Meaning and Representation in History

Jörn Rüsen, Jörn Rüsen

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780857455550
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

History has always been more than just the past. It involves a relationship between past and present, perceived, on the one hand, as a temporal chain of events and, on the other, symbolically as an interpretation that gives meaning to these events through varying cultural orientations, charging it with norms and values, hopes and fears. And it is memory that links the present to the past and therefore has to be seen as the most fundamental procedure of the human mind that constitutes history: memory and historical thinking are the door of the human mind to experience. At the same time, it transforms the past into a meaningful and sense bearing part of the present and beyond. It is these complex interrelationships that are the focus of the contributors to this volume, among them such distinguished scholars as Paul Ricoeur, Johan Galtung, Eberhard Lämmert, and James E. Young. Full of profound insights into human society pat and present it is a book that not only historians but also philosophers and social scientists should engage with.

Part I

MEANING

CHAPTER 1

Memory—Forgetting—History

PAUL RICOEUR

Perhaps I might be allowed to begin with an observation that puzzled me and that inspired me to reflect on the topic of memory and forgetting in history. It has to do with the spectacle offered by the post–Cold War period and the problem of difficulty of integrating traumatic memories from the totalitarian era. Among some, especially in the West, one might well deplore a shortage of memory and an excess of forgetting. Among others, for example in the Balkans, one would be more inclined to complain of an excess of memory, since events connected with past greatness or former humiliations are so resistant to being forgotten.

I.

Before tackling the problem of forgetting directly, I asked myself how it is that the history as written by historians operates as a critical authority capable of distinguishing between an excess and a shortage of memory. The first step in our inquiry involves resituating the entire sequence—memory/forgetting/history—against the background of a wider dialectic, that of historical consciousness. Here, the term historical does not designate a particular discipline, but rather the fundamental condition of humanity, commonly known as its “historicity.” Why extend the framework of discussion in this way? Because the three terms of the triad in question all concern the past, and the past acquires its double sense of having been and no longer being only in relation to the future. In this respect, I shall adopt the conceptual framework proposed by Reinhart Koselleck in Futures Past, in particular the fundamental polarity between “space of experience” (Erfahrungsraum) and “horizon of expectation” (Erwartungshorizont). ¹ Space of experience implies the totality of what is inherited from the past, its sedimentary traces constituting the soil in which desires, fears, predictions, and projects take root—in short, every kind of anticipation that projects us forward into the future. But a space of experience exists only in diametrical opposition to a horizon of expectation, which is in no way reducible to the space of experience. Rather, the dialectic between these two poles ensures the dynamic nature of historical consciousness.

II.

Let us consider now the relation between memory and the history of the historians, which completes, corrects, and sometimes contradicts the memory of survivors, their ancestors, and their descendants. The privilege that history cannot take away from memory is that of, on the one hand, preserving—and even, in the Husserlian sense of the term, of constituting—the relationship with the past, and also, on the other hand, of bringing out clearly the dialectic between space of experience and horizon of expectation. This dialectic tends to be obscured by history, which focuses on the events and human beings of the past methodically and with, as it were, a gaze that is professionally sharpened to such a degree that we might well be led to believe it possible to have an interest in history that is cut off from any connection to the present and the future. It is only memory, which turns again, and in a renewed way, to the future, that restores the link between the work of the historian and historical consciousness.

The relation of history and memory can thus be analyzed in three steps. First, memory establishes the meaning of the past. Second, history introduces a critical dimension into our dealings with the past. Third and finally, the insight by which history from this point onward enriches memory is imposed on the anticipated future through the dialectic between memory's space of experience and the horizon of expectation. We shall examine each of these three moments in turn.

1.

The original link between consciousness and the past is to be found in memory. This has been known, and repeatedly stated, since St. Augustine: memory is the present of the past.² However, this simple and in a certain sense undeniable observation is not unproblematic. If history is to be able to engage critically with memory one needs to give a meaning to the notion of collective memory, proposed by Maurice Halbwachs in an unfinished work posthumously published in 1950.³ This is no small problem, given that nationalism, the excesses of which we deplore, sets great store by the shared recollections that endow an alleged collective entity with its distinct image—an ethnic, cultural, or religious identity. People do not remember in isolation, but only with help from the memories of others: they take narratives heard from others for their own memories, and they preserve their own memories with help from the commemorations and other public celebrations of striking events in the history of their group.

These are all well-known phenomena, aptly described by Halbwachs. But to move from these reflections to the assumption that there exists a collective subject of memory, thus going directly against the idea of an individual proprietorship or “mineness” of memories, is a more problematic step to take, for it would imply that the collective memory of a group exercises the functions of conserving, organizing, and evoking that were formerly attributed to individual memory. Halbwachs appears to take this step when, in a sentence that reminds us of Leibniz, he writes that “each memory is a viewpoint on the collective memory.”⁴ My preference, on the contrary, is to use the idea of collective consciousness as a working rather than as a substantive concept. The way that Husserl develops the concept of “personalities of a higher order” at the end of the fifth of his Cartesian Meditations is instructive in this regard.⁵ By dint of this concept he gives an intersubjective basis to a network of relationships. We objectify this network only if we forget the process by which it was constituted.

It is important not to conflate, carelessly, the legitimate idea of the objectification of intersubjective relations in collective entities with the idea of alienation or reification.

It is only by analogy with individual consciousness and its memory that collective memory can be described as assembling together in a unity the traces left by momentous events in the history of the group concerned. This same analogy attributes to collective memory the ability to bring these common memories to life again in public anniversaries, rituals, and celebrations. Once this analogy is acknowledged, nothing prevents us from regarding these “personalities of a higher order” as subjects with inherent memories. Nor is there any barrier to speaking of their temporality or historicity. In short, one extends by analogy the “mineness” of memories to the idea that “we” collectively possess collective memories. This is enough to give historians a starting point for investigating the existence, as phenomena, of groups: the historian of “mentalities” and “cultures” asks for nothing less—and nothing more.

2.

We take a step forward in the dialectic between memory and history when we bring in history as a critical authority that is able not only to consolidate and to articulate collective and individual memory but also to correct it or even contradict it. To understand this critical relationship between history and memory one must introduce the linguistic medium of narrative, which memory and history share.

What interests me here is the difference in epistemological status between what might be called memory narratives (individual or collective) and historical narratives. Memory narratives circulate in conversation and belong to everyday discourse. Admittedly, memory narratives are not devoid of critical second thoughts, since during conversation a play of question-and-answer introduces into a concrete public space an exchange of narratives. But criticism, here, is not raised up to the level of an authority standing above the living exchange of memories.

In contrast, in the case of historical narratives this does happen. Historical narratives break with the discourse of memory on three levels. First and most obviously, they do so in the process of establishing the facts, a level that might be labeled “documentary.” Second, historians search for explanations. They do so in two respects: on the one hand they search for causes (more or less as do natural scientists and practitioners of some of the other human sciences), and on the other hand they look for the motives and justifications out of which deeds arose. Even in this second type of explanation the critical spirit of history emerges—from the procedure itself. As Max Weber showed in his discussion of the work of E. Meyer, the historian first assumes, in imagination, the absence of the presumed cause, and next asks himself what the probable course of historical events would have been, as compared to what actually happened.⁶ This process of “singular causal imputation” highlights the divergence between historical explanation and the “uncontrolled” explanations of ordinary conversation.

The divergence between history and memory becomes greater still at the compositional level—the level of vast tableaux, such as those we find in authors like Michelet, Burckhardt, Braudel, and Furet. In his Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis of the Historian's Language, Frank Ankersmit puts forward the thesis that these great narrative frescoes, which he dubs “narratios,” are unique entities that are exempt from the logic of falsification, a logic that, in his view, the work of the historian defeats on the documentary level and even, to some degree, also on the explanatory level (whether it is a matter of explanation by causes or explanation by reasons).⁷ Narratios arise, rather, on the field of controversy, where each narratio competes with others on the basis of its ability to give an arrangement to established factual knowledge as well as to “middle-range” explanations.

Briefly put, a narratio asserts itself on the basis of its breadth of view and breadth of significance. Discussion among specialists and among an educated readership will assign to a large narratio a high degree of plausibility and probability. Already by virtue of its purely probable character, the narratio plays a critical role with respect to collective memory. Perhaps, in establishing this distinction between memory and history, one should go further, by denying to history the capacity for the reenactment of the past that Collingwood attributed to it.⁸ Far from abolishing temporal distance, history deepens it by making absence the essential sign of the “pastness” of the past, as Michel de Certeau suggests in his L'Absent de l' histoire.⁹

The most noteworthy consequence of the critical intervention of history into the forming of memory (both collective and individual) seems to me to consist in a kind of splitting of memory into two divergent modes of functioning. To help clarify this cathartic effect of history, I would like to draw attention to a distinction proposed by Freud in a clear and very noteworthy essay of 1914, “Remembering, Repeating and Working-through.”¹⁰ The starting point of Freud's reflection here is his attempt to define the basic obstacle hindering the “work of interpretation” as it seeks to recover traumatic memories. He designates this obstacle, which he attributes to “repression resistances,” by the term “repetition compulsion” (Wiederholungszwang). According to Freud, a repetition compulsion consists in a tendency to proceed toward action (Hang zum “Agieren”) that gets substituted for memory. The patient reproduces the forgotten fact “not as memory, but as an action: he repeats it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it.”¹¹

In addition to this clinical observation, Freud makes two therapeutic suggestions that, in view of the traumatic state of memory of some nations today, are of the greatest importance for us. The first suggestion is addressed to the analyst, the second to the patient. To the analyst, he advises showing a great deal of indulgence when dealing with repetitions appearing under cover of “transference.” Freud asserts that such transference creates, by its operation, an intermediate space between illness and real life: one can consider it a “playground” where a compulsion is allowed to expand in almost total freedom, and where the subject's underlying pathology thus has the possibility of openly manifesting itself. But something is also demanded of patients: they must stop complaining and stop disguising their true condition from themselves, they must “find the courage to direct [their] attention to the phenomena of [their] illness,” and they must move away from thinking of their illness as something contemptible and instead come to consider it a worthy opponent. This doubled handling of resistances, which concerns both the patient and the analyst, is what Freud calls “working through” (Durcharbeiten). Hence it becomes possible to talk about memory itself as a form of work, the “work of recollection” (Erinnerungsarbeit).¹²

Is it not clear that this little text by Freud offers moralists and politicians a sort of scaled-down model of the pathology of historical consciousness and of its cure?

The discrepancy between an excess of memory and a shortage of memory, mentioned at the beginning of this essay, can be reinterpreted in terms of the categories of resistance, repetition compulsion, transference, working through, and, finally, “the work of recollection.” Following along this line, we can say that excess of memory resembles repetition compulsion, which Freud tells us puts a turn to action in place of the genuine memory through which the present and the past could be reconciled with each other. How much violence throughout the world is equivalent to an “acting out,” instead of a remembering! With regard to such festivals of death we can speak of a repetition-memory (wiederholendes Gedächtnis). Following this train of thought, however, one needs to add that repetition-memory is resistant to criticism, while recollection-memory (Erinnerungsgedächtnis) is a fundamentally critical memory. If this interpretation is right, then a shortage of memory can be interpreted as follows: some people take a sick pleasure in cultivating the repetition-memory from which others flee with a bad conscience. The former like to lose themselves in it; the latter are afraid of being swallowed up by it. But both suffer from the same critical deficiency, failing to achieve what Freud called the work of recollection.

The work of recollection, with its necessary phase of distancing and objectification, can contribute to the interrogating of history. In the end, it is at the “probabilistic” level of large narratios (as Ankersmit calls them) that historians offer the most powerful alternatives to that “official history” into which the grand narratives of collective memory tend to congeal. These controversial narratios first of all teach us to see the events of the past simply as “other,” and then they teach us how to narrate them from another standpoint, from another perspective. This exercise can lead us even so far as to narrate our own history from the standpoint of the memories of people belonging to other groups, and even to other cultures, than our own. But one must also allow for the two therapeutic suggestions given by Freud. True political wisdom is to be derived from the advice that we ought to exercise patience toward compulsive outbursts in the fictive playground of transference: some peoples need symbolic satisfaction of their fears and hatreds. Great tolerance is required of communities to whom history has given great real satisfaction, or who are far enough advanced along the path of mourning the “lost object” of their past psychic investments. But this advice, offered to those to whom history has given a place comparable to the position occupied by the therapist, does not excuse anyone from Freud's advice to the patient. It is work on oneself that induces “repetition compulsion” to give way to “the work of recollection.” Critical history can make a contribution to this healing of collective memory.

3.

I do not wish to leave the last word to written history as opposed to collective memory. Memory asserts its priority over history not only because it ensures a consciousness of, respectively, continuity between past and present and a feeling of belonging, but, on the contrary, also because it maintains the dialectical connection between what, following Koselleck...