, and rarely was it what a naive observer might have expected such speakers to say, given the verdicts of popular historical consciousness about German guilt. It was at this point that, on the advice of Juan Linz, I first read Maurice Halbwachs (1966, 1992) on collective memory.

Halbwachs’ Legacies

Halbwachs is widely considered the founding father of contemporary collective memory research — and rightly so, even if he often serves as a more totemic than substantive referent in contemporary discussions. Reading Halbwachs provided me not just with a label for what I was interested in — collective memory — but with the conviction that what I was noticing about organizational and national storytelling was indeed a topic for sociology proper, not merely the application of a social metaphor for a fundamentally psychological or individual phenomenon nor something epiphenomenal to real sociological processes. For though Halbwachs did argue that memory is carried largely by individuals, he showed that even the most primally individual memories are socially framed and that, thus, at the limit, the very distinction between individual and social memory is problematic and that memory is no mere byproduct of group existence but is its very lifeblood.

Though the “social frameworks” of memory took up the lion’s share of Halbwachs’s attention, Halbwachs was also unmistakably his teacher’s student: The very term mémoire collective was stamped with the memory of Emile Durkheim’s master concept of conscience collective. As such, Halbwachs’s work on collective memory also drew our attention not only to the social frameworks of individual memory or even to social memory (i.e., the memory of groups) per se but also to collective memories as representations collective, publicly available symbols and meanings about the past — what Jan Assmann (1992) many decades later called cultural, in addition to social and individual, memory. Memory, the Durkheimian Halbwachs implied, is not just individual, nor is it just a binding activity for groups; it is their cultural inheritance, whether actively or passively maintained.

In this way, my reading of Halbwachs also seemed to fit well with what I was finding in the growing and changing literature on political culture, the other obvious place for someone interested in political symbolism, representation, and meaning to turn. In its classical period in the 1950s and 1960s, political scientists largely understood political culture as the aggregate of subjective orientations toward political outcomes.² In other words, different political institutions rested on different attitudes in the population, attitudes about those specific institutions and about wider issues of authority and obligation. The principle agenda of the most important work in this tradition — Almond and Verba’s (1963) The Civic Culture — was to understand what set of orientations supported democratic regimes and what set was more likely associated with authoritarian ones. Political psychology was thus the culture — as a Petri dish to bacteria (i.e., cell culture) — in which political institutions grow.

Nevertheless, in the decade or two before I began thinking about collective memory, political culture theory had undergone something of a revolution. Under the influence of French structuralism and Geertzian anthropology, theorists now questioned whether culture was properly conceptualized as norms, values, and attitudes — in other words, as subjective meanings — rather than as intersubjective or objective symbols. If political culture could be reduced to political psychology, critics asked, what was the point of having a concept of political culture at all (Dittmer 1977; Elkins and Simeon 1979)? As with culture more generally, analysts were now reconceptualizing political culture as meaning systems in which significant symbols were to be understood not as subjective orientations but as parts of objective systems that give meaning to political outcomes without primary reference to whether they appear in any particular proportion of individuals’ minds. The tools of this new political culture analysis thus turned away from survey research and toward structuralist, hermeneutic, and semiotic approaches, in which political culture theory no longer involved measuring the distribution of norms and attitudes but interrogating symbols and the ways their meanings are related to each other (Hunt 1989; Ortner 1999).

This turn in political culture theory fit well, I found, with the more Durkheimian moments in Halbwachs, in which collective memory — the property of groups and a sometimes embodied, sometimes disembodied, cultural inheritance — had an ontological status sui generis. Collective memory, I argue below, is not identical to the memories of a certain percentage of the population but constitutes a social fact in and of itself — though, as I also argue below, we need to be very careful about the transcendentalism implied by this formulation. These theories also helped me think about political memory in Germany, focusing my attention not on what speakers there meant to say with their symbols and words but on what symbols and words were available to them in which times and places and hence with how those cultural frameworks are prior to, and thus shape, their intentions. In other words, contrary to any instrumentalist take on political language, in which words and symbols are tools politicians use to get things done — albeit often things not so obvious from the words themselves³ — I approached German political discourse as a structure of possibilities that shaped, as much as were shaped by, the intentions of its participants. Combining insights from the linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin and from Karl Marx, I was motivated by the analytical principle that people do things with words, but not in circumstances of their own choosing (I first presented this formula in the paper that appears below as chapter 3).

The Dynamics of Collective Remembering

This effort to understand the complex dynamics of political speech about the past in postwar Germany, I should note, also fit very well into an emerging sociological research program, shaped most significantly in the United States by Barry Schwartz. In his seminal work on the sociology of collective memory, which he began publishing in the 1980s, Schwartz showed that sociological studies of collective memory were caught between two equally unsatisfying theoretical options (Schwartz 1982, 1991, 1996; Schwartz, Zerubavel, and Barnett 1986). On the one hand, essentialism assumed that memory and images of the past are to be understood as expressions of historical reality-become-social structure. Here, a potent model is Karl Mannheim’s (1952) theory of generations, in which a shared set of significant experiences by members of a birth cohort shape their generational identity and future memory, thus coloring their future experiences and perceptions distinctly from members of other cohorts who did not experience the same events at the same formative moment in their biographies. On the other hand, presentism assumes that memory and images of the past are produced in the present for present purposes and hence are indices not of anything that happened in the past and its effect on the present but of the structure of interests and needs of the present. This view is often attributed to Halbwachs, who distinguished collective memory from history in terms of its relevance to the present; another key figure here is Eric Hobsbawm (1983a), whose concept of invented traditions encourages a debunking posture on the part of historians and social scientists, whose job it apparently is to unmask false traditions and decode instrumental motives. As the work of Schwartz and others makes abundantly clear, however, neither of these theoretical positions (granted, drawn here and in the literature as strawmen) provides an adequate depiction of the statics and dynamics of memory, either individual or collective. The challenge, then, has been to come up with theoretical models as well as explanatory strategies and modes of analytical presentation that transcend this sterile dichotomy.

A crucial first stage in this effort, I believed, was to understand the ways in which, and reasons for which, images of the past change or remain the same rather than to define memory a priori as inherently durable or malleable. In my own effort to sum up the work that had been done on collective memory across numerous fields by the mid 1990s — a literature review of what I had come to think of as social memory studies — I identified three distinct kinds of both statics and dynamics of memory: instrumental, cultural, and inertial (Olick and Robbins 1998). Often, social actors engage in concerted action to either maintain or transform images of the past — the former represents orthodoxy and the latter progressivism. This instrumentalism, however, though capturing so much of the sociological attention, is not the only process at work. Images of the past change or remain the same also to the degree that they fit into a changing or stable culture, a process that calls our attention away from cynical manipulations to an analysis of culture sui generis.⁴ Images of the past also often change or remain the same (these are always degrees, not polar opposites) to the extent that their media and institutions continue to support them. I called these dynamics inertial because they refer to processes relatively beyond culture and action, for example, the burning of a library or the “sands of time.” This typology serves, I believe, both as a useful summary of various strands in the scholarly literature and as a guide to sociological theory and analysis, which calls for us to specify the processes and practices that characterize what we designate with the label collective memory.

Collective Memory and Historical Sociology

Though Halbwachs stands rightly at the beginning of any discussion of the sociology of collective memory, however, as an historical and theoretical sociologist more generally I have found most of my inspiration and models elsewhere, particularly in the writings of Norbert Elias, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Pierre Bourdieu. There are, obviously, many important differences among these three. But the similarities are intriguing. All three, for instance, have focused significant attention on the writings of Immanuel Kant and have expended great effort to articulate their rejection of him — Elias (1924) in his doctoral dissertation, in which he attacks Kant’s first critique (the epistemology), Bakhtin (1986) in his book on the philosophy of the act (likely first drafted in the 1920s) on Kant’s second critique (the moral philosophy), and Bourdieu (1984) in his contemporary — though in part influenced by Elias and Bakhtin — postscript to Distinction on Kant’s third critique (the aesthetics).⁵ But though each has his own distinctive accent, what they share seems even more important, namely an effort to overcome dichotomous thinking — what they all saw in their own ways as the legacy of Kant — in which form stands outside of history (Bakhtin), structure stands above action (Bourdieu), and society stands against the individual (Elias). As Elias (1991, p. 15) put it, and the others would presumably agree, transcendentalism — of which all three of these dichotomies are varieties — was “the worm in the apple of modernity.”

The central lesson I take from this theoretical troika — though they are by no means the only inspirations available — is an approach to historical sociology that seeks to be genuinely historical, that is, one that avoids wherever possible transcendentalism. As Philip Abrams (1982) argued in his Elias-inspired manifesto, not all sociology that focuses on the past is historical, at least not in any more than a truistic sense. Rather, for sociology to be genuinely historical — that is, nontranscendental — it must appreciate that social life takes place in time without relegating that temporality to a residual category, like longitudinal analysis or comparative ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Frontmatter page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I
• Part II
• References
• Index