British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Social Brain, Distributed Mind
Abstract
Some Functions of Collective Forgetting
Paul Connerton (Cambridge)
Coerced oblivion was one of the malign features of the twentieth century. Forgetting as repressive erasure appeared in its most brutal form in the history of totalitarian regimes where, in the words of Milan Kundera, the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. It was to disarm that threat of oblivion that the eloquence of Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Nadezhda Mandelstan was directed. Their testimonies were at once political acts and therapeutic acts. Political acts: because to write was to denounce the injustice which they had survived or escaped. And therapeutic acts: because for them to write was a way of making sense of a destructive, violent past, one in which they had been victims, and of triumphing over that experience, of turning it into a motivation for living and working. Germany after Hitler, France after Petain, Spain after Franco, Chile after Pinochet, Greece after the Colonels, Argentina after the Generals, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Cambodia, the post-communist states of central and eastern Europe – all had to confront the problem of what a nation should do about a difficult past. To date some twenty 'truth commissions' have been established. Three massive volumes, collectively entitled Transitional Justice, document the world wide story up to 1995. Elie Wiesel is surely right to have suggested that, just as the ancient Greeks invented the literary genre of tragic drama and as the Renaissance invented the literary genre of the lyric poem, so the twentieth century invented the literary genre of testimony. As a result, we now think of remembering as an ethical act, not only a cognitive one. We can speak of an 'ethics of memory' at the end of the twentieth century, as we could not have done at the close of the nineteenth century, or the eighteenth century, or the seventeenth century. This structure of feeling has cast a shadow over the context of intellectual debate on memory, in the shape of the view, widely held if not universal, that remembering is usually a virtue and that forgetting is necessarily a failing. Yet forgetting, or oblivion, is not always a failure, and it is not always something about which we should feel culpable. Indeed, oblivion can sometimes be a success; and I want to distinguish three types of oblivion which are successful, in the sense that they establish and enhance social bonds. The first type is what I would call prescriptive oblivion. This is precipitated by an act of state and is believed to be in the interests of all the parties to the previous dispute; it can therefore be acknowledged publicly. Its aim is to prevent a chain of retribution for earlier acts from running on endlessly. A second type of forgetting is that which is constitutive in the formation of a new identity. One ingredient in a sense of identity is the feeling of being committed to certain patterns of action. Specific narratives sometimes play a role in shaping people’s dispositions to act in certain ways, whether directly or by giving rise to stereotypes of right action; and socially shared dispositions which function in this way are likely to be connected with narratives preserved by collective memory. The narratives preserved by collective memory may play a causal role in influencing people’s dispositions; or they may play a normative role, by providing criteria by which models of action can be shaped. Narratives of modernity, for example, require the massive discarding of traditional narratives. A third type of forgetting might be called annulment. This is a possible response to a surfeit of information. Paradoxically we live in a throwaway society and in one where memory is archival. No epoch has deliberately produced so many archives as ours, with our museums, libraries, depositories and centres of documentation. To say that something has been stored, in an archive or computer, is in effect to say that, though it is in principle always retrievable, we can afford to forget it. We now live in a society that has access to too much information and in the foreseeable future the problem can only get worse. Genuine skill in knowing how to manage one’s life may come to reside less in knowing how to gather information and more in knowing how to discard it.