Is Collective Memory a Figment of the Imagination? The Scope of Memory in the Public Sphere

The historical introduction in the previous chapter advanced the hypothesis that the prominence of collective memory as a theme of theoretical reflection since the early decades of the twentieth century corresponds to a decisive shift in conceptions of collective experience that could no longer be accounted for through the principal paradigms bequeathed by the past. Over the modern period, as we have seen, the demise of traditional metaphysical presuppositions concerning the intelligibility of unchanging truths governing human society and the world in which it is situated brought to the fore a resolutely anthropological scope of reflection. The twentieth century witnessed a widespread questioning of all-encompassing spiritual or natural principles in their capacity to account for human historical development as an overall process. Parallel to the unprecedented transformation of the conditions of human life, beginning in Europe and North America, and a wide experience of discontinuity with the past, the preoccupation with collective memory reflected a shift in the modes of interpreting the phenomenon of social cohesion and human historical development. Here the historicist presuppositions that "historical memory" might discern a principle of cohesion uniting the epochs of history as a process or that the notion of an "organic memory" might explain historical development in terms of an inherited natural legacy gave way to a more limited perspective from which the topic of collective memory as an autonomous field of investigation provided a corresponding method of reflection.

After tracing the emergence of this new paradigm in the introduction, I devote my efforts in the following chapters to the development of a theoretical approach to the phenomenon of collective memory in the human social and political world. In this theoretical perspective, my primary concern centers on the precise sense that we might attribute to the concept of "collective memory."

I

Upon initial examination, the concept of "collective memory" presents an immediate difficulty as soon as we attempt to clarify it. According to its primary signification, remembrance is carried out in the original sphere of the self. In a strict sense, collectivities never "remember" any more than they have an autonomous, substantial being. And yet, members of a community, as vast as it may be, may share remembrances of what can be publicly communicated through word, image, and gesture. In the public sphere, however, it is not generally possible to convey what memory recalls in immediate personal experience: people and things, events and situations as they actually present themselves in a direct encounter or, so to speak, "in the flesh." My understanding of this phrase draws on phenomenological theory — above all on the work of Edmund Husserl, who equated original experience with what he termed experience "in the flesh" in a given, living present ("leibhafte Erfahrung in einer jeweiligen lebendigen Gegenwart"). Other persons, as Husserl explained, present themselves to us "in the flesh." In a precise sense, this signifies that their bodies, movements, and gestures are displayed to us, and it is by this means that we gather in a secondary manner their inner thoughts and feelings. Moreover, Husserl also applied the phrase "in the flesh," leibhaft, to other things in the world, as to the givenness of the surrounding world itself. If photographs, paintings, or descriptions may revivify these encounters or publicly relate them through signs, images, or gestures, they can never replace this primordial capacity, which is unique to remembrance in the original sense. A brief example serves to illustrate this concept.

Autobiographical literature provides particularly vivid accounts of encounters in the flesh as, for example, in François-René de Chateaubriand's Mémoires d'outre-tombe. In this autobiographical memoir composed in different periods of the author's life and modeled along the lines of a confession, Chateaubriand proposed "to account for myself to myself [ ... ]; to explain my inexplicable heart, in seeing finally what I will say once my pen abandons itself without constraint to all of my recollections." With this aim in mind Chateaubriand, in an early chapter of the work, recalls his experiences as a young man when, in the early 1790s, he embarked on a voyage to the New World. After he arrived in Philadelphia, he was invited to the home of George Washington, first president of the United States, who was in Philadelphia at that moment. Chateaubriand recounts their first meeting, before seeing him the next day at a dinner to which he was invited in the president's unassuming residence: "Large in size, appearing calm and cold rather than noble, he resembles his portraits." Regarding the dinner with Washington and a small number of his friends, Chateaubriand relates that while the president was "at his brilliant apogee," he himself was completely unknown; "I was happy, however," he writes, "that his gaze turned toward me! I felt enheartened by this encounter for the rest of my life!"

Another example, this time a visual representation, will serve to complement Chateaubriand's reminiscence. In roughly the same period as Chateaubriand's visit to Washington, the United States Congress commissioned the French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon to fashion a marble representation of the first president of the United States. He made the trip from Paris to the New World to create this and other sculptures of Washington. The works were done in Washington's presence at his residence in Mount Vernon, Virginia, where the one commissioned by Congress stands today. The candidness of expression and the imposing demeanor of Houdon's representation of Washington corroborate Chateaubriand's description of the statesman. But here we come to our principle point: in spite of the vivid evocations of Washington conveyed to posterity by the talents of the writer and the sculptor, nothing permits us to recall an original encounter with Washington in the flesh, which Chateaubriand and Houdon each experienced at different moments and which it is the primordial capacity of memory to recall.

In our contemporary world, such a limitation of original experience to direct personal encounters might, of course, seem hopelessly narrow. Nowadays, we have immediate ways of conveying encounters through radio and television, and we can watch video...