Memory and Culture

My father left me with a legacy which speaks to the subject of memory in a way that both complicates and solidifies, for me, the conception of the ways in which memory functions. It is a distinct image of him at the head of the table looking off into a space beyond the room, and the sound of his voice in my head intoning, “There are strange things done in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold, and the Arctic trails have their secret tales that will make your blood run cold. Arctic nights have seen queer sights but never a stranger did see, then the night on the marge of Lake Lebarge I cremated Sam Mcghee.” I have just now typed that section without any aid from the text. It in fact may not be “correctly” the text of Robert W. Service’s “The Cremation of Sam Mcghee” but that is not especially relevant. At that moment twenty years ago when he recited a poem he had set to memory, (A poem I have since read only once) it became forever a part of the fabric of my history. He recited the poem at a few other points in my life previous to that day, but it is this particular rendition, his last for me that has become his legacy.
Given the concerns of Plato and Benjamin this story resonates with many implications. First in terms of Plato’s concern with writing and memory in Phaedrus, and then with Benjamin’s conception of the storyteller as the locus of memory. I must at this point draw a distinction, which seems appropriate, between two different types of memory. The physical faculty to recall information or see an event clearly in the mind I will call the personal memory, and then the ability of society to pass on important information and organize itself and its history in terms of a mutually recalled story which I will call cultural memory. They share a similar structure and purpose for the individual but serve very different ends in society and as I shall expand one is very much under threat while the other suffers problems of social and political appropriation.
First I would like to consider the personal memory. Plato argues in the Phaedrus that memory is threatened by the invention of writing.
But when they came to writing, Theuth said: “O King,
here is something that once learned , will make the
Egyptians wiser and will improve their memory”...
Thamus however replied,”...In fact it will introduce
forgetfulness into the souls of those who learn it: they
will not practice using their memory because they will
put their trust in writing...”[81]

In terms of personal memory it is hard to argue against Plato’s position. To borrow a line from Indiana Jones, “I wrote it down so I wouldn’t have to remember.” The written word becomes a replacement for the act of memory. One could argue that there is no need to be able to recall the specific details of an event or of information if one can simply write those details down to refer back when recall is necessary. For Plato the loss of the practice of remembering without visual aid effects what one can actually know, which leads into a discussion of the nature of knowledge, but his statement of concern still resonates when memory itself is considered.
The anecdote of my father’s legacy speaks in a way to Plato’s concern. I have read many poems in my academic career, some of them many times, but I can remember none of them half as well as this story passed on to me at the dinner table. One could argue that as an aural learner I am hard wired to remember what is spoken more readily than what is read, but I have heard many of the poems of which I speak read aloud, some again multiple times, but there is something about the rendition of my father that is different. This seems to be in terms of the social connection involved. Though the poem itself does not have any advice as Benjamin would advocate, the performance goes beyond recitation and becomes story in the sense that Benjamin posits the relationship between storyteller and his audience and it’s effect on memory. It is tied up in connection, in communication of social values, in shared history. It sticks in the personal memory more readily because it moves to the realm of cultural memory. The poetic performance, because it communicates far more than the text of the poem, becomes a statement, both for the teller and the listener, a statement of who we are and why our relationship matters.
The danger of writing becoming a replacement for the ability to remember has perhaps been greatly magnified in this digital age of PDAs, Daytimers and cell phones. As a young man I was readily able to recite the phone number of at least many tens of people. The alternative at the time was to hunt through the phone book assuming the number was listed. Now that the cell phone and computer keep track of all the numbers I need, I cannot even remember the phone number of my closest friend. Her number can be recalled by mentioning her name to my phone. It does the work for me. From this perspective, Plato’s concern about writing and its danger to the memory is again hard to question. The personal memory seems to grow weaker as the need for its brand of storage can be readily replaced by something outside of itself. As we lose our ability to recall details we risk also losing our ability to accurately remember as a culture.

In the book Time Maps, Eviatar Zarubavel draws a tie between the structure of the personal memory and the different but related phenomenon he calls cultural memory. The process begins with the narrative structure of personal memory, but in the realm of the social begins to behave collectively. Cultural filters alter the way in which the individual remembers.
Our tendency to better remember facts that fit certain
(unmistakably cultural ) mental schemeta is quite
evident in the highly formulaic plot structures we often
use for narrating the past.... Far from being a strictly
spontaneous act, remembering is also governed by
unmistakably social norms of remembrance that tell us
what we should remember and what we should essentially
forget. [4]

He argues that the story we create in our memory is affected by the ways in which our social surrounding teach us to organize information that we store. He relates, for example that he remembers the story of Alfred Dreyfus as a story of imprisonment and disgrace forgetting his eventual exoneration and the public apology. Zarubavel attributes this to his immersion in the Jewish tradition which relates a history of trial and persecution. He is in effect brought up to arrange the information in terms of a prevailing narrative. It is not a tendency to see things in terms of a particular bias, but rather a structural determinism based on the way his culture has taught him to remember.
For Zarubavel, culture’s effect on the way in which we structure memory has a compound effect on the ways in which things come to mean for the individual. He writes. “...meaning lies in the manner in which semiotic objects are systematically positioned in relation to one another.” The process of organizing memory becomes also a way of organizing meaning. In the process of memory, details get organized into a narrative which connects disparate events into a continual story that bridges gaps of time and space. This arrangement often takes the place of the actual timeline of events and draws relationships that arguably were not historically present in the context of the actors. In our minds we perform a small personal revisionist history to make sense and continuity of the past.
This process is played out on a grand scale in the space he calls the collective memory. It has different rules than the personal memory, but operates in the same selectively narrative pattern.
Rather than a mere aggregate of the personal recollections
of its various members, a community’s collective memory
includes only those shared by its members as a group. As
such, it invokes a common past that they all seem to recall. [4]

Membership in this group requires assumption of the collective memory. The story of the history of the group becomes a part of personal story. Further, many things that we remember are only as a result of our membership in the group.
The collective memory is a space outside of any individual that in part determines identification with a particular group. But the assumption of that identity also informs the way in which the personal memory creates its own story. Pieces of the collective story become enmeshed with personal history and begin to color the way in which private events gather meaning.
Unlike Plato, Zarubavel credits writing with the ability to spread memory across generations, but Zarubavel is concerned with memory as a social and collective function, where Plato warns against the failing of the individual memory. Clearly writing does not help us remember events or facts; it simply replaces the need to remember. Zarubavel writes, “ It was language that freed human memory from having to be stored exclusively in individual’s brains.”[5] Beyond freeing the individual from the burden of remembering details, language offers the benefit of cultural transmission. “ Indeed language allows memories to actually pass from one person to another even when there is no direct contact between them.... Such mnemonic transitivity enables us to preserve memories in the form of oral traditions that are transmitted from one generation to the next.”[6] Culture is then able to transmits its collective memory from elder to younger, passing the lessons of experience and maintaining traditions which reinforce moral and cultural values. Collective memory is organized in terms of a timeline, but it is also distributed in the form of narrative.
Walter Benjamin, in his book Illuminations, examines the role of the storyteller as a keeper of cultural knowledge. Both speaking and writing have their role in memory as they both trace their lineage to the Epic. The Epic form is memory writ large. The goal of the Epic is to preserve the collective story for future generations complete with advice and lessons for future generations. Epic combined the functions of remembrance (a historical preservation of specific events) and reminiscence (a less accurate linking of events along a timeline, drawing connections of meaning and narrative). Even the muse of epic is all about memory - Mnemosyne, the rememberer. The novel and the spoken story both have roots in the epic, but each takes a specific memory function. The novel operates in the realm of remembrance while the story functions by reminiscence. Benjamin prefers story for its ability to convey advice and draw immediate connections, but I would argue that both are vital to memory.
Both collective memory and personal memory are necessary parts in the regulation of power. Caroline Fourche, in the introduction to her collection of “poetry of witness” called Against Forgetting, establishes the role of an art artifact in the process of resistance. “In fact, the poem might be our only evidence that an event has occurred: it exists for us as the sole trace of an occurrence.”[31] The art object becomes the remembrance of an abuse of power or an atrocity. As it fills its role in the preservation and transmission of history and of story the art object can also become the focus of resistance. This is another essential function of memory. The danger in the collective memory is the spaces of structured forgetting. This combined with the forces arrayed in our society that seems to deaden the personal memory allow for regimes like Nazi Germany to arise. These cultures willfully forget details that are inconvenient to the story they wish to portray.
This is playing out in our culture today. Story functions to co-opt and replace memory with more amenable details. The current administration operates by repeating information so often that it becomes absorbed in the collective memory. At last count, 65% of Bush supporter believe that Sadam Hussein had a direct role in the attacks on the World Trade Center. They identify themselves as a member of this group by maintaining the collective memory that favors their story. They reminisce, drawing the necessary connections while dismissing inconvenient details. Story is after all not about remembering what actually happened, but rather about preserving and reinforcing a particular viewpoint. I have singled out this group for attention, but they are not alone in their selective construction of memory, we are all equally implicated by the way in which our associations affect the narratives we create.
The danger we face as memory is slowly eroded by cultural and technological forces, is the loss of the ability to transmit values and lessons in an efficient and organized way. Their are forces in human society that have a vested interest in the loss of memory. Those things which we are unable to remember, become free passes for those that have inflicted harm. It is equally dangerous to allow the collective narrative to elide those things which are painful or inconvenient to forget. Art can step in to fill the role highlighting those things which would otherwise be lost. Conscious and conscientious storytelling can also help to preserve memory in the face of pressure to forget. By conscientious I mean with the full knowledge that our mind is structured to draw only easy and culturally determined connections which must be evaluated to understand what is spoken in the silences.