Social memory in the age of knowledge

In: International social science journal, Band 62, Heft 203-204, S. 57-66

Abstract

Throughout the twentieth century the study of social memory has remained synonymous with the study of the unconscious and a supra-human memory (perhaps internalised, but in a self-forgetting way) whose mechanism is used, but not controlled, by subject-centred remembering. Both the stability and the potential disruption to individual identity deriving from the social aspect of remembering became central issues in the philosophical thought of Bergson, the psychoanalytical writing of Freud, and the autobiographical literature of Proust; their tension invoked by the classical pairings of mneme and memoria and recalled by Marcel Proust as memoire involontaire and memoire volontaire, by Walter Benjamin as Eingedenken und Andenken, by Aby Warburg as Sophrosyne and Mnemosyne, and most recently by Aleida Assmann as Gedachtnis and Erinnerung. Common to the literature on social memory of the twentieth century was the mediatory role assigned to objects, whose capacity to provoke shared associations and the mutual, inter-subjective anticipation of actions was seen to bind words to concepts. As interlocutors between personal recall and shared recognition of what was thus recalled, objects accrued a value whose measure remained, often in spite of all appearance, unstable, requiring continuing reactivation through acts of social commemoration. Far greater stability was assigned to immaterial streams of information that connect persons to one another via access to the relational nature of acts of remembering enshrined in performances and an increasing plethora of digital media. Adapted from the source document.