In Our Time - Memory and Culture

Episode Date: May 27, 1999

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss memory. At the start of the twentieth century Freud put memory at the centre of our psychology, and as the century has worn on what a nation remembers and what it should try to forget has become one of the binding political questions that modern societies face. As every second passes, humanity has a moment more to remember, and perhaps this fact alone goes a long way to explaining the ever changing role of memory, both in the mind of individuals and at the heart of the body politic. Memory, what to remember and when to forget, has personal and national implications. Whether we look to Chile, South Africa, Germany or Northern Ireland, these are all societies where the issue of memory is at the centre of the dilemmas and challenges they face. And in the mind of the individual too - as ever more forms of information crowd for space in our minds, and the image from someone else’s photograph can be more enduring than our own first hand experience of an event, can memory itself forever remain unchanged in its role within our psychology? Have our ways of remembering changed? Not in the sense neuro-biologists would explore the subject, but in its cultural and collective, as well as its individual, sense. “Memory is decidedly in fashion” writes Dr Nancy Wood, “whether attention is focused on the so-called return of repressed memories of the abused individual, or on the black holes in a nation’s recollection of its past. The topic of memory has become a compelling preoccupation”. With Professor Malcolm Bowie, Marshall Foch Professor of French Literature at Oxford University and Director of Oxford’s European Humanities Research Centre; Dr Nancy Wood, Chair of Media Studies, University of Sussex and author of Vectors of Memory.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, as every second passes, humanity has a moment more to remember. And perhaps this fact alone goes some way to explaining the ever-changing role of memory, both in the mind of individuals, and the heart and at the heart of the body politic.

Memory has personal and national implications. Whether we look to Chile, South Africa, Germany or Northern Ireland, these are all societies where the issue of memory is at the centre of the dilemmas and challenges they face. And for the individual too, as ever more forms of information crowd for space at our minds and the image from someone else's photograph can be more enduring than our own first-hand experience of an event,

can memory itself forever remain unchanged in its role within our psychology? Malcolm Bowie is Marshall Foch Professor of French Literature at Oxford University and also the director of Oxford European Humanities Research Centre. He's a scholar of Proust, Freud and Lacan, and his most recent book is Proust among the stars. Dr. Nancy Wood is head of media studies at the University of Sussex, where her research is chiefly in the areas of popular history and memory. She is the author of Vectors of Memory,

which is to be published in September this year. Marken Bauer, at the start of this century, Freud came up with an idea that had a huge impact on the way that we think about our own past. He put memory, I think, right at the heart of where we form ourselves as individuals. Could you tell us about that? I need to begin by sketching out something that he wasn't doing. He wasn't coming up with a theory of memory in general.

He wasn't trying to work out the internal systems that might comprise the neurophysiological functioning of the brain. He was only in a very limited sense, a cognitive psychologist trying to work out what was happening cerebrally. What he was interested in was a certain class of memories and a certain special role that those memories could have in therapeutic treatment. These were the memories of painful early events, which had proved intolerable to the individual,

which the individual had repressed, had no longer had direct access to. And so the famous Freudian dialogue between analyst and patient was set up in order to allow the patient to get back down into contact with those hidden recesses of the mind and to control potentially dangerous material. by way of conversation, by way of building a future self that had been somehow purged of those pains, difficulties,

emotional disturbances and so forth. So memory of a quite special kind was placed at the centre of the Freudian method. Yes, in this programme we're not talking about the neurobiology of memory, we're not talking about where it resides in the brain, we're talking about the culture of memory. Before Freud, were there any theories of memory as powerful, or was he challenging already existing theories of memory?

There were numerous theories of memory going all the way back to Plato and the Presocratics. I think what Freud did that in large part caused him to achieve this extraordinary celebrity, which for better or for worse goes on to this day, was to think of memory as a dramatic device. Certain memories were very much more potent than others. They could be placed at the center

of an entirely new sort of conversation between a clinician and patient. And so memory became, if you like, a suddenly new sexy subject on the European agenda from having been the sort of thing that philosophers, psychologists, moral inquiries of one kind or another would explore in their spare moments and write treatises and tomes about,

it suddenly became of urgent import to you, me and everyone. But it also became, it was seen as the key to unlocking this great subterraneous reservoir called the unconscious for better and for worse. It could bring to mind what was thought of. That's 90% of stuff or 95% down there under the surface of what we deal with every day. How far do you think this is true as a theory?

I don't know. It's very difficult to apply the ordinary truth tests to it when you talk about a reservoir, subterranean recess, which is the unconscious, which is a storehouse of forbidden, forgotten, difficult memories and so forth. There really are no ways of testing for the presence or even partial presence of that within average human mental functioning. I think if one thinks of Freud as a dramatist as somebody who has one singular and splendid intuition at an early stage in his life and carries on working out the consequences of that in more and more refined versions of his therapeutic technique,

you get further. So you don't ask the question, how true is this, so much as the question does it work in helping people to come to terms with their problems and in constructing futures for themselves. And the drama was enhanced by the fact that he proceeded in his course through conversation, through dramatic conversation, through dialogue, I suppose.

That's right. Only two people working together could have access to either person's unconscious, and then only glancingly and momentarily. I come back in a moment to whether you thought he had a big influence on Proust and other writers. But Nancy Wood, do you think that the individual still uses memory in the way that Freud described? Yes, I do. I think that we still use memories to establish our identities through time.

I think that is a key function of memory. We tell narratives of the self, if you like, as a way of establishing. who we are. I think perhaps what's changed is that society has come to value that function in a different way. It's not simply that's what memory does. It's that society assigns a very high social value to that process. We can see that in the proliferation of psychotherapies that are designed precisely to try and probe our memories in search of self-knowledge. I think we can see it in the kind of value that's put on autobiography, individual memoirs as forms of testimony about ourselves.

So while I think the function of memory remains for the individual, telling narratives of the self and when unable to do so, trying to fill in those gaps as Freud would have it, I think we have as a society come to give it a particular premium. Do you think that we use memory or not? employ memory or go-to-memory in a significantly different way at the end of this century. Let's say we're talking about the Western with a small W world in this case. Are we doing it in a significant different way than a couple hundred years ago?

I think we are. I think if you look at the broad sweep of memory, previous societies created environments of memory, if you like. They lived memory, unself-consciously. was more a spontaneous phenomenon. It was embedded in rituals and in traditions. I think what modern societies have done is separated memory off, put it on forms of cultural display.

The French historian Pierre Norha uses a term lieu de memoir or sites of memory to try and indicate the extent to which we have separated ourselves off from the experience of memory. Can you give us some examples of this? The listeners can have to figure out. a hold on this? Certainly if you think about the growth of the museum, museum industries, the

extent to which we are interested in commemorating our past. But haven't civilisations always been interested in commemorating their past? Yes, I think commemoration is again something that is part of our social lives. I think at the end of this century

we do it more and more. and we can ask ourselves whether we do it because we have less of a faith in the future. The future appears perhaps more capricious, more uncertain, and in that sense we turn to memory as a sort of refuge. Do you think that the memories of the individual as are as important as they once were? I think they're even more important. I think we don't rely on tradition, rituals in the same. way. I think individuals themselves come to embody memories in a certain way. We're memory

individuals to a great extent and society expects us to be so. Can you just disentangle what memory individuals in a certain sense means? Well, I think it's the expectation that our sense of continuity will no longer be guaranteed through tradition, but that it will be guaranteed through the self and through the extent to which individuals, find other individuals to whom they can refer, to whom they can share, with whom they can share memories. And I think that has become more and more a function of individual memories in society to join them into a group memory.

Malcolm Bowie, do you think that this idea of putting memory in such a prime prize position in our culture is, is right, is something that you agree with, is something that I'm not asking you to flatly contradict Nancy Wood, I don't know. But what's your view of that? Because Freud's ideas have been severely re-examined by two of the people that you're very interested, well, by Lacan, but also by Sartreth, his existential notion of how we live.

What's your view of the primacy, almost, of memory, as Nancy Wood was discussing? I think the problem for psychoanalysis, and a variety of other therapies that put a particular emphasis on memory, is that unless you do a thing in a particularly subtle and wide-ranging way, it can become terribly narcissistic and self-inclusive. You're dealing with your own autobiography, digging up your own reminiscences, reprocessing them conversationally, as we were saying, that you're not connecting yourself back to the community,

back to any sense of public responsibility. you're not really taking part in the, if you like, the institutionalized forms of memory that help to create certain sorts of cohesion on the one hand and of inventiveness and innovation on the other. So there's something slightly, come on, say, self-preening about certain of these therapies, as if the answer to the individual's problems

always somehow lay within and lay retrospectively within, rather than in the public sphere and prospectively taking the person out into new forms of connection with others. Would you say that from your studies of Jacques Lacan, he did what you think should be done? He suggested his theory took us in that direction. His was a theory of what he called intersubjective speech. That's the say of things that happen between people, between the analysts and the patient in the first instance,

but between the speaker and the speech. community at large, secondly. And that sounds to many of his defenders and enthusiasts like the beginnings of a very important new psychoanalytically based social theory. If you get a Lacanian hold on language and on the centrality of language within the human subject,

you're thereby, it's claimed, getting a hold on all sorts of social mechanisms and modes of production and meaning within society. Now, it seems to me that's, that's difficult in that different levels of social activity, different kinds of meaning within society, might need to be treated as quasi-autonomous systems rather than brought together into one embracing cult of human language

as the be-all and end-all of all kinds of meaning whatsoever. So there's a problem there, but there's certainly a much more thoroughgoing attempt to situate the life of the individual, the memories of the individual within the social sphere in Mecca than in Freud. Nancy, would you stress the importance of the individual memory, but how important are individual memories, it's most impossible to get the balance,

but anyway, that's what you've been working on. Compared with collective memories, I mean, there's a collective memory in this country of wars in this century, and the collective memory of the Holocaust, even though for many people, many people below a certain age, just to take one. section of people, it was nowhere near their direct experience. And yet it's part of the collective memory. We all know, I mean, I was born in 1989,

but I know from what I've read and seen about the First World War and about, of course, what happened all over the First World, particularly about the British contribution in the First World War, and the images of the trenches and so on, are very strong in my mind. They're as strong as memory. And I know it's a collective memory in this country. Most people I talk to, well, they would know what we're doing.

talking about. It's part of what we are, part of what we come from. How do you put that in your theory, your idea of memory? Well, I would make a distinction between individual memory and what you call collective memory. I think only individuals remember, but societies organize those memories or indeed other representations of the past into particular scenarios for us. And I think that what is important is that in those scenarios, we establish some relationship to the past, some type of judgment of it, some type of identification with it,

or some ethical view of it. And I think that is really the function of what we might call collective memory is to establish our relationship to the past. And I think when you mention the example of World War I, it's interesting that insofar as that has come back, into public culture, it has come back in a critical form. We're looking at those representations of the trenches, of the soldiers who were shot at dawn,

of the soldiers sent on impossible missions in barren landscapes, and we are critical of those. And I think that is one of the functions of memory. Memory is not only a kind of commemoration and celebration of the past. I think it is also a form of critical reflection. Malcolm Boe, do you think that the memory, the ideas of memory, and that we remember, are too dominating in the culture at the moment, and that the idea of the past is too dominating, and the idea that the past is sacred and there is sacred is too dominating? I think we're coming up, we are in the middle of a rather difficult period of the moment

where everybody but everybody is in retrospective as well as introspective, with the advent of the millennium. This is time for the usual end of year stock-taking. It's the end of century stock-taking. It's the end of millennium stock-taking. As you yourself know from your ventures elsewhere, it's a whole stock-taking exercise on Christianity itself and on that as an underpinning for much in Western culture.

And this constant retrospection, I really do find alarming. It's a difficult question to know, just how are we going to emerge from this? fixation on the remembering mode and get ourselves into the new millennium, the new century on day one, and inventing new forms of experience for ourselves. The example at the end of the last, the last fantasy act, if you like, in the period 1890 to 1910, it's an example of extraordinary new fertility and forward-lookingness and invention before the horrors of the First World War were unleashed, as Nancy was describing. one thinks of that extraordinary cultural resurgence in Paris in the years up to 1913. Now, I don't see any sign, apart possibly from relatively trivial things like large wheels on the South Bank and Millennium Derms and so forth.

I don't see any sign of an impending cultural or personal renaissance, a new form of imagination coming into being for the 21st century. Do you think that the idea, that memory is so important to us as individuals and collectively and that we explore it so much in now in our own lives we'll all accept that I think

and in the media in different ways the film's about the past we have access to it they're fascinating do you think that means that we are rather afraid of facing what is and what might be or do you think that's just the luxury

of a particular period in our development. I think it is very luxurious to have, by way of the media and extraordinary explosion in publishing, what seems like instantaneous access to the past in all its highways and byways, and cross-culturally,

we can imagine ourselves back into the skin of any one of our human predecessors and re-examine his, her lifestyle, with the aid of this now very subtle and often sort of online and instantly retrievable information that we have about the past. And that, that luxuriance, that sense of slightly deliquescent lingering over things that have ceased to be, does seem to me to be in danger of sapping the inventiveness, the system building, the hypothesizing, the future imagining capacities of the human mind.

Except that that very acceptance of the past, inspired one of your greatest series as Nyakle, one of the greatest novelist to ever lived? That's right. Well, he, Proust is thought of as the person who somehow monumentalises and fetishizes memory. He gives memory a special role at the beginning of his novel,

and he comes back to a further account of memory much later in the novel in order to give it one of its senses of overall completeness and closure. So he's thought of, of as a man who is famous for remembering, famous for remembering what it feels like to be a child as an adolescent and then as an adult and so forth. But if you look at the texture of post-writing, you can see that it's full of what I would call model-building ingenuity, forward-flung anticipation of new modes of awareness, new patterns of thinking. And so if you like, the act of memory is the motive, the spur, the trigger to a whole lot of,

perspective imagining inside the texture of that book. Then, Sue, I'd like to come back to this notion of the collective memory and if you could explain why you think that the collective memory is important and what it is about the collective memory today that is significantly different. I know I've asked this before, but if we can take a bit more time, significantly different from collective memories in previous times. Well, I think, again, in thinking of the way that we talk about sites of memory, memory as areas within culture to which we can refer with

which we can identify, I think that is very different than the way we've related to memory in the past. But I think there's probably a sharper way of examining that question, and I think it's to look at societies who are examining their past, who are examining their collective memories. If you think about South Africa, for example, the example you mentioned at the start of the program, where there is an attempt to establish a consensus about what happened under the years of apartheid in order to move forward,

in order to make that transition to democracy, one in which people feel has involved some type of reckoning with the past and the crimes of the past. So I think at that level, societies need to work through their pasts in order to move forward into democratic futures, which isn't to say that's easy, but I think it's a necessary process, particularly for societies coming out of authoritarian regimes. It's very prescriptive, isn't it, though?

It's saying we will look at our past in that way, or in case of Chile, we will forget those crimes. You will forget those crimes, otherwise we can't move forward. Do you think this is at all effective? I think the case of South Africa is very instructive, and particularly through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was the South African attempt to come to terms with the past. I think truths about the past, and I would emphasize truths in the plural, did emerge.

Whether reconciliation was achieved, I think, is another matter. I don't think reconciliation can be imposed by societies. I think it has to come from below. And it primarily has to come from those who were victims or whose families were victims of regimes. And in that sense, I think there is a question mark over whether that process was achieved in South Africa or could have been achieved by those institutional means.

I do think Chile has to go through that process itself. I don't think the price of democracy can be merely a forgetting, a putting behind of crimes of the past. I think it will return those. crimes will return to haunt societies in the future. Is it possible, do you think, Michael Byr, for governments to, as it were, direct the way its peoples think about their past, in other words, to direct memory? Do you just think it's possible?

I think it's possible, it's certainly happening as we speak in the sense that government agencies of one kind or another are responsible for what is nowadays called heritage for as it were the official story constantly modified but still constant in its broad outlines of the nation state and its predecessor outfits seen almost always as stories of grand linear development towards rewarding fulfilling goals rather than a catalogue of disasters and accidents so there's a lot a lot of government money is spent on that form of commemoration and of encouraging a certain sort of, if you like, buying in on the part of the populace to officially or semi-officially sanctioned versions of the past

rather than encouraging critical scrutiny of the national myths. Because in this country at the moment we're told again and again in newspapers or people discuss, and I think quite rightly, about what particularly the English are at the moment, the Scots seem to, from Braveheart to their own Parliament, and so on it gets. And that is very much to do with how we remember ourselves, isn't it? I think that's right, but there's no particular reason when the Englishness of English history has been disentangled

from the Jacobite Rebellion and so for various uncomfortable things happening on the Welsh marches. And so no reason why that should be a story of uniform success and fulfillment. I mean, it seems to me that we owe it to the past to look at the dark eclipses. the history of the nation state, not for pious reasons, reasons of sort of national self-improvement, but just as a way of telling a certain new range of truths

about what actually happened. But in this collective memory, are we talking about memory, how we talking about politics? That is to say, when in Ireland, for instance, people remember Oliver Cromwell, that's taken. Are they remembering Oliver Cromwell in any sense that makes sense, or are they using Oliver Cromwell to get on with what they want to do tomorrow morning? Well, I think

the term politics of memory is very instructive in this respect because it says any memory responds to certain intentions, and those intentions are usually political intentions of states. Of course, those intentions can come from below as well. I think one

is talking about a balance of power, and certainly I think memory is subject to those forces as much as it's something that emerges out of some particular interests in the past. I think intentionality drives memory and its presence in the public sphere.

Do you think the widening amount of information that comes in, Mark and by, to people through television and now have the internet and the radio, which is largely shared over particular groups, do you think that in any way is overwhelming individual memory? I think it's overwhelming individual memory in certain cases and individual creativity,

the sense that it's possible for individuals to make a difference, to have ideas that change things. I think that's being compromised. I think people are often sort of nostalgically and sentimentally afloat in various versions of the past, sometimes kind of hyper-real versions of the past coming at us by way of the new technology, and losing any sense of personal willfulness,

inventiveness, the word I keep using, and the power to affect change within, society or within their sense of their own individuality. Do you think that the emphasis, as I said at the top of the program, on memory at the moment, which is in, as Marka Bauer has hinted at, is in various forms, right, both academic and cultural and popular and so, do you think this is something which will pass, or do you think it's something that we will want to keep exploring intensively for any foreseeable future? I think we will probably want to keep exploring it.

What I think we have to do is avoid turning it into a cult of men. I think we have to keep realizing that memory is for uses in the present ought to inform us about the present and guide our actions in the present. And cults of memory will not do that. Marka Bow, we've kept away from neuroscience, neurobiology, but do you think maybe discoveries in the brain finally will change the way that the cultural memory is perceived? My greater hope would be of cognitive science, that's to say that people will make. models of brain process that will enable us to understand the functioning of memory and the different systems that combine to produce complex memory performances and states of attention based on memory.

But I don't think that neuroscience in itself is going to tell us how to conduct ourselves in the new millennium. Well, thank you very much. Thank you very much. Professor Marka Bowie and Dr. Nancy Wood. Next week I'll be joined by John Keene and Nile Ferguson, and we'll be talking about the concept of the just war. which I think came from Aquinas. Thanks for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast.

You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.ukuk forward slash radio 4.