memory and narrative benjamin derrida.pdf

Memory and Narrative in

Social Theory

The contributions of Jacques Derrida

and Walter Benjamin

Myrian Sepúlveda Santos

ABSTRACT. The author argues that contemporary social theories

cannot simultaneously accommodate the diachronic and synchronic

dimensions of time within their frameworks, because they reduce the

complexities of social life in order to cope with them. Jacques

Derrida’s and Walter Benjamin’s writings on memory open up

the possibility of thinking about the relation between memory and

narrative in multiple ways. These two theorists affirm the dis-

continuity and the non-recognition between past events and present

discourses and analyse a broad range of possibilities in the reading of

history. The author argues that the simultaneity of the diachronic and

synchronic dimensions of time becomes possible only when past and

present are not thought of as two separate entities, as is common

practice in social theory. KEY WORDS • history • Jacques Derrida •

memory • Walter Benjamin

I. Memory and Social Theory

Since Marx, at least, the links between history, society and liberty have become

intertwined in social and political thought. Yet the notion that historical know-

ledge entails freedom is not uncontested within contemporary social theory. The

grand narratives about the past, the linear history of sequential events, and the

evolutionary appraisal of human beings’ achievements have been strongly de-

nounced as invented traditions, instruments of power and constraining practices.

In the last three decades of the 20th century, there have been several different

10(2/3): 163–189

[0961-463X; 2001/09;10:2/3;163–189; 019362]

164

TIME & SOCIETY 10(2/3)

attempts to deal with the past, no longer through history, understood as a

rationalized account of a distant past, but through collective memories. As the

general public became aware of the necessity of respecting people’s memories

and their commemoration, so too intellectuals have embraced memory as the

concept capable of doing what history can no longer do: build links between

past and present. The term ‘collective memory’, however, encompasses a

number of different meanings, from more subjective and particular accounts of

the past to readings of remote traces inscribed in social codes.

As a result of new approaches to the past, the work of Maurice Halbwachs

on collective memory, written at the beginning of the 20th century, has been

widely rediscovered and reinterpreted by historians. 1 Halbwachs established a

distinction between history, as schematization and arbitrary explanation about

the past, and social or collective memory, as the representation of the past with-

in social thought (Halbwachs, 1968/1950). 2 Historians criticized earlier social

and economic historical analyses for their emphasis on structural and repetitive

elements, and proposed the incorporation of subjective, cultural and political

aspects into the study of the past. Monuments, hymns, flags, exhibitions, auto-

biographies and commemorations became privileged objects of study.

Although they differ in many aspects, the concepts of collective memory

always suggest that individuals retrieve the past as they interact with one

another and, consequently, they imply the intertwinements between past and

present, on one hand, and agency and structure, on the other. It is not surprising,

therefore, that memory became a favoured concept in an understanding of

the past. To anyone who follows contemporary political debates, from the

Nuremberg Trials to the ethnic massacres in former Yugoslavia, it is clear that

the issue of collective memory has become deeply associated with the study of

social identity, nation building, ideology and citizenship. 3

Contemporary social theory has done much to overcome the dichotomies

between agency and structure. However, the solutions proposed to this classical

dilemma within social thought have failed to gain wide acceptance. If we think

of the great majority of even contemporary studies that focus upon the issue

of collective memory, we will see that their objective is to better understand

the uses and determinations of the past in current social practices. Although

scholars have conceived of memory in the context of a pragmatics of remem-

bering and forgetting, they hardly touch the question of the presence of the past

that may exist beyond the individual’s will, that is, of social determinations

related to the past that are liable to leave a mark on an individual’s subjectivity.

In this article, I will argue first that contemporary social theories, as they

reduce the social world by means of a closed and circular set of concepts, fail to

consider the synchronic and diachronic dimensions of time in their simultaneity.

Concerning memory, their approaches remain partial emphasizing recognition,

representation or transmitted meaning between past and present lived experi-

SANTOS : DERRIDA AND BENJAMIN

165

ences. As memory entails a process of differentiation within continuity, it is

important to consider the limits of these approaches.

In order to develop this argument, I will, in the second and third parts of

this article, draw from Jacques Derrida’s and Walter Benjamin’s writings on

memory. These two authors think of temporality as both marking each thought

or action and enabling ruptures and renewals. Having rejected the synchronic–

diachronic dichotomy, they allow us to understand the limits of contemporary

social thinking. Neither of them deals systematically with conceptions of time

or their relationship to social theory. Yet the question of temporality is crucial

for them and is present in some form in everything they wrote. For the sake

of clarity, I will focus my analysis on two basic texts written on the issue of

memory: Mémoires pour Paul de Man (Derrida, 1988) 4 and On Some Motifs in

Baudelaire (Benjamin, 1968/1939). These texts deal with the issue of memory

at the same time as conveying each author’s basic premises concerning tempo-

rality.

II. Social Theory and the Diachronic–Synchronic Dichotomy

As we have seen, the work of Maurice Halbwachs on collective memory has

been widely revived by social scientists. After studying with the philosopher

Henri Bergson, Halbwachs renounced philosophical questions about the nature

of time and psychological issues related to memory, such as those raised by

Bergson himself (1913) and Sigmund Freud (1968/1920). He was the first to

consider memory as a social fact, using Emile Durkheim’s premise that social

conventions came prior to individuals.

Instead of concerning himself with the recovery of time by perception or

intentionality, Halbwachs wrote about the past reconstructed anew within

collective representations. In a set of writings extending from 1925 to 1950, he

set forth the central argument that individuals always rely on other people’s

memories to confirm their own recollections and for them to endure over time.

Thus the functioning of individual memory required instruments such as words

and ideas, which individuals did not invent by themselves, but rather borrowed

from their milieu (Halbwachs, 1968/1950: 36). By blurring the boundaries

between past and present as well as those between individual and collective

memory, the sociologist established an agenda that remains valid to this day. 5

Contemporary social scientists have attempted to understand an epoch

through the investigation of testimonies, cultural practices and ongoing tradi-

tions. 6 The emphasis is on what we have not chosen, on the role developed by

living traditions, that is, on shared, self-perpetuating sets of lived experiences

which are transmitted across generations. The hermeneutic influence on social

theories is responsible for analyses that seek to illuminate the processes of

166

TIME & SOCIETY 10(2/3)

belonging and shared beliefs that take place in contemporary societies over

time. This influence is present in many ethnographic studies, not to mention

the whole tradition of the history of culture. Lived and ongoing experiences,

which are carried on in an unmediated way, are supposed to limit our ability to

remember and to forget. In this case, interpretations of the past are made

through the study of commemorative practices and symbols, which are seen as

determining the present independently of their creators and authorities.

However, for Halbwachs, the study of the social frameworks of memory

should be developed empirically and separately from the expressed intentions of

individuals. Memory, as a bricolage of social conventions, was dissociated from

both individual creativity and influences of the past (Halbwachs, 1968/1950:

15–17). His contention was that although recollections seemed to be the results

of personal feelings and thoughts about the past, they existed only within social

conventions of the present (Halbwachs, 1925: xvi). In short, memory was to be

understood as a social fact in a very Durkheimian sense, and past experiences

were those that could be perceived within current, static schemes of reference.

There is a commonplace critique of structural functionalism and system

theory that points out their inability to deal with novelty and the dynamic

aspects of social life. We also face a far-reaching critique of culturalism for its

inability to account for the influences of structural social formations upon indi-

viduals. To these criticisms collective memories respond by setting the limits of

a local group, nation or ethnic community. The general criticism of both static

frames of reference and unconstrained flows of living tradition has given rise to

new conceptions of space–time dimension within social theory, which are

associated with the attempts to transcend the division of structure-orientated

and action-orientated theories. To name just a few authors who have been very

influential in contemporary sociological theoretical debate, Norbert Elias

(1982/1939), Pierre Bourdieu (1979) and Anthony Giddens (1984), despite their

different conceptual approaches, have the merit of describing the reproduction

of lived experiences within a network of social practices.

Therefore, contemporary concepts of memory are much more complex than

Halbwachs could have anticipated. They construe memory as a kind of perform-

ance in which the act of remembering does not reflect either the individual’s

will or social determinations, but rather the intertwining of these two forces.

These latter approaches are closer to the Simmelian notion of tragedy, in which

life, with all of its ambivalence, produces certain forms in which it expresses

and realizes itself. The temporal dimension is understood through images that

are forged, negotiated and rejected by social actors at a given moment in time

(Elias, 1992/1987). Concepts of the past, whether collective memory or in-

vented tradition, vary only in terms of the struggles and conflicts present among

those who engender the collective thinking.

Giddens radicalizes this approach as he points out that the continuous recon-

SANTOS : DERRIDA AND BENJAMIN

167

struction of tradition is the result of the decline of local authorities and face-to-

face encounters. According to him, an un-anchored subjectivity has emerged

in late modernity. Territories that exceed the limits of shared locales, the

emergence of high mobility, speed, free-flowing information and a global com-

municative network are all responsible for creating individuals who have been

disembedded from former traditions. Such individuals do not have to face

the constraining effects of ongoing traditions, but merely the unpredictable

boomerang effects of the consequences of their attitudes. Accordingly, the

social actor of late modernity is seen as a free-floating actor, detached from

tradition (Giddens, 1994). Although in both Elias’s configurational approach

(Elias, 1982/1939) and Bourdieu’s definition of habitus and structure structurée

(Bourdieu, 1979: 191), the effects of the frameworks of temporal reference

upon social actors receive much more attention than in Giddens’s structuration

theory: they are always thought of as symbolic constructions of the past by

knowledgeable agents.

If authors like Elias, Giddens and Bourdieu have solved classic dichotomies

within social theory, the theoretical attempt of these latter authors to couple the

synchronic and diachronic dimension of time within social interaction is not

enough. The concepts of synchronic and diachronic time will be developed in

the following sections, but preliminary definitions might be an awareness of

time that is thought of as the result of an individual’s perception in a given

moment of the present, and to a dimension of time that cannot totally be per-

ceived by individuals, because these latter are conceived as an inherent part of

the temporal horizon respectively. The focus on contingent aspects of social life

is just one more reduction of its complexity. The focus on a pragmatic concept

of habitus is correctly concerned with the explanation of the condition of

becoming. Further, it yields some crucial notions such as those related to the

unpredictability of the present and the encompassing of an open future. Yet I

would like to point out that these theories circumscribe the effects and deter-

minations of either lived experiences or future possibilities to the sphere of a

decision taken in the present by individuals in interaction. Concepts such as

integration and belonging are analysed in terms of needs, interests, choice, and

risk calculations. Consequently, although Halbwachs’s concept of memory

reduces it to a static social fact, it is not surprising that his writings continue to

be a source of important analyses within social science. 7 My point is that the

conceptual apparatuses that focus on structural, subjective or contingent aspects

of social life cannot circumscribe the whole relationship between time and

society. I suggest, therefore, that there is always a concept of time underwriting

sociological theories, so that what is at stake here is not the creation of a tempo-

ralized sociology, as proposed by social thinkers (Baert, 1992), but rather

the establishment of the limits of sociological theories as they reduce the com-

plexities of temporality. As I said before, I will take into account the different

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: