From the History of an Ancient Idea into the Historiography of a Contemporary Vogue
This book is a reflection on my peregrinations in memory studies, and offers an overview of the remarkable historical interest in the topic of collective memory since the late 1970s. Some 20 years ago I published History as an Art of Memory (1993).1 That book was a study in the history of ideas. I explored the way the ancient art of memory was reinvented in modern times within the context of philology, romantic poetry, depth psychology, and historiography. The English cultural historian Frances Yates served as my intellectual guide. As an early contributor to the study of the relationship between collective memory and history, I sometimes strayed into the middle ground between the two. At the time, some scholars misconstrued my purpose, and claimed that I was eliding them.2 So let me be clear at the outset about my understanding of their relationship. History and memory share a common curiosity about the past. Though they may at times overlap as perspectives of the present on the past, they are different in their resources and their contributions to culture. History is rational and analytical; memory is emotional and inspirational. Moreover, their appeal to the past is different. History fixes the past in a narrative that aspires to provide a measure of certainty about what the past was like, but always at a critical distance. Memory, by contrast, may at any moment evoke the past in all of its possibilities, importing past into present insofar as that might be imagined. As philosopher Paul Ricoeur remarked, memory is a âlittle miracleâ in its resources for creativity. In this respect, it may inspire the historian, too.3
This book, by contrast, is primarily about the historiography of the scholarsâ inquiry into the relationship between collective memory and the rhetoric of historical conceptualization during the late twentieth century. For historians, the topic of memory appeared to emerge precipitously within the scholarship of the late 1970s.4 A marginal, somewhat arcane interest within the history of ideas during the 1960sânotably through Frances Yatesâs highly acclaimed study of the Renaissance art of memoryâmemory studies by the turn of the twenty-first century had reshaped the research and understanding of cultural history, enriching both its methods and content.5 Scholarly discourse on the topic of memory quickened during the 1990s as varied approaches converged, gathering force in the volume and array of subject matter in a hyperbolic ascent into what came to be characterized as memory studies by the turn of the twenty-first century. As a new arena of historical investigation that matured rapidly, the phenomenon of memory studies sheds light on the way a field of historiography developsâfrom bold pioneers blocking out new interpretations, to more discerning specialists who follow, before moving on to appreciative latecomers who take research in new directions as the interpretative insights of the pioneers begin to fade from view. The historiography of memory studies also reveals the way in which initially provocative interpretative forays into a new field of scholarly inquiry are eventually reassessed and integrated into a larger body of scholarship. By the 2010s, memory studies had become an interdisciplinary venture, loosening its ties to the historiographical movement of the 1970s out of whose matrix it had emerged.
In framing my study, I address the questions: why so much interest in memory among historians, and why did it emerge in the late twentieth century? I consider them in two contexts: one historical, the other historiographical:
Late Twentieth-Century History: A Crisis of Identity
From a historical perspective, the historiansâ preoccupation with memory in the late twentieth century may be attributed to anxieties about the breakdown of long-standing collective identities undermined by new historical realities that contributed to their dissolution. In the post-World War II era, particularly by the 1970s, new realities had emerged to undercut the modern historical narrative, indeed to render it irrelevant. Globalizing economic forces challenged the primacy of national identity. A new economy of consumerist desire displaced the older one of human need. The fads of consumerism drove fantasies that blurred the line between real and vicarious identities. The distinction between high and popular culture dissolved in the face of a consumerist culture that promoted an abundance of homogenized material riches for those who could afford them, while relegating the workers who produced them in the far corners of the world to endemic poverty. The long twentieth-century struggle for womenâs rights and opportunities played into rethinking the nature of gender identity itself by centuryâs end. Most imposing of all was a revolution in technologies of communication whose accelerating pace eclipsed typographic culture. New media altered ways of organizing knowledge, exporting vastly expanding realms of data to readily accessible electronic archives, with far-reaching implications for what and how we remember. Learning in a digital age was transformed, especially for the young, to such a degree that computer scientists speculated about an eventual convergence of biological and artificial intelligence.6 In a world whose culture was being reconfigured in so many ways, historians would begin to rethink the meaning of collective identity in the globalizing culture of the contemporary age. Memory, the seat of such knowledge at all levels of human experience, would rise up to meet their inquiries, inspiring them to think about the past in relation to the present in innovative ways. Over time, collective memory, conspicuously identified with the commemorative rituals of the nation-state, would break free of the constraints of that association to reveal a myriad of particular identities in global settings, mirroring the changing realities of the late twentieth century.
It was not just the unsettled present, but also a past full of haunting memories that troubled historians about the grand narrative of modern history. Old and unresolved problems raised new questions about the historical meaning of the twentieth century in light of the massive death and destruction that it had witnessed. Two world wars, a devastating economic depression in the era between them, the calculated genocide of European Jews, and the American use of the atomic bomb as a weapon of war dispelled any and all notions that the twentieth century had bequeathed to the present age a historically intelligible route toward the making of a better world. The atrocities of the Holocaust, far from receding into the past, loomed larger with the passage of time as an unrequited memory of reality that defied comprehension. What was one to make of sublime evil committed by the Nazi government of a once enlightened nation in a historical age supposedly advancing the human condition? The debates of the âHistoriansâ Disputeâ among German scholars during the 1980s underscored their awareness that the old narrative of history was no context in which to interpret the historical meaning of the conscious plan to exterminate a specific group of people solely for its genetic inheritance. These were recognized as crimes against humanity, a past whose meaning had yet to be mastered by historians.7 The power of trauma to block remembrance became the focus of their scholarly research. As method, the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud, banished with the stalled venture of psychohistory during the 1960s, came to the fore once more in this avenue of scholarship.8
Late Twentieth-Century Historiography: A Crisis of Metanarrative
From a historiographical perspective, the memory phenomenon in late twentieth-century historiography may be construed as the first serious effort to assess the relationship between memory and history. For much of the nineteenth century, historians, like their readers, thought little about their differences, and tended to conflate them in their excursions into the past. They aspired not only to explain the realities of those times but also to convey to their readers some feeling for its imagination. The public came to value the study of history not only for intellectual edification but also for emotional empathy. Long after their work has been superseded by more exacting scholarship, well-known historians such as Jules Michelet and Benedetto Croce continued to be admired for their capacity to evoke the passion in the pageant of the past. Memory and history were thought to cooperate in the quest to approach the impossible dream of bringing the past to life once again. Sympathy for this interplay of memory and history would surface once more in memory studies toward the turn of the twenty-first century, this time from a critical rather than a naive perspective.
The professionalization of historical scholarship of the late nineteenth century, however, put its accent on their opposition. Memory and history were understood to operate in tandem. History offered itself as the official form of memory. It claimed to provide a rigorously critical interpretation of the remembered past, chastening collective memory by deflating its exaggerations and excising its misconceptions. It prided itself on its accuracy, objectivity, dispassion, and critical distance from the past. It confirmed that claim by its appeal to method and to evidence. Historical scholarship was regarded as a high responsibility because it corrects the misperceptions of memory, and so lends stability to human understanding of the past. In its best analyses, history in its modern scholarly guise offered a perspective on the past based on reliable certainties, and so was characterized as a particular kind of science. As French historian Jacques Le Goff put it, âMemory is the raw material of history.â History begins where memory ends. Its authority depends on the historicist proposition that there is an underlying temporal foundation in which all past experience is grounded. The timeline of history serves as the essential frame of reference for a universal âscience of time.â9
By the late 1970s, though, this simple formula for explaining memoryâs subordination to history had come to be recognized as inadequate. It is in this context that historian Pierre Nora published his Lieux de mĂ©moire (1984â1992), an ambitious collaborative study of the mnemonic sources of the French national identity as they had sprung forth since the Middle Ages. The standard narrative of modern French history that had served for more than a century as the framework for historical scholarship had lost its power of appeal for practicing historians. Meanwhile, the interest in collective memory was surging, notably in studies of commemorative practices.10 Such scholarship revealed that there were many ways in which memory and history were intertwined. Following the initiative launched by Nora and his colleagues, three principal lines of inquiry into the puzzles of memoryâs relationship to history came to the fore during the crucial decade of the 1980s, not only in France but throughout Europe and North America: the politics of commemorative practices; the cultural implications of the transition from oral to literate cultures; the disabling effects of trauma on historical understanding, with particular emphasis upon the Holocaust of European Jews during World War II. These pathways would guide directions of historical scholarship on the memory phenomenon until the turn of the twenty-first century.
Symptomatic of the crisis that precipitated the memory phenomenon was the breakdown of the âgrand narrativeâ of modern history, a proposition advanced by French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard in a book about the âpostmodern condition.â11 Lyotard argued that the narrative of the rise of Western Civilization as the vehicle of reform in the name of the modern imperative of progress, both economically (as greater and more equitably distributed prosperity) and morally (as civic purpose and responsibility) had lost its conceptual p...