Memories 2/4

There can be no humanity without memory. In times of doubt, crisis or conflict, memory is a refuge, a remedy, even a hope. The same is true at both the individual and the collective levels, and this phenomenon is a constant in both the most traditional and the most modern societies. Rousseau sensed this intuitively, and psychoanalysis proves him right: our identity is the product of a memory that is full of joys, sorrows, encounters, wounds and the aftermath of life’s ups and downs. The marginalized philosopher experienced a crisis and wanted to understand, to understand himself and to be understood, which is why he wrote his Confessions. The title refers to a well-known Christian practice that is also found, in different forms, in all spiritual and religious traditions. The intellect pauses for a moment, turns its attention to itself and its recent or distant past and waits for the conscience to draw up a balance sheet of what it remembers in a bid to understand, change and grow. It tries to reveal the intentions and meaning of the past, to trace the path that led us to where we are now and the events that nurtured and shaped us. Memory reveals, often explains things, and sometimes clarifies things. According to modern psychology and especially psychoanalysis, being cured requires an act of memory. It means going back to our parents, reliving things that we may never have done or understood, and identifying the repressions, the trauma and the blocks. The unconscious accumulates memories, and is a particularly active passive memory, and the Jungian school insists that it transcends the individual. Because of the way it reorganizes our relationship with ourselves and the primacy it gives to the individual, modernity is primarily interested in the ‘memory that dwells within me’. The old traditions had a very different relationship with both time and communities and society: what was meaningful was ‘the memory that carries me’. Memory is, however, basic and determinant for both because it shapes the identity of individuals. It does not, however, have the same relationship with the self, the world or meaning.

As we have already said more than once, globalization has paradoxical effects. As we shall see in the next chapter, the loss of points of reference and the greater cultural diversity of our societies encourage individuals to adopt individual, social and communitarian attitudes based upon identities and communal loyalties. The reference to memory is an essential part of this process, as it appears to be one of the things that legitimate our identity and singularity. There can be no identity without memory. Memory allows us to plunge into history, to give our presence a meaning, to justify our affiliations and, in times of crisis and confusion, to distinguish ourselves from others. The one thing that matters in an era of globalization is the ability to lay claim to a heritage, an origin and roots. This is a curious inversion: modernity seemed to have set us free from traditions that were forced upon us, from an authority that was never negotiated and from the lack of any recognition of the individual and his critical freedom. Yet, our fears, our lack of self-confidence and the fear of the other that is undermining our certainties now force us to turn to our memories to justify our differences and affiliations. Fearful memories recreate, or rather reinvent, their traditions.

And yet those traditions are no longer quite the same. The old traditions had an inspiration of their own, and an intrinsic power and energy that inscribed us in both an order and a project. They may well have restricted the exercise of reason, but they offered prospects for the future: their scientific or social legitimacy was open to criticism, and the moderns did criticize it, but it has to be acknowledged that they did have their uses, and that they did help to foster a cultural and social cohesion. The new traditions are reconstructions: their primary function is to establish lines of demarcation rather than any intrinsic cohesion. Traditions once shaped identities; identities now reconstruct traditions. Traditions are no longer a source of inspiration. They are frames of reference. They now define frontiers rather than the horizons that bound landscapes. Civilizations, culture, nations, regions, native-born citizens, immigrants, former slaves and colonial subjects and natives all demand origins, a history and a memory that justify the way they specify their differences and, should the need arise, resist the way the other’s memory instrumentalizes history. Memory is a banner and a weapon in conflicts over representations and power that are meant to guarantee our survival. This economy of memories is very unhealthy, and the very opposite of what the rationalism that gave birth to modernity wanted: it is no longer a critical analysis, and it no longer integrates many different points of view into a historical study. Memories are produced to suit the purposes of those who need or instrumentalize them; memory has become a functional reconstruction, and an ideological product.

The sources of modernity lay in a desire to find a universal. Descartes’ project was to use a rigorous method to arrive at a truth that applied to all men, and Kant hoped to give his maxims the same universal status. Philosophy had to break free from culture and religions in order to formulate a rationality that was common to all men. We have achieved a phenomenal emancipation and industry and the sciences have made revolutionary advances: the economy is now a planetary, communication is instantaneous, and culture is global. As we reach the end of this process and approach the threshold of a postmodernity which may or may not actually exist (not all philosophers and sociologists are in agreement about this), modernity finds that its order has been inverted. Although it exists on a global scale, it produces singular memories and claims to particuliarity rather than shared universals. What began with reason seems to have been torn apart by the passions; our memories are emotive and do not identify with ‘history’. And our shared history is certainly not the sum total of our memories.