The Worldly Philosophers
The Tidal Wave of Memory
Pierre Nora
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2001-06-21
Every country, every social, ethnic or family group has in recent decades undergone a profound change in its relations with the past. This change takes many forms: criticism of official histories and recovery of repressed ones; demands for confiscated or suppressed pasts; interest in “roots” and genealogy; commemorative events and new museums; opening archives to the public; and, finally, fondness for what English-speakers call “heritage” and the French “
patrimoine
.” If France was the first to embark on this almost fetishistic “memorialism,” this is because its memories of WWII are so divided. After the death of General de Gaulle, France witnessed a fascination for its wartime Vichy government and the birth of a form of Jewish “memory” unseen before. Others soon followed. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe underwent its own “recovery of memory,” followed in turn, along with the fall of military dictatorships in Latin America and of apartheid in South Africa, by a global settling of scores with the past. This upsurge in memory intersects with powerful historical phenomena. Call one the “acceleration of history,” which suggests that the key feature of modernity is not continuity but change – an accelerated precipitation of all things into a swiftly retreating past. This change shattered the unity of historical time, that straightforward linearity which traditionally bound the present and the future to the past. For the way in which a society, nation, group or family envisaged its future traditionally determined what it needed to remember of the past. This gave meaning to the present, which linked the two. Broadly speaking, the future could be envisaged in one of three ways: as a form of restoration, as a form of progress, or as a form of revolution.
Nowadays, these ways of interpreting the past are discarded because we do not know what form the future will take. Because we cannot anticipate what our descendants will need to know about us in order to understand themselves, we stockpile – piously and indiscriminately – any visible trace that might testify as to what we are or what we will become. It is this dissolution of any teleology of history – the disappearance of a history whose end is known – that creates today’s urgent “duty to remember,” a sense more mechanical and heritage-based than moral, and linked, not to the idea of “debt” but to “loss,” which is a very different matter altogether.
This “acceleration of history” also leaves us cut off, communing with the past only through vestiges. We recover the past by reconstructing it in detail, aided by documents and archives; a form of memory once called “history.” But this is a radical, indeed, dangerous alteration in meaning, for “memory” now means something so all-inclusive that it tends to be used as a substitute for “history” and places the study of history at the service of memory.
A second reason for this outbreak of memory is a pronounced emancipatory trend among peoples, ethnic groups, and even certain classes of individuals – the emergence of all those forms of memory bound up with minority groups for whom rehabilitating the past reaffirms identity.
Minority memories mainly arise from three types of decolonization: international decolonization, which provided societies stagnating in colonial oppression with access to historical consciousness and the rehabilitation (or fabrication) of memories; domestic decolonization of sexual, social, religious and provincial minorities for whom reaffirming their “memory” – in fact, their history – is a way of having their “particularism” recognized by a community that refused them that right; and ideological decolonization, which reunited people with memories confiscated, destroyed or manipulated by totalitarian regimes.
This explosion of minority memories profoundly altered the status and reciprocal nature of history and memory. Indeed, it enhanced the idea of “collective memory,” once little used.
History used to be in the hands of public authorities, scholars, and specialized peer groups which used it to mold the collective meaning of a nation. It taught children to be (good) Frenchmen, Germans, Mexicans or Japanese. Although founded on memory, history, as a discipline aspiring to scientific status, was in the past built up in opposition to memory, which was thought to be idiosyncratic and misleading. History was the sphere of the collective; memory of the individual. The idea that memory can be collective, emancipatory, and sacred turns its meaning inside out. Individuals had memories, collectivities had histories.
History in this sense has now been replaced by memory, which acquired the prestige of a popular protest movement and resembles the revenge of the underdog and outcast, the history of those denied history. Hitherto, if history did not have truth, it at least had loyalty on its side. But the last century’s sufferings incited demands for a truth more “truthful” than history, the truth of personal experience and individual memory.
The idea that collectivities have a memory implies a far-reaching transformation in the status of individuals and their relations to the community. Here lies the secret of that mysterious shift in our understanding of identity , without which it is impossible to understand today’s upsurge in memory . For identity has been transformed from an individual and subjective notion into a collective, quasi-formal and objective one.
Traditionally, identity characterized all that is unique about an individual – so much so that it acquired an essentially administrative sense: our fingerprints expressed our “identity,” we carried “identity” papers. Nowadays, expression of identity implies a group category, a way of defining us from without . “One is not born a woman,” Simone de Beauvoir remarked, “one becomes one.” It might serve as a catch phrase for all identities created by self-assertion.
So identity, like memory, becomes a form of duty . I am asked to become what I am: a Corsican, a Jew, a worker, an Algerian, a Black. It is at this level of obligation that the decisive tie is forged between memory and social identity. The two become almost synonymous; their near-merger reflects a change in the way history and society interact.
How is “memory” now organized? Two patterns are visible. The first consists of a dramatic increase in the uses made of the past. Many reasons exist for today’s proliferation of commemorative events, but each shows that the past has ceased to have a single meaning and that a present overlaid with awareness of its own history allows for several possible versions of the past.
The second effect of this change in the way memory is organized deprives historians of their monopoly on interpreting the past. In a world in which you had collective history and individual memories , the historian exercised exclusive control. Today, historians share their duties with judges, witnesses, the media and legislators.
The problem raised by memory’s sacralization comes in recognizing the moment at which emancipation becomes exclusion. For to claim the right to memory is to call for justice, but this proliferation of moral claims can degenerate into a call to murder. It is this message of memory that we must also remember.
Nowadays, these ways of interpreting the past are discarded because we do not know what form the future will take. Because we cannot anticipate what our descendants will need to know about us in order to understand themselves, we stockpile – piously and indiscriminately – any visible trace that might testify as to what we are or what we will become. It is this dissolution of any teleology of history – the disappearance of a history whose end is known – that creates today’s urgent “duty to remember,” a sense more mechanical and heritage-based than moral, and linked, not to the idea of “debt” but to “loss,” which is a very different matter altogether.
This “acceleration of history” also leaves us cut off, communing with the past only through vestiges. We recover the past by reconstructing it in detail, aided by documents and archives; a form of memory once called “history.” But this is a radical, indeed, dangerous alteration in meaning, for “memory” now means something so all-inclusive that it tends to be used as a substitute for “history” and places the study of history at the service of memory.
A second reason for this outbreak of memory is a pronounced emancipatory trend among peoples, ethnic groups, and even certain classes of individuals – the emergence of all those forms of memory bound up with minority groups for whom rehabilitating the past reaffirms identity.
Minority memories mainly arise from three types of decolonization: international decolonization, which provided societies stagnating in colonial oppression with access to historical consciousness and the rehabilitation (or fabrication) of memories; domestic decolonization of sexual, social, religious and provincial minorities for whom reaffirming their “memory” – in fact, their history – is a way of having their “particularism” recognized by a community that refused them that right; and ideological decolonization, which reunited people with memories confiscated, destroyed or manipulated by totalitarian regimes.
This explosion of minority memories profoundly altered the status and reciprocal nature of history and memory. Indeed, it enhanced the idea of “collective memory,” once little used.
History used to be in the hands of public authorities, scholars, and specialized peer groups which used it to mold the collective meaning of a nation. It taught children to be (good) Frenchmen, Germans, Mexicans or Japanese. Although founded on memory, history, as a discipline aspiring to scientific status, was in the past built up in opposition to memory, which was thought to be idiosyncratic and misleading. History was the sphere of the collective; memory of the individual. The idea that memory can be collective, emancipatory, and sacred turns its meaning inside out. Individuals had memories, collectivities had histories.
History in this sense has now been replaced by memory, which acquired the prestige of a popular protest movement and resembles the revenge of the underdog and outcast, the history of those denied history. Hitherto, if history did not have truth, it at least had loyalty on its side. But the last century’s sufferings incited demands for a truth more “truthful” than history, the truth of personal experience and individual memory.
The idea that collectivities have a memory implies a far-reaching transformation in the status of individuals and their relations to the community. Here lies the secret of that mysterious shift in our understanding of identity , without which it is impossible to understand today’s upsurge in memory . For identity has been transformed from an individual and subjective notion into a collective, quasi-formal and objective one.
Traditionally, identity characterized all that is unique about an individual – so much so that it acquired an essentially administrative sense: our fingerprints expressed our “identity,” we carried “identity” papers. Nowadays, expression of identity implies a group category, a way of defining us from without . “One is not born a woman,” Simone de Beauvoir remarked, “one becomes one.” It might serve as a catch phrase for all identities created by self-assertion.
So identity, like memory, becomes a form of duty . I am asked to become what I am: a Corsican, a Jew, a worker, an Algerian, a Black. It is at this level of obligation that the decisive tie is forged between memory and social identity. The two become almost synonymous; their near-merger reflects a change in the way history and society interact.
How is “memory” now organized? Two patterns are visible. The first consists of a dramatic increase in the uses made of the past. Many reasons exist for today’s proliferation of commemorative events, but each shows that the past has ceased to have a single meaning and that a present overlaid with awareness of its own history allows for several possible versions of the past.
The second effect of this change in the way memory is organized deprives historians of their monopoly on interpreting the past. In a world in which you had collective history and individual memories , the historian exercised exclusive control. Today, historians share their duties with judges, witnesses, the media and legislators.
The problem raised by memory’s sacralization comes in recognizing the moment at which emancipation becomes exclusion. For to claim the right to memory is to call for justice, but this proliferation of moral claims can degenerate into a call to murder. It is this message of memory that we must also remember.
Pierre Nora is Director of studies, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris and a member of the Académie française.
Copyright: Project Syndicate and Institute for Human Sciences, June 2001
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