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Issue 6. Medium Theory

The Rhetoric of Forgetting: Elena Esposito on Social Memory

Author: Michael Boyden
Published: February 2003

Abstract (E): review of Elena Esposito. Soziales Vergessen. Formen und Medien des Gedächtnisses der Gesellschaft. trans. Alessandra Corti. afterword by Jan Assmann. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002.

The Forgetting of Forgetting

For a long time, the memory of society referred to a past which could offer no hold in our rapidly changing modern society. With the advent of the new communication media, however, social memory again assumes a function similar to that which it used to fulfil in premodern times. This, at least, is what Elena Esposito states in Soziales Vergessen: Formen und Medien des Gedächtnisses der Gesellschaft, an inspiring but at times disturbing contribution to the booming field of cultural memory.

The book takes its cue from Niklas Luhmann's systems theory. In his later writings Luhmann accords greater importance to memory as a stabilizing factor in social systems. In Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft he approaches memory as a function which selects operations on the basis of their coherence with reality, or rather, what the system constructs as real (578-9). From this perspective, memory is not something which brings back past events or some kind of container, but rather a control mechanism which sorts out relevant from irrelevant information. To Luhmann, therefore, forgetting is the main function of memory. Only by forgetting can systems orient themselves towards the future.

Following his strict separation between consciousness and society, Luhmann conceives social memory as a sort of immanent structure which organizes the recursive network of communications making up the social. This perspective is a clear departure from most discussions of social memory, which tend to relate it to the consciousness of individuals (as, for example, in Halbwachs 1950). By radically disconnecting social memory from individual thought, Luhmann draws attention to the fact that subjectivity is not the basis of social memory but rather a (relatively recent) product of it. At the same time, he indicates that society's self-descriptions are always partial, since they can never completely capture the various ways in which individuals experience reality.

The fact that social memory is exclusively located within the social means that it has a history of its own which can in its turn be described. According to Luhmann, the memory of modern society takes the form of culture (586 and following). The concept of culture as we now know it originated during the second half of the 18^th century to confront the growing complexity of society. Paradoxically, however, the introduction of culture both increases the comparability of societies and puts into question the legitimacy of such comparisons. Because of such legitimization problems, Luhmann claims, the authority to determine what should be remembered or forgotten and what not is more and more delegated towards the memories of the subsystems of society, such as the mass media.

As the title already betrays, Soziales Vergessen relies heavily on Niklas Luhmann's view on social memory. Following Luhmann, Esposito defines memory as "eine ständige Überprüfung der Kohärenz," a continuous revision of coherence (26). She also refers to forgetting as its most important feature. Forgetting is memory's blind spot, or in the terminology of the mathematician Spencer Brown, its unmarked state. One can remember that one remembers, but one has to forget that one has forgotten.

Although Soziales Vergessen rather strictly adopts this Luhmanian schema, it also departs from it in at least two ways. First, Esposito extends Luhmann's observations on modernity to postmodern times. She does not share Luhmann's aversion to the category of postmodernity and claims that with the advent of computer technologies a new form of memory has emerged which cannot be captured by the concept of culture. This new type of memory she describes as telematic memory. Second, Esposito also includes premodern forms of memory. Here, she differentiates between prophetic memory on the one hand and rhetorical memory on the other. In doing so, she relies on the important distinction between alphabetical and non-alphabetical writing (as in Havelock 1986) which is absent from Luhmann's framework.    

Memory and Semantics

Esposito's heavy reliance on the systems theoretical approach carries important implications. Central to the exposition is that it forces social memory into line with semantics. Esposito clarifies the interrelationship of the two concepts in a separate section of the introductory chapter. The recursive network of communications which composes society condenses identities which in their turn structure future communications. In systems theory, such identities are referred to as semantics. Esposito quotes Luhmann's definition of this concept as "das gleichsam offizielle Gedächtnis der Gesellschaft" (21). To Esposito, social memory is that function which enables the conservation of identities in discourse. This equation of social memory and semantics has, however, at least two far reaching implications.

First, it means that social memory is reduced to its institutionalized self-descriptions. Like Luhmann, Esposito tends to restrict her research to canonized texts without problematizing their status. For example, how do we know that, as Esposito claims, Plato's Phaidros is representative for Greek society between the 6^th and 4^th centuries? What is the status of this dialogue given Plato's reluctance to confide his reflections to writing? Which meanings have been ascribed to Plato and which do "properly" belong to him? The potential of systems theory to challenge the concept of the individuality and authorship from a constructivist standpoint thus remains unrealized. What Esposito's book seems to forget is that social memory is the outcome of the complex and often conflicting relationship between society's leading semantics (its official memory) and the submerged semantics of everyday discourse.   

A second but related implication is that social memory is coupled to writing. In the systems theoretical framework, semantics has divorced itself from social structure with the advent of writing. Before this, separate identities existed, but they were not registered since they could not be stored. Esposito considerably complicates this schema by differentiating between alphabetical and non-alphabetical writing. Nevertheless, the basic caesura between orality and writing remains, together with a marked preference for the latter pole of the opposition. Esposito stresses that oral societies do have memory, but no autonomous memory model. But how can this be argued if only the written word is considered as valid evidence to support this thesis? It is not entirely clear why the distinction between pictograms and ideograms or that between ideograms and consonantal writing is subordinate to that between alphabetical and non-alphabetical writing.

As a matter of fact, even alphabetical writing cannot be completely context-independent, since meaning is always constructed from within an interpretive community (Fish 1980). Such a community consists of the texts and reading conventions which have been "netted" through time. Although reading habits have dramatically changed over time due to medial and societal transformation, text and interpretation will never be completely separated from each other. It would be more productive, therefore, to stress that the autonomization of writing is an ongoing process which is never completely accomplished. Writing is but one form of communication and the distinction between self- and other-reference can be reflected upon in many ways apart from writing.

Four Memory Types

Esposito states that the four memory forms are the outcome of the circular interplay between communication media and forms of differentiation. In doing so, she attempts to avoid a monocausal explanation of the evolution of social memory in terms of either communication technologies or social structure. Thus, printing has existed in China since the second century, but the modern semantics of culture has only emerged from the 15th century onwards. This is when society started to reorganized itself in functional terms, so that the potential of the printing press to address an anonymous audience could be realized (185-6).

The co-evolution of media and forms of differentiation makes that social memory grows ever more abstract. More and more, what is memorized is not information, but the procedures to make information available to us. Society forgets more, which creates the space to remember more at the same time. There is, therefore, a simultaneous increase of forgetting and remembering.

Prophetic memory constitutes the most context-dependent memory type. This type has little to do with the conservation of the past. The temporal distinction between past and future is here subservient to the spatial distinction between here and there, or between a surface and the depth which it reveals when manipulated. Esposito relates this memory type to non-alphabetical writing, which cannot convey subjectivity, purposiveness or time. Words are in this respect mnemonic devices which almost completely derive their meaning from the context in which they are uttered. Prophetic memory can be metaphorically grasped as wax, which is modelled after objects, but does not convey information about them. Non-alphabetical writing emerged in ancient high cultures, the first "authentic" information societies (77), such as Mesopotamia and Egypt. These societies were spatially organized in terms of center and periphery but did not yet reflect upon the distinction between social classes.

This awareness grew when the distinction between center and periphery was replaced by that between part and whole, that is, when stratification became the dominant form of organization in society. This form of differentiation could only arise thanks to the introduction of alphabetical writing, which completely divorced words from the things they stand for. Rhetoric describes the rules which govern discourse as an autonomous sphere apart from external reality. Rhetorical memory, therefore, should not be envisioned as a surface in which objects can be printed, but as a container in which the traces of past experience are stored. According to Esposito, this new memory model, however incomplete, first emerged in ancient Greece. In his useful afterword to Esposito's book, Jan Assmann relativizes this claim by pointing out parallel developments in contemporary Israel (406-7).  

Most impressive is Esposito's rereading of Plato's Phaidros as a conflict between the two earliest memory models. In her interpretation, Plato does not react against writing as such but represents the prophetic model which is associated with non-alphabetical writing. The sophists, on the other hand, stand for the new rhetorical model. According to Plato, the latter labor under the false illusion of autonomy which comes with alphabetical writing. This illusion leads them to think that whatever can be argued following the rules of rhetoric is true. For Plato, however, truth and falsehood are always determined on the basis of the context of utterance. In this sense, Esposito claims, Plato is more of a sophist than the sophists themselves, since he refuses to separate words from the meanings the carry in every particular situation. By this original rereading, Esposito wants to show that the evolution of social memory is not necessarily for the better.      

The third memory type is probably most familiar to us. Systems theory explains the rise of culture as the outcome of the gradual functional toppling of society. According to this view, modern society is no longer vertically organized around social strata, but horizontally around subsystems oriented towards a specific social function. As a result, individuals have relatively more freedom to choose and are thus in a more direct fashion confronted with their singularity. Esposito relates this evolution to the introduction of printing and the mass media. These have less to do with the conservation of information than with establishing connections to "call up" the information we need. In this way, they both augment and reduce the freedom of the individual. Culture can be metaphorically understood as an archive. Unlike a container or a thesaurus, an archive needs a catalogue to disclose the documents it has in store. Such a catalogue does not carry information in the traditional sense. Rather, it establishes links to disclose the documents stacked away in the archive. To Esposito, therefore, modern memory is characterized by the primacy of forgetting.   

The most provocative claim of Soziales Vergessen is that the concept of culture is no longer sufficient to encompass the memory of society. Increasingly, this memory function is delegated towards the social subsystems, which are for a large part structured by formal organizations. These organizations depend more on decisions than on information. Postmodern society is in this respect a decision society rather than an information society. Esposito claims that this shift has to be related to the proliferation of the new media. The internet does not store informations, but continually produces new informations. The net model, therefore, does not function as a traditional catalogue. It does not index documents, but operates on the basis of associations. Telematic memory is a mobile form of memory in that it constantly re- and de-establishes links. In this sense, it is very much like prophetic memory, because it does not rely on a linear organization of time. Time moves so fast that the past is catching up with the present.

Has the Future Begun?

In the concept of postmodern memory the strengths and weaknesses of Esposito's memory typology become most explicit. A first weakness resides in the fact that many of the characteristics of new media can also be ascribed to mass media. Digital media merely amplify the evolution from comprehension to selection which began in the 15th century when the printing press was put to the use of the masses. Second, telematic memory does not rely on a new form of differentiation. Rather, Esposito registers a radicalization of the ongoing functional differentiation of society. This produces a lacuna in her two-sided schema which might indicate that she tends to overstate the case of medial transformation. Finally, Esposito's analogy between the Mac aesthetic and the premodern prophecy model seems not altogether free from the tendentious rhetoric of many popular media theories. Her refusal to approach postmodern memory as a storage of the past is in some sense a way of unasking the question of how we should deal with the proliferation of information in the age electronic communication technologies.

Esposito conceives of social memory as a closed circuit which does not seem to encounter black-outs or dementia. However, is it really true that forgetting and remembering necessarily grow in equal measure? Could it not be argued that some cultures forget more or differently than others? Esposito stresses that electronic media are orientation devices which to some extent absolve us from the freedom of choice. But new media just as much have disorienting effects. Moreover, such effects might be intentionally produced by organizations or individuals which obtain relief from massive disinformation. Esposito so consistently differentiates between personal and social systems, it seems, that she does not reflect upon the form possible structural couplings between them might or should take. 

Esposito's oracular statements about telematic memory probably embody the worst of what systems theory's evolutionary perspective has to offer. At the same time, however, they are a display of the intellectual flexibility and sheer brilliance of Soziales Vergessen. Esposito avows that her conception of a postmodern memory model is an impression rather than a worked out thesis (287). In spite of this, she refuses to stick to the modern representation of memory. This is because she attempts to expose the contingency of the cultural model which organizes present-day society. Even culture is a partial (some would say, eurocentric) way of organizing reality which cannot observe the limits of its own comprehension. If only for this reason, Soziales Vergessen is a challenging book and a welcome correction to the views of media theorists who prophesy the end of memory (a good example is Birkerts 1994). Although Soziales Vergessen suffers from a high degree of abstraction, it is of interest to scholars from many different fields apart from sociology. Historians and literary scholars concerned with issues of canon formation, in particular, are invited to put the book's theoretical subtleties to the test of concrete historical cases.

References

Birkerts, Sven.The Gutenberg Elegies. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1994.

Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980.

Halbwachs, Maurice. La mémoire collective. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1950.

Havelock, Eric. The Muses Learn to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy From Antiquity to the Present. New Haven/ London: Yale University Press, 1986.

Luhmann, Niklas. Die Gesellschaft Der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997.

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