In-depth study of collective memory began relatively late, following Warburg and Halbwachs. Of course,
renowned philosophers and historians have theorized about the definition and typologies of collective memory,
but the most complex theories were formulated and developed by Jan Assmann.
In this study, we aim to present the most important theories, typologies, and tools through which the past is
“shaped” in the formation of collective memory.
Cultural Memory
The influential theory of cultural memory, developed since the 1990s by Jan Assmann and Aleida Assmann, is conceived as an attempt to elaborate both Halbwachs’ and Warburg’s ideas through a new concept of cultural memory. This theory explains how testimonies of the past transmitted through a variety of media create meaning through processes such as ritualization, canonization and interpretation, thus creating a collective identity, that is, a mediated social identity, structuring the relationship between time, identity and culture. However, before reaching these conclusions, Assmann carefully studies Egyptian concepts and the most important theorists of memory.
Typologies
In Cultural Memory: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Identity in Ancient Great Cultures, the concept of cultural memory is defined through a double demarcation and makes a clear distinction between communicative memory, or everyday memory, which he also calls non-cultural memory, and memory in science – cultural memory.
Communicative Memory, also referred to as everyday memory, has characteristics that are more limited, still developing and less cultural than those of science, because it lacks some characteristics of memory, namely reference to a collective self-image. Communicative memory encompasses those varieties of collective memory that are based exclusively on everyday communication. It is living, informal, oral memory, shared by members of a generation or a small social group, and is based on direct interaction, conversations, shared memories and personal experiences. These are the forms that Halbwachs summarized and analyzed under the concept of collective memory and which constitute the field of oral history. From the practice of oral history, we now know more about the particularities of this everyday form of collective memory, which we will call communicative memory. One of the most important characteristics is its limited time horizon. As a rule, all oral history studies seem to confirm this, extending no more than 80–100 years. Assmann provides an even more precise definition and uses the term “floating gap”. He states that after approximately 40 years, the memories of eyewitnesses begin to disappear and, if they are not preserved in cultural memory (museums, books), they are lost forever. According to his theory, we are currently at the critical moment of crossing the floating gap, where the communicative memory of the Revolution must be definitively transformed into cultural memory through institutions such as the Memorial in Timișoara, which, through its activity, contributes to the formation of a healthy culture of memory, ensuring a balance between the state and civil society.
Cultural Memory knows fixed points that connect it to a past that continues to be
extend as the present progresses. Something of this kind can only be achieved through
cultural formation and, therefore, it moves beyond informal everyday memory. The transition from
the realm of communication to the realm of objectifying culture changes almost everything. The transition is both
so fundamental that Assmann wonders whether the metaphor of memory is still appropriate here.
Assmann explains that cultural memory is stabilized through three main channels:
Legomenon (The Word): Texts, myths, poetry, dogma.
Dromenon (The Deed): Ritual, repeated gesture, procession, celebration.
Deiknymenon (The Image): Architecture, monument, iconography, visual symbol.
Assmann states that cultural memory is a structure of belonging because if we
remember, then we know our social belonging.
The Egyptians, in their texts, said that the ideal is the person who can remember: “The lazy man does not have
yesterday” (has no memory). The loss of the past is equivalent to the disappearance of gratitude, of
responsibility, solidarity and justice. When social memory disintegrates, the world
becomes a battlefield of all against all.
Normative Memory
The Egyptian concept for this normative memory is Ma’at. It promises identity even immortality, in the form of enduring in the social memory of the group after death. “A man’s monument is his virtue. He who has an evil character is forgotten.” This is the foundation of the institution of the monumental Egyptian tomb: an account before posterity. This connection between memory and sociability was developed by Friedrich Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morality. For Nietzsche, the genealogy of morality is, at the same time, a genealogy of memory. Morality and memory develop together in the process of “taming” man to become a cultural being. We need memory in order to be able to make promises and assume obligations. Nietzsche calls man “the animal that is allowed to promise”. In order to do this, man developed a counter-faculty to forgetting: the memory of the will. This is not merely a passive inability to escape an impression, but an active desire not to let go of what was once willed. This is, Nietzsche says, “the long history of the origin of responsibility”. In this process, man learns to renounce his own interests. In place of the sacrificed “individual Self”, he receives a “social Self”, which has memory and is therefore stable and trustworthy. The Self that remembers is the place where society inscribes its demands and obligations. Memory mediates belonging; we remember in order to be able to belong, and this remembrance has an obligatory character. We can therefore call it normative memory. Nietzsche, however, goes further and deconstructs this connection. He sees normative memory as a malign construction that chains the individual. He describes the process of civilization in somber terms: “Something is burned into memory so that it remains there: only what never ceases to hurt remains in memory”. This is the ancient mnemotechnics: sacrifices, torture, mutilation—all use pain as the strongest aid to memory. We also have an example in our own history: during the reign of Stephen the Great, there was a ritual in which boyars would take their sons to the borders and beat them thoroughly so that they would never forget how far their lands extended. Unlike Nietzsche, for Halbwachs, memory is not the result of external coercion or “training”; he insists on the affectivity of collective memory. The principle he sees at work in the formation of memory is not violence, but love, a phenomenon that arises naturally through communication. For Halbwachs, however, there is no “cultural” memory, and he avoids any recourse to the normativity of collective memories. At this point, he represents the exact opposite position to Nietzsche. If for Halbwachs the driving force of memory is affectivity, for Aby Warburg cultural memory has a liberating function. Through art and symbols, man frees himself from the pressure of reality, from the fear of demons and from the assault of the senses. He focuses on “pathos formulas”, images that crystallize collective emotions and migrate through time. “For Warburg, whom I would like to classify as the third among the founding fathers of the study of social memory, this cultural collective memory, in complete contrast to Nietzsche, has a liberating rather than a subjugating function. Through cultural objectifications, man frees himself from the phobic pressure of reality, from the fear of demons and from being overwhelmed by the senses. Warburg’s concept of the phobic is closer to Freud’s theory of trauma than to Nietzsche’s bloody mnemotechnics, but, on the other hand, it cannot be denied that the motifs of fear and terror form a common denominator, while they are completely absent in Halbwachs. The same boundary separates Halbwachs and Warburg as separates Halbwachs and Nietzsche. It is the boundary between communicative and cultural memory, between memory as an autopoietic system and memory as a cultural institution made visible in signs, symbols, images, texts and rites, that is, writing in the broadest sense. Warburg is interested in the traces of European pictorial memory, in the lines of connection between images, pictorial formulas, themes, in short: cultural objectifications and non-psychological contents of consciousness. Halbwachs, on the other hand, avoids as far as possible any reference to cultural objectifications. For him, this is a boundary beyond which we should no longer speak of memory, but of tradition, historiography, etc. He remains within the framework of the psychology of consciousness. The power and duration of memories do not derive from tradition, but from feeling, from the individual’s need to belong to one or more groups.” Assmann establishes here the boundary that separates the two great theorists: on the one hand, Halbwachs’ communicative memory, as an autopoietic system based on living, oral communication between people, which does not require objectifications (texts, monuments) and depends on the feeling of belonging to the group; and on the other hand, the cultural memory shared by Warburg and Assmann, representing memory that has been visualized and institutionalized in signs, symbols, images, texts and rites. In the broadest sense, it is a form of “writing”. Assmann concludes that cultural memory has two faces, both of which are valid: Warburg’s light: memory as liberation, distancing and salvation from disappearance through art and culture. Nietzsche’s light: memory as discipline, training, binding and submission through norms and prescriptions.
Beyond Assmann’s theories, the Memorial of the Revolution in Timișoara operates at the boundary between the two: it preserves communicative memory through oral testimonies (Halbwachs) and transforms it into cultural memory through its archives and monuments (Warburg/Assmann).
Culture of Memory
Assmann calls it Erinnerungskultur (culture of remembrance). He defines the culture of memory as follows: “The culture of memory ensures the cultural continuity of a society by preserving its collective values from one generation to the next; thus, later generations can reconstruct their cultural identity. References to the past, on the other hand, provide members of a society with a historical consciousness by creating a shared past.” According to Assmann, the significant memories of a society are never spontaneous or predetermined. The past, like collective identity, is a construct based, simply put, on two complementary operations: actualization and forgetting. The relationship between cultural memory and history is based precisely on this constructed nature of the past. Cultural memory is oriented toward fixed points in the past. The past cannot be preserved as such even in cultural memory, but rather is reflected in symbolic figures to which remembrance attaches itself. Thus, the culture of remembrance is a series of fixed points of the past, with each group having its own culture of remembrance. Continuity plays an essential role in this process. Continuity is imagined through practices and figures of remembrance and is generated, in fact, through the process of cultural practice. Repetition and remembrance of the past ensure continuity because they directly invoke the founding narratives of the collective. Summarizing Assmann’s theory in one sentence, it explains how testimonies of the past transmitted through a variety of media create meaning through processes such as ritualization, canonization and interpretation, thus creating a collective identity, that is, a reflection, a mediated social identity. The relationship between the three poles—past, present, culture and group—leads to the concretization of identity: “we are this”. For Assmann, cultural memory is not only about the “past”, but about social cohesion, complementing Halbwachs’ theory of social frameworks. Aleida Assmann developed this theory further and clarified how such a concept should be distinguished from other forms, not only of individual memory but also in terms of how it could be usefully employed scientifically. In this way, she differentiates cultural memory from the social memory of a generation or the communicative memory of people living together. In the jointly written text Yesterday and Today. Media and Social Memory, she emphasizes an essential point right from the beginning: “Memory does not develop only within people, but above all between people.” Therefore, it exists not only at the individual level, but also at the collective level. In addition to its function as a neuronal and psychological phenomenon, memory is also, to a very large extent, social. Through the work of Aleida and Jan Assmann in defining these new theories under the heading of cultural memory, it became a new paradigm that expanded into different fields and exerted influence in many countries. As I mentioned at the beginning of the paper, the study of memory acquired a sense of historical urgency only in the mid-20th century, when a paradigm shift occurred, a post-cultural situation from the perspective of which old Europe became an object of remembrance through commentary. The last two decades of the 20th century were explosive from the perspective of memory research. Countless studies were developed on forms of memory, their identification, definition and classification. Assmann also observed that “Memory, having meanwhile become a key concept in the cultural-scientific reorientation, is now the object of research in very different disciplines, such as neurology, psychology and psychoanalysis, history, political science, as well as art and literary studies. Although each discipline has its own approach to the object of research, the constant insertion of new pieces of the puzzle from different hands into the overall picture makes memory research a transdisciplinary process.” Pierre Nora also provides a complex definition of collective memory, having developed an influential concept of memory, particularly through his monumental work Les Lieux de Mémoire (Realms of Memory / Sites of Memory). For Nora, memory is not simply a repository of memories, but a complex entity, distinct from history. “This is a memory or set of memories, conscious or unconscious, of experiences lived and/or mythologized by a living collective, of its identity, of which the sense of the past is an integral part. The remembrance of events experienced or transmitted through written, practical or oral tradition; active memory maintained by institutions, rites and historiography; latent and sometimes recovered memory; official, voluntary memories orchestrated through a staging of the imaginary, such as those composed by nations and families, churches and parties, or memories without memory, clandestine and metahistorical memories; their range is infinite.” Nora argues that, in a modern society, memory and history are fundamentally opposed notions. Memory is alive, constantly changing, subjective and connected to the societies that carry it. It is deeply rooted in the concrete, in emotions and lived experiences. Memory is what remains of the past in what we experience in the present, often nourished by the mass media and by “immediate history”. History, on the other hand, is an intellectual and critical reconstruction of the past. It is a discipline, a science that seeks to explain and organize the past, often detached from the raw emotion of memory. When history begins, authentic memory fades. The Memorial of the Revolution is a lieu de mémoire, not merely because it houses objects, but because there is a will to remember and not to forget. Nora says: “without the will to remember, sites of memory would be merely sites of history”. If Assmann developed the theory of cultural memory, Paolo Jedlowski, who contributed significantly to the study of memory, particularly regarding its social nature and the interaction between memory, time and identity, developed another theory. His theory is distinguished by its emphasis on the dynamic, selective and reconstructive character of memory, both at the individual and collective levels. Jedlowski extends Halbwachs’ ideas and argues that individual memory is intrinsically social. There is no purely individual memory detached from the social context. Our memories are defined and verified in relation to the memories of others and are influenced by the multiple social circles to which we belong. The act of remembering is a social act, dependent on the cultural context and the intelligence of society. He places particular importance on language and discourse in expressing and reproducing the social frameworks of memory. Memory, both individual and collective, is mediated through narratives, communication and verbal interactions. These not only transmit memories, but also shape them and give them meaning. From this point, he formulated the concept of public memory, which had “the role of comparing different collective memories within society. A memory of the public sphere that is strongly influenced by mass media and journalism. These play an essential role in shaping the collective perception of the past, but also carry the risk of distorting, interpreting and manipulating memories.” Jedlowski considers public memory to have two main components: institutional memory and popular memory. A new concept of memory, cosmopolitan memory, was developed primarily by sociologists Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, particularly in their work The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (2001/2006). They observed how, under the impact of globalization and mass media, events such as the Holocaust ceased to be the property of particular nations or groups, becoming instead a moral and historical point of reference for a global community. Cosmopolitan memory is a variable that helps explain the reconfiguration of sovereignty, due to its nature, which enables it to transcend national borders, increase universal solidarity and reshape the model centered on the nation itself. Another example would be minority rights at both the global and local levels. Thus, unlike national memory, which focuses on the history and identity of a specific nation-state, cosmopolitan memory transcends these boundaries. It recognizes that certain events have a universal impact and involve moral responsibilities that transcend national belonging. Mass media through television, the internet and social networks play an important role in disseminating and shaping cosmopolitan memory. Through global narratives and representations, distant events become accessible and relevant to the general public, contributing to the creation of a sense of belonging to a global community of witnesses.
Drd. Gino RADO