Abstract
I address changing conceptions of collective memory in light of advances in the technologies of communication, with particular attention to the passage from orality to literacy, and in our times from print to electronic/digital culture. Central to this line of inquiry are the pioneering studies by German scholars Jan and Aleida Assmann on the concept of cultural memory, conceived as the elaboration of memorable heritage in canon and archive. I follow with a discussion of the implications of digital age media for understanding cultural memory, as memory studies escape their niche in historiography to become an interdisciplinary field. Here communication science plays a key role in rethinking the relationship between biological and artificial memory in the electronic archive.
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Notes
- 1.
For an overview of the work of Parry, Lord, and other early students of orality/literacy, see John Miles Foley, The Theory of Oral Composition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 2–10.
- 2.
Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963) 3–15.
- 3.
The changes in mentality have also been plotted by the anthropologist André Leroi-Gouhran as a five-stage process. These include oral transmission, written tables, file cards, mechanical writing, and electronic sequencing. See his Le Geste et la parole: la mémoire et les rythmes (Paris : Albin Michel, 1965), 65.
- 4.
Alexander Luria, Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976).
- 5.
Jack Goody, The Interface between the Written and the Oral (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985).
- 6.
Robert Funk and Roy Hoover, eds., The Five Gospels; What Did Jesus Really Say? (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), 1–38.
- 7.
See Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
- 8.
Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic; Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).
- 9.
Noteworthy is the contribution of historian Robert Darnton to the study of print culture. His early scholarship concerned the making of the Encyclopédie as the key tool for the organization and preservation of knowledge in the modern era of print culture. But his best-seller, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French History (New York: Basic, 1984), reached a wider audience. In a series of artfully told stories, he canvassed the new social types born of the emerging age of print literacy: printers, hack writers, editors, clerks, and readers of novels. See also his The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982).
- 10.
James Olney, Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
- 11.
On involuntary memory in Proust’s novel, see Daniel Schacter, Searching for Memory; The Brain, the Mind, and the Past (New York: Harper Collins, 1996), 26–28.
- 12.
Patrick Hutton, “Sigmund Freud and Maurice Halbwachs: The Problem of Memory in Historical Psychology,” The History Teacher 27 (1994), 146–48.
- 13.
Building upon oral protocols, Yates explained, they used the art of memory to provide a framework for building a body of cultural knowledge. She analyzed the uses of the art by neo-Platonic philosophers, with particular attention to their speculative purposes. Sixteenth-century magi, such as Giulio Camillo, Giordano Bruno, and Robert Fludd, believed that their ornately decorated memory palaces mirrored the structure of the universe, and so contained the keys to its understanding. Celebrating the harmony between divine and human power of mind, their architectonic designs might be regarded as supernova of the intellectual quest of a waning philosophical idealism. Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), esp. 129–59, 368–72.
- 14.
Aleida Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization; Arts of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 18.
- 15.
Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian; The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 8–17, 21.
- 16.
Jan Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 6–11.
- 17.
Ibid., 36–44.
- 18.
Ibid., 87, 103, 156–65, 170–74.
- 19.
Ibid., 176–79, 230–31.
- 20.
Ibid., 179–80.
- 21.
Ibid., 191–200.
- 22.
In his interpretation, Assmann qualifies Eric Havelock’s thesis that the flourishing of the written word in the Greek Classical Age was largely a product of the transition to manuscript literacy made possible by the adoption of the Phoenician alphabet. Assmann argues that the politics of a changing society was also a contributing factor in the emergence of Greek cultural memory. From the seventh century BCE (the Archaic Age), the Greeks developed a new, more democratic politics suitable for the social mores of emerging urban city-states. As living memory, the way of life of the rural aristocracy had come to an end, surviving only as nostalgia for a mythic past of epic proportions. Ibid., 273–75.
- 23.
Ibid., 248–51, 262–71.
- 24.
Aleida Assmann, “Canon and Archive,” in Cultural Memory Studies; An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 100–02.
- 25.
Ibid., 106.
- 26.
Ibid., 98–104; idem, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization, 327–32.
- 27.
In making her case about the nature of cultural elaboration and transmission, Assmann draws upon the insights of the largely forgotten German art collector Aby Warburg, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization, 163, 198, 214–16.
- 28.
Assmann, “Canon and Archive”, 102.
- 29.
Ibid., 103.
- 30.
Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization, 106, 196–97.
- 31.
Ibid., 201, 369–76.
- 32.
Assmann, “Canon and Archive,” 104.
- 33.
Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization, 17–22, 98–99.
- 34.
Ibid., 200–01, 340, 344–57.
- 35.
Ibid., 340–41.
- 36.
The term “memory unbound” has been widely used by scholars to denote the turn toward the interest in digital memory.
- 37.
The idea of a “third wave” of memory studies is common currency among the generation of scholars coming of age today. See, for example, Gregor Feindt, Félix Krawatzek, Daniela Mehler, Friedemann Pestel, and Rieke Trimçev, “Entangled Memory: Toward a Third Wave in Memory Studies,” History and Theory 53 (February 2014), 24–44. They focus on the “entanglement” of diverse approaches to collective memory, and repudiate Nora’s regret over the loss of unity and homogeneity in national memory. They explore the possibilities of what “European memory” might be.
- 38.
Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012).
- 39.
Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney, “Introduction: Cultural Memory and its Dynamics,” in ibid, 1–11.
- 40.
Ibid., 3–5; Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation; Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000), esp. 20–62.
- 41.
Erll and Rigney, “Introduction: Cultural Memory and its Dynamics,” 4. See also Erll, “ Literature, Film, and the Mediality of Cultural Memory,” in Cultural Memory Studies, 392–95.
- 42.
Andrew Hoskins, “Digital Network Memory,” in Erll and Rigney, eds., Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory, 91–101.
- 43.
See Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 66–88; and the review by Jo Tollebeek, “‘Turn’d to Dust and Tears’: Revisiting the Archive,” History and Theory 43 (May 2004): 237–48.
- 44.
Feindt, “Entangled Memory”; Lucy Bond, Stef Craps, and Pieter Vermeulen, eds., Memory Unbound; Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016).
- 45.
Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory; the Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 19–21.
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Hutton, P.H. (2016). Cultural Memory: From the Threshold of Literacy to the Digital Age. In: The Memory Phenomenon in Contemporary Historical Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49466-5_4
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