Two minutes of silence: Social technologies of public commemoration

Abstract

A diverse range of commemorative practices developed in the wake of the First World War as collective means for performing private trauma and loss. Public commemorative silence became adopted as a key feature of Armistice Day from 1919 onwards. This practice can be treated as a “social technology,” which is here defined as the mediational means for the reflexive self-modification of the subjective state of affairs of human subjects. Social technologies produce novel experiences, new modalities for performing the psychological. When a social remembering approach to memory is adopted, the Armistice silence can be compared to more recent uses of public silence with respect to how the past is mobilized in the present. In current, highly technologically mediated versions, public silence effectively disposes of those it is supposed to commemorate and makes of silence a spectacle where participants are absorbed in their own enactment of empathy and sorrow. When disconnected from other forms of remembrance, public silence tends not to open the past up for interpretation and debate and should therefore be reconsidered as a means of “one-off” commemoration.