Collective Memory and Chronic Differentiation: Historically and the Public Sphere

Abstract

The year 1995 was a banner one for commemoration. A half century earlier, according to dominant Western narratives, justice had vanquished two tyrannies, bringing forth a new paradigm of world history. But it was not just the Aroundness@ of the number fifty that gave cause for commemoration. The recent flurry of fifty-year markings of World War Two events was only an instance of our epoch=s wider preoccupation with memory. Everywhere we turn, it seems, memory is at the centre of local and national agendas. The mass media and entertainment industries find nostalgia an endless attraction to consumers; governments commemorate failures as well as triumphs; and social movements and other identity groups turn to Arepressed@ histories as sources of their cohesion and as justification for their programs. Whether through the marketing of idealized pasts, a general politics of regret, or historical identitarianism, ours is an era in which the presence of the past--real or imagined--is potent and problematic. Indeed, many commentators have seen this pervasive historical consciousness as emblematic of our contemporary condition. Across many disciplines, and in the wider public too, collective memory has become a favourite term. Strangely, many commentators have characterized the end of the last century in remarkably similar terms, seeing the late nineteenth century as undergoing a profound memory crisis. Intellectuals in that period paid serious attention to memory, be it individual or social, just as the political world around them was seeking to harness and exploit it. Writers like Proust, Bergson, and Freud contributed to the veritable obsession with memory that they saw in their societies. They excavated, theorized, diagnosed, indeed propagated their age=s pervasive nostalgia (a medical condition), responding to it with a simultaneous fascination, engagement, and terror. 1 The scholar Ernst Renan identified forgetting as the core of