Memory

⇒ Antinet Zettelkasten ⇒ Annotations that are stored in the External Memory can function only in tandem with Internal Memory, so excerpts and notes prompt recollection of more than what they actually contain.”111

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Memory, it seems, has become a fashionable subject – one might even say that it is about to resume the central position it held for millennia in society and semantics, and which it had lost for a few centuries – precisely because it was incompatible with fashion. Curiously, the growing importance of memory is related to the radicalization of the same tendencies that had led to its Exclusion.

It is well known that memory was of fundamental importance in archaic and ancient societies; and this not because these societies maintained an obsessive relationship with their past – the past was not even conceivable in the form we know – but because they dealt with the present in a way that was completely different from us and from each other. As we shall see, the problem of memory is not an engagement with the past, but its relation to the present; for it is only in the present that one can remember or forget.

In modernity, however, the emphasis shifts: memory is equated with recollection and recollection with the past. However, guiding principles are no longer sought in the past. The striving for permanence is replaced by the urge for change, repetition by novelty, permanence by change. Memory appears as a barren recurrence, it loses its attraction and significance, but above all it loses its relevance and omnipresence. It shrinks to a limited and marginal function that can be useful, but no longer occupies a central importance and in any case does not provide what is sought henceforth: creativity and innovation. One can no longer turn to memory to shape the future – but the future now forms the decisive point of reference.

Today, however, it looks as if a different attitude is gaining ground. Beyond the superficial return to archaisms and traditions, interest in memory is also growing through a more complex approach. After a few centuries of pursuing the future, it now seems to be caught up: the future has already begun, but we do not yet know what to do with it. The new is predominantly unknown, uncontrollable and largely incomprehensible – such as the Internet, developments in technology or the indeterminable perspectives of scientific research. For this reason, it seems useful to turn once again to memory. Not so much to revive a past that is definitively closed and useless for a future that we only know will be different, but rather because memory holds a Store of Forms that can be used to manage and structure the present. In other words, orientation to the future – taken to an extreme – leads once again to a confrontation with the present, and the structures of the present are provided by memory.

All this needs to be treated in more detail, and we will deal with it below. At this point we confine ourselves to mentioning that in the archaic and ancient form memory was much more than a mere preservation of memories. It represented the entity that gave order to the cosmos and thus gave meaning to action; it regulated the relationship between contingency and necessity, between the mutable and the eternal, between limited and disordered human affairs and the ultimate things of the world. In this respect, temporal references were of secondary importance: memory was recollection, but also anticipation, revival of the past, but also forgetting and prefiguring the future – it was above all the confirmation and establishment of a general order starting from a given point in time and context. It is this aspect of memory in particular that we need to revive: the idea that one has an orientation when one is oriented only to oneself – as is the case with one who remembers, and that this orientation, though contingent, is therefore not already accidental. We will deal with this by first outlining the procedures of divination (chap. II) and the techniques of rhetoric (chap. III), and then turn to the preconditions for the bruising debates that accompanied the exclusion of memory at the beginning of modernity (chap. IV), and in the wake of which memory as a subject of research has been all but forgotten.

This project, if taken seriously, presents some difficulties. First, the associated reference system must be determined: It is about memory, but whose memory is meant? It is well known that the idea of an individual subject is recent, at least it is closely linked to the emergence of modernity – but modernity is the age that has least to do with memory. If we are to study the pre-modern (or at least the forms of memory independent of the mainstream of modern semantics), we must refrain from the now suspect reference to the subject, although the subject continues to be the more or less implicit reference point of almost all studies of memory. Even Halbwachs's concept of collective memory and considerations of so-called computer memory do not dispense with the primary reference to forms of subjectivity, which, as we shall see, are of little use to us. Our main interest will rather be on extra-individual forms of memory – our reference system will therefore be the memory of society. Here, we understand society to be an autonomous system that proceeds with its own operations, radically distinct from the mental operations of the individuals participating in it – which ties in with Niklas Luhmann's definition of society. Memory, with which we want to deal, is thus neither a subject of psychology nor of biology, but it is and can only be a subject of sociology.

But by what is the memory of society determined, if not by psychological and biological structures? In Luhmann's conception, society consists of communications. If memory concerns the way in which self-reference is established, then the way in which communications refer to communications depends primarily on the tools or the available means to manage this, and that means concretely: on the technologies (or media) of communication. If it becomes possible to record communication in writing and thus to return to it at a later point in time, or if, for example, the possibility arises through the press to address persons who are distant in time or place and even completely unknown, then the way in which communication connects to itself and conditions itself also changes. In other words, the form of society's memory changes.

One of the central theses of this work is that society's memory depends on the available communication technologies (from the first forms of non-phonetic writing to the alphabet, and finally to the press and electric and electronic media) of the given society: these influence its forms, scope and interpretation. But one could also say, and perhaps it is the same thing, that the memory of society is the precondition for the enforcement and diffusion of certain means of communication. In essence, the thesis states that there is a circular relationship of mutual influence between memory and communication media, and that this relationship can be discerned by analyzing the time reference, the degree of conceptual abstraction, the nature of environmental engagement, and, above all, the self-reflexivity of communication.

This basic assumption is becoming increasingly relevant as we live in an information society in which communication technologies are literally machine-driven, posing entirely new kinds of interpretive problems. The Internet is about to become the neuralgic center of projections of the future that we cannot possibly control. Thus, at the same time, it is beginning to become the neuralgic center of the organization of memory, which in turn is regaining relevance. In our view, therefore, it is no coincidence that both topics are becoming the focus of interest at the same time, just as it is no coincidence that the theories available provide extremely unsatisfactory explanations in both respects. If one wants to examine the memory of contemporary society, then one must also take into account the incursion of telematics, its preconditions and the reactions to it (such as the fear of "big brother" or the syndrome of waiting for the revolution), the impossibility of controlling the "net" and the new forms of network connections that emerge almost by themselves out of precisely this impossibility of control. All this will occupy us in chapter V, where we will try to outline the related memory model with its peculiarity of using the context (meaning the so-called user/machine interactivity) to limit possible arbitrariness.

The choice of the topic >memory< is additionally made for reasons immanent to the theory: it is an object that can be used to show in which way reflexivity operates. Reflexivity has become ubiquitous. The problems of self-reference, observer dependence, the receding of linear relations before circular configurations are the presuppositions of any theoretical work with a modicum of scientific pretensions – it is these problems that inevitably tend to generate paradoxes. This is true of sociology in general, and to a special degree of memory. Everything that can be said about it can also be formulated as a paradox: Memory is simultaneously past and present, subjective and objective, personal and uncontrollable, memory and forgetting – and in each case one side of the distinction forms the condition for the existence of the opposite one. What is interesting, however, is not the mere exposure of paradoxes, but the demonstration that structures emerge nonetheless (or precisely because of them). In the case of memory, this involves examining how memory works – how it remembers, forgets, and forms its own structures. By explaining the mechanisms of memory, one indirectly finds an explanation for reflexivity and its conditions – as long as one does not stop at the explanation of paradoxes, but tries to reach more complex forms of stability by means of a theoretical construction.

Elena Esposito would like to thank the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, which financed her stay at the Institute of Philosophy of the Free University of Berlin in the period from 1998 to 1999, during which this study was set up. She would also like to thank Sybille Krämer in particular for her hospitality and for her valuable support of my research. She would also like to thank Jan Assmann, Hartmann Tyrell, Karin Knorr-Cetina, and Rudolf Stichweh for their supervision at Bielefeld University.

ESPOSITO, Elena, 2002. Soziales Vergessen: Formen und Medien des Gedächtnisses der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft, 1557. ISBN 978-3-518-29157-3.