“The World Forgetting, by the World Forgot”: ‘Remembering’ as a ‘social act’ & the social context of ‘memory’

A few years ago, on a long winter night, I decided to watch a movie, rather randomly. I watched it several times after that, and gradually it became one of my all-time favourite movies. Here, I am discussing a movie released in the year 2004, directed by Michel Gondry, and titled, ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.’ The plot of this ‘offbeat movie’ largely revolves around a man and a woman who fall in love with each other, discover their mutual incompatibility on some aspects during the evolution of their romantic relationship and the course of action which they decide to adopt ultimately is a ‘technological erasure’ of the ‘memories’ they shared, from their respective minds. Although the movie is obviously a work of fiction, the main takeaway from this is the central role of ‘memories’ in our everyday social interactions and the huge impact that they have on our lives. Hence, this essay is an attempt to understand the ‘social context of memory’ and offers a fresh scope for the analysis of ‘remembering’ as a ‘social act.’

Marc Bloch, a leading French historian of the ‘Annales School,’ in his pathbreaking scholarship, titled “The Historian’s Craft,” quite innovatively described ‘history’ as a “study of the dead and of the living,” and further pointed out that the primary task of a historian is to “understand and explain” people in the ‘historical past’ only through a contextualization of their ‘social milieu,’ locating them in the “mental climate of their time.” Bloch highlights a crucial point in ‘historical observations,’ which can only be necessitated by a complementary and interdependent relationship between the ‘past’ and the ‘present;’ as he equates a “misunderstanding of the present” with an “ignorance of the past,” and in a reciprocal fashion, the ‘fruitlessness’ in “seeking to understand the past,” when one is “totally ignorant of the present.”

The legendary British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm’s essay, titled “The Social Function of the Past: Some Questions,” is also illuminating. Hobsbawm begins his essay by problematizing the definition(s) of the ‘social past,’ which entails a “particular selection” out of the vast expanse of “what is remembered or capable of being remembered.” He highlights the ‘point of no return’ in a ‘past’ which is “so remote from actual or remembered reality” that it demands a “total innovation” at specific historical junctures, and hence, it is invoked as an “artefact” or rather, “fabrication,” to justify certain ‘needs’ of the ‘present.’ On these aspects of “innovation,” Hobsbawm contends that a ‘legitimization’ of the ‘past’ occurs not through viewing the ‘past’ as a “set of reference-points” or “duration,” but rather with “the past as a process of becoming the present.” While outlining the ‘social functions of the past,’ he discusses two important aspects of considerations of the ‘past,’ namely: “as genealogy” and “as chronology.” Therefore, in this regard, he views ‘history’ as the “unity of past, present, and future,” where on the former aspect, he examines the “pull of the past as continuity and tradition,” and on the latter aspect, as a “necessary measure” of it. These preliminary observations of Bloch and Hobsbawm are quite important, especially in the context of the aforementioned larger theme of this essay. 

Pierre Nora’s 1989 study, titled “Between Memory and History: Les lieux de Mémoire,” elaborates and problematizes the “embodiment of memory in certain sites where a sense of historical continuity persists.” Nora provides us with a sharp distinction between ‘memory’ and ‘history’. The former is characterised as an “actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present”, existing in a state of “permanent evolution”, and “open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting;” while the latter is a “representation of the past,” and a “reconstruction” of “what is no longer,” with a “problematic and incomplete” nature. On these grounds, Nora contends that this distinction reflects the emergence of a “historical consciousness”. He also discusses the “archival nature” or intent in the construction of “modern memory.” An important observation is that of a parallel relationship between ‘individual memories’ and ‘collective memories,’ with the thesis put forward that “the less memory is experienced collectively, the more it will require individuals to undertake to become themselves memory-individuals.” Finally, on account of the aforementioned distinctions between ‘memory’ and ‘history,’ Nora makes certain interesting observations such as the shifts within “a history sought in the continuity of memory to a memory cast in the discontinuity of history;” the role of ‘memory’ to ‘dictate’ while history is being ‘written,’ as “history books” which are “founded on a revision of memory” are the ‘sites of memory’ (his most important theoretical formulation, which is also the subtitle of his article); and, an “exclusion of the event that defines the ‘sites of memory’,” by correlating an ‘attachment’ of ‘memory’ to ‘sites,’ and ‘history’ to ‘events.’ 

Paul Connerton’s book published in the year 1989, and titled as “How Societies Remember” distinguishes between “social memory” and “historical reconstruction” – the latter ‘independent’ of the former, as historians possess an ability to ‘recover’ any ‘event or custom’ that is ‘forgotten’ through both ‘written’ and ‘unwritten’ sources, but still the ‘practice’ of the latter can “receive a guiding impetus,” and provide a “shape” to “the memory of social groups;” and outlines the significance of the latter, as it “preserves” these specific ‘memories of social groups’, the “voice” of which “would otherwise have been silenced.” Pertinently, Connerton highlights the implications of the grammatical usage of the word “remember,” which he identifies as a “cognitive act” of “philosophical importance,” and observes that “certain types of memory claims are privileged,” consequentially leading to a “relative neglect” of ‘memory’ as a “social phenomenon.” Essentially, he highlights three ‘classes’ of ‘memory claims’: “personal memory claims”, which are featured in our “self-descriptions”; “cognitive memory claims” in which we ‘remember’ certain aspects of ‘human learning’, such as the “meaning of words” and “truth of logic”; and finally, “habit-memory claims” where an “act of performance” of our earlier accumulated / acquired knowledge makes us “able to recognize and demonstrate to others that we do in fact remember.” Furthermore, Connerton acknowledges the instrumentality of Maurice Halbwachs in the formulation of the ‘social construction’ of ‘memory’ as ‘individuals’ tend to “acquire”, “localise”, and “recall” such ‘memories’ by virtue of their “membership of a social group – particularly kinship, religious and class affiliations” because the “mental spaces” of ‘localised memories’ are structured through the “support” of “material spaces that particular social groups occupy.” Therefore, Connerton ultimately aims to study the “acts of transfer that make remembering in common possible.” 

Peter Burke, an eminent scholar of ‘cultural history’, authored a book titled, “Varieties of Cultural History” which was published in the year 1997. Here, Burke emphasises a requirement for historians to study ‘memory’ as a “historical source” and “historical phenomenon” to locate a “social history of remembering” and, describes how one needs to “identify the principles of selection” for exploring both “social memory” and “individual memory” in order to specifically situate “how they vary from place to place or from one group to another and how they change over time”. The author offers a thematic breakdown to study the “transformation of social memory” with the “social organisation” of such a “transmission” organised through the ‘employment’ of five different forms of “media” namely: “oral traditions”, “memoirs and written records”, “images”, “ritual actions” and “space.” Interestingly, Burke examines the creation of a ‘mythogenesis’ in the context of certain individuals in ‘historical time’, which is derived from a reflection of an existing “current stereotype of a hero or villain” and thereby, the “social uses of collective memories” can be attributed to either consequential “disasters” which follow the “death or disappearance of the hero” or alternatively, the ‘disastrous reign’ of a ruler, leading to a ‘nostalgic remembrance’ of an earlier ‘reign’ in the eyes of a subject population. Providing us with two specific examples of the ‘Irish’ and the ‘Poles’, Burke highlights the ‘use’ of “the past”, “social memory” and “myth” so as to “define identity”. Furthermore, he also covers an important domain of the “uses of social amnesia” by pointing out the “official censorship of the past”, acted upon through the “official erasure of memories of conflict in the interests of social cohesion”. Lastly, Burke maintains the significance of “writing and print” as they “preserve records of the past” and therefore, “assist the resistance of memory to manipulation”.

Eviatar Zerubavel’s scholarship, as a sociologist, is quite relevant to approaching the theme of this essay from a different dimension. As he explores the various patterns of ‘human cognition’, he first highlights the limitations of the approach of “cognitive universalism” in ‘cognitive science’, where a tendency exists to “ignore differences” among “individuals”, “different cultures”, “social groups” and “historical periods”. Dwelling upon the need to approach ‘cognitive science’ through ‘cognitive sociology’, Zerubavel discusses how the latter “highlights major differences in the way we think” and, on account of this, “we think not only as individuals and as human beings but also as social beings, products of particular social environments that affect as well as constrain the way we cognitively interact with the world”. Quite pertinently, he highlights the role of ‘cognitive sociology’ in addressing a distinct “intersubjective, social world” that lies between the “purely subjective world of the individual” and the “absolutely objective physical world”. The conceptualization of particular “thought communities” within any ‘society’ reflects the nature of “cognitive diversity”, as with the “existence of numerous culturally specific cognitive traditions” and hence, the ‘identification’ of “cognitive subcultures” stands out as a primary task of ‘cognitive sociology’. Zerubavel also refers to “mental acts” namely, “perceiving” “attending” and “remembering” both as “physiologically constrained human acts” and “social acts bound by specific normative constraints”. Ultimately, he outlines the aim of his book to stimulate a discussion of “six major cognitive acts – perceiving, attending, classifying, assigning meaning, remembering, and reckoning the time”, with each of them constructed through three aspects, namely, “personal cognitive idiosyncrasies”, “universal cognitive commonalities”, and most importantly, through “social beings who belong to specific thought communities”.

Conclusively, after an overall consideration of the aforementioned studies, it can be definitively argued that “remembering is a social act”. Further developments in scholarly studies on the domain of interrelatedness and connections between ‘memory’ and ‘history’ are proving to be an exciting field of research with every passing day. There is also a vast amount of existing scholarship on these themes, which the author of this essay has failed to take into account, on consideration of various limitations. However, imbibed with a sense of optimism, the author would like to conclude, hoping that the essay at least does justice to the purposes it was written for.

Somnath Pati

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