How Societies Remember (Themes in the Social Sciences) by Paul Connerton

Author:Paul Connerton [Connerton, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1989-08-24T16:00:00+00:00

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I turn now to the second difficulty: the tendency to ignore the pervasive importance in many cultures of actions which are explicitly represented as re-enactments of prior, prototypical actions. Commemorative ceremonies share two features of all other rituals, formalism and performativity; and in so far as they function effectively as mnemonic devices they are able to execute that function in large part because they possess such features. But commemorative ceremonies are distinguishable from all other rituals by the fact that they explicitly refer to prototypical persons and events, whether these are understood to have a historical or a mythological existence; and by virtue of that fact rites of this sort possess a further characteristic and one that is distinctively their own. We may describe this feature as that of ritual re-enactment, and it is a quality of cardinal importance in the shaping of communal memory. But the character of modern society and of modern self-understanding makes it singularly difficult for us to appreciate the nature of precisely this feature of ritual re-enactment. We may perhaps best seize hold of this characteristic of commemorative ceremonies if we approach it by juxtaposing two important statements, each of which seeks to delineate schematically a historically particular form of life and a way of understanding that type of life. The first figures centrally in Paul de Man’s essay on ‘Literary History and Literary Modernity’. The second is sketched out in Thomas Mann’s address ‘Freud and the Future’.

In ‘Literary History and Literary Modernity’ de Man fastens upon a particular type of forgetting as part of the core experience of modernity.31 He invites us to consider ‘the idea of modernity’ as consisting in ‘a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at last a point that would be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure. This combined interplay of deliberate forgetting with an action that is also a new origin reaches the full power of the idea of modernity.’32 The justification offered for this principled forgetting is automatically linked to what it negates: that is, to historicism. De Man more than acknowledges, he pointedly underscores, this paradox: the more radical the rejection of anything that came before, the greater the dependence on the past. We can develop de Man’s insight by distinguishing two phases in the strategy of rejection. In the avant-garde it took the form of a rhetoric of forgetting, in postmodernism it appears as a rhetoric of pastiche. The attack of the avant-garde was directed mainly against the store-room of collective memory: museums, libraries and academies. The appeal to forget was at its most stridently uncompromising in the manifestos of the Futurists, who denounced intellectuals as the slaves of antiquated rites, museums as cemeteries, and libraries as burial chambers. But the Futurists were not alone; the idea of a tabula rasa had already been given a justification in Nietzsche and it recurred in the first third of this century in the work of avant-garde architects and town planners.

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