Communicative and Cultural Memory
1. Memory: Individual, Social, and Cultural
Memory is the faculty that enables us to form an awareness of selfhood (identity), both on the personal and on the collective level. Identity, in its turn, is related to time. A human self is a "diachronic identity," built "of the stuff of time" (Luckmann). This synthesis of time and identity is effectuated by memory. For time, identity, and memory we may distinguish among three levels:
Level Time Identity Memory
inner, subjective time
inner self individual memory
social social time social self, person as carrier of social roles
cultural historical, mythical, cultural time
O n the inner level, memory is a matter of our neuromental system. This is our personal memory, the only form of memory that had been recognized as such until the 1920s. O n the social level, memory is a matter of communication and social interaction. It was the great achievement of the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs to show that our memory depends, like consciousness in general, on socialization and communication, and that memory can be analyzed as a function of our social life (Les cadres sociaux; La memoire collective). Memory enables us to live in groups and communities, and living in groups and communities enables us to build a memory. During these same years, psychoanalysts such as Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung were developing theories of collective memory but still adhered to the first, the inner and personal level, looking for collective memory not in the dynamics of social life but in the unconscious depths of the human psyche (see also Straub, this volume).
Originalverffentlichung in: Astrid Erll, Ansgar Nnning (Hg.), Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, Berlin, New York 2008, S. 109-118
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Aby Warburg, however, the art historian, coined the term "social memory" with regard to the third, the cultural level; he seems to have been the first one who treated images, that is, cultural objectivations, as carriers of memory. His main project was to study the "afterlife" (Nachleben) of classical antiquity in Western culture and he termed this project "Mnemosyne," the ancient Greek term for memory and the mother of the nine Muses. As an art historian, Warburg specialized in what he called Bildgeddchtnis (iconic memory), but the general approach to reception history as a form of (cultural) memory could be applied to every other domain of symbolic forms as well (Gombrich). This is what Thomas Mann endeavored to do in his four Joseph novels, which appeared between 1933 and 1943 and which may rank as the most advanced attempt to reconstruct a specific cultural memoryin this case of people living in Palestine and Egypt in the Late Bronze Ageand, at the same time, to conjure up our European cultural memory and its Jewish foundations in times of antiSemitism (J. Assmann, Thomas Mann). Neither Warburg nor Thomas Mann, however, used the term "cultural memory"; this concept has been explicitly developed only during the last twenty years. It is, therefore, only since then that the connection between time, identity, and memory in their three dimensions of the personal, the social, and the cultural has become more and more evident.
The term "communicative memory" was introduced in order to delineate the difference between Halbwachs's concept of "collective memory" and our understanding of "cultural memory" (A. Assmann). Cultural memory is a form of collective memory, in the sense that it is shared by a number of people and that it conveys to these people a collective, that is, cultural, identity. Halbwachs, however, the inventor of the term "collective memory," was careful to keep his concept of collective memory apart from the realm of traditions, transmissions, and transferences which we propose to subsume under the term "cultural memory." We preserve Halbwachs's distinction by breaking up his concept of collective memory into "communicative" and "cultural memory," but we insist on including the cultural sphere, which he excluded, in the study of memory. We are, therefore, not arguing for replacing his idea of "collective memory" with "cultural memory"; rather, we distinguish between both forms as two different modi memorandi, ways of remembering.
2. Culture as Memory
Cultural memory is a kind of institution. It is exteriorized, objectified, and stored away in symbolic forms that, unlike the sounds of words or the
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sight of gestures, are stable and situation-transcendent: They may be transferred f rom one situation to another and transmitted f rom one generation to another. External objects as carriers of memory play a role already on the level of personal memory. Our memory, which we possess as beings equipped with a human mind, exists only in constant interaction not only with other human memories but also with "things," outward symbols. With respect to things such as Marcel Proust 's famous madeleine, or artifacts, objects, anniversaries, feasts, icons, symbols, or landscapes, the term "memory" is not a metaphor but a metonym based on material contact between a remembering mind and a reminding object. Things do not "have" a memory of their own, but they may remind us, may trigger our memory, because they carry memories which we have invested into them, things such as dishes, feasts, rites, images, stories and other texts, landscapes, and other "lieux de memoire." O n the social level, with respect to groups and societies, the role of external symbols becomes even more important, because groups which, of course, do not "have" a memory tend to "make" themselves one by means of things meant as reminders such as monuments , museums, libraries, archives, and other mnemonic institutions. This is what we call cultural memory (A. Assmann). In order to be able to be reembodied in the sequence of generations, cultural memory, unlike communicative memory, exists also in disembodied form and requires institutions of preservation and reembodiment.
This institutional character does not apply to what Halbwachs called collective memory and what we propose to rename communicative memory. Communicative memory is noninstitutional; it is not supported by any institutions of learning, transmission, and interpretation; it is not cultivated by specialists and is not summoned or celebrated on special occasions; it is not formalized and stabilized by any forms of material symbolization; it lives in everyday interaction and communication and, for this very reason, has only a limited time depth which normally reaches no farther back than eighty years, the time span of three interacting generations. Still, there are frames, "communicative genres," traditions of communication and thematization and, above all, the affective ties that bind together families, groups, and generations.
A change of frames brings about forgetting; the durability of memories depends on the durability of social bonds and frames. In his earlier work, Halbwachs does not seem to be concerned with the social interests and power structures that are active in shaping and framing individual memories. In his last work on collective memory, however, he shows a keen awareness of institution and power. 1M topographic legendaire des evangiles en terre sainte, published in 1941 during the German occupation, deals with the transformation of Palestine into a site of Christian memory by the
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installment of all kinds of memorials, a process which took place after the adoption of Christianity as the state religion by the Roman empire. In this work, he crosses the border which he himself had erected between memoire and tradition and shows to what degree this kind of official memory is dependent on theological dogma and formed by the power structure of the church.
3. Time Frames
Jan Vansina, an anthropologist who worked with oral societies in Africa, devoted an important study to the form in which they represent the past and observed a tripartite structure. The recent past, which looms large in interactive communication, recedes, as time goes by, more and more into the background. Information becomes scarcer and vaguer the further back one moves into the past. According to Vansina, this knowledge of affairs that are told and discussed in everyday communication has a limited depth in time, reaching not beyond three generations. Concerning a more remote past, there is either a total lack of information or one or two names are produced with great hesitation. For the most remote past, however, there is again a profusion of information dealing with traditions about the origin of the world and the early history of the tribe. This information, however, is not committed to everyday communication but intensely formalized and institutionalized. It exists in the forms of narratives, songs, dances, rituals, masks, and symbols; specialists such as narrators, bards, maskcarvers, and others are organized in guilds and have to undergo long periods of initiation, instruction, and examination. Moreover, it requires for its actualization certain occasions when the community comes together for a celebration. This is what we propose calling "cultural memory." In oral societies, as Vansina has shown, there is a gap between the informal generational memory referring to the recent past and the formal cultural memory which refers to the remote past, the origin of the world, and the history of the tribe, and since this gap shifts with the succession of generations, Vansina calls it the "floating gap." Historical consciousness, Vansina