book critique on halbwachs on collective memory

7/29/2019 Book Critique on Halbwachs on Collective Memory

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Halbwachs Critique

0|P a g e P a t r i c k J C h r i s t i a n

Running Head: Halbwachs Critique

Book Critique of: Maurice Halbwachs (1992). On Collective Memory, Chicago, IL: Chicago

University Press.

Patrick James Christian

Nova Southeastern University, Graduate School of Humanities & Social ScienceDepartment of Conflict Analysis & Resolution

History, Memory & Conflict

Winter/Spring 2012


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Introduction

This paper seeks to review the contribution of Maurice Halbwachs introduction of the idea

of collective memory on the field of conflict analysis and resolution, especially at the

psychological sociological levels of examination. The volume reviewed is a compilation of

works by Halbwachs that was edited, translated and introduced by a contemporary, ProfessorEmeritus Lewis A Coser (1913-2003). Given the breadth of subject material covered by this

compilation, my review focuses on the first five chapters of the social frameworks of memory,

which includes sections on dreams, language, reconstruction of the past, localization of memory

and the collective memory of the family. My use of Halbwachs as a primary source for

analyzing family and community conflict stems from these chapters and has helped me lay the

foundation for integrating Halbwachs work with that of Edmund Husserl, Georg Jellinek,

Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Howard Stein and Jonathan Winson. The works of these theoreticians

spans subjects from philosophy, sociology, psychology, anthropology and neurology.

Collectively, they and other social and natural scientists construct a theoretical basis for thepsychological underpinnings of sociological life in human communities. My purpose in showing

the integrative possibilities of Halbwachs work is the essence of my critique. I believe that a

theoreticians work is most valuable when it provides foundational structure to integrate and

develop knowledge for human advancement. As a foundation of memory, Halbwachs theory of

collective memory provided a link that served to connect Emile Durkheims ideas of the

collectivity of creation with the collectivity of memory which we now find to be underlying

explanations of how humans build group identity, establish cultural integration across

generational lines and ultimately, ensure species survival. This may sound dramatic, but without

the existence of collective creation and of collective memory that Halbwachs illuminated, groupidentity and the generational existential memory that exists within that identity would not be

possible. And without the ability to collectivize and transmit the memory of our present

existence to future remembrance and memorializing, we could never be induced to lay the

foundations for future societies that we will never see, never experience (Christian, 2012).

Maurice Halbwachs lived in a time of social continuity, where the society or collective

created public discourse and group memory of a type and in a manner that was accepted and

recorded in all its dogma and controversy. Where there was discord between disciplines of

academia, ideologies of society or even political objectives of states, Halbwachs time was one

of belief in the public-knowing of public life. Based on this belief, scholarly or public inquiriesended to protect the privacy of the individual, the family, or of the state. Intrusion into that

privacy was thought to be of little value to the sanctity of history and memory. In short, private

actions and public knowing was not thought to be of substantial separation as to materially affect

the record of history and human society. I base this assertion on many of the dramatic

revelations in the affairs of states and men over the past half century. The exposure of this gap


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between public knowing and private actions in the affairs of men and states began near the end

of Maurices life. In fact, it can be argued that his death was directly a result of the public

unknowing of the private actions of the Vichy Regime in wartime France and its collaboration

with the German Nationalist Socialist State. Halbwachs, an Alsatian Christian married to a

Jewish wife, died in Buchenwald Concentration camp shortly before the end of World War II. Itmay be a misuse of the word irony to apply it to his death just as the world community was

about to learn of the tremendous gap between what it thought it knew about Germanys policies

towards its multicultural citizenry and the reality that emerged. The changes that Maurice might

have made to his theories had he lived to learn about collective memories that were never written

about; never spoken into language, yet existed all the same in the amorphous phenomenological

texture of collective human trauma, we will never know. It is enough to know however, that his

initial foundations allowed us to move beyond restrictive boundaries that separated people into

individual spheres of creative existence with memory delimited by the physical boundaries of

our outward separate states of being. Maurice showed us that we are connected by largerpossibilities than mere blood and inheritance and the collectivity of our memory hinted at the

central importance of communal memory in the life cycle of human societies.

The collectivization of creation, memory and identity

Halbwachs began intellectual life in a world of academe where disciplines are separate

spheres of knowledge possessed by guilds of knightly defenders. These knights of academe were

armed with single disciplinary narratives reminiscent of epic poems laden with heroic figures of

extraordinary complexity. The narratives they armed themselves with were used to explain

humanity and its purpose in authoritatively uncompromising voices. The complexity with whichthese fortified guilds of academic disciplines explained the world required the continuous

development of arcane language that sought to cloak the gaps between the bricks of their ideas

with a protective mud coating. Halbwachs willingness to be influenced first by the philosopher

Henri Bergson, and then by the father of Sociology mile Durkheim, defied this single discipline

authority and created an acceptance of what he would later argue for as an interdisciplinary

approach to understanding social science and the development of human life. Into this

interdisciplinary approach to sociology, Maurice integrated subjects as diverse as geography,

history, social morphology, religion, suicide, and social evolution to develop the foundation of

the idea that humans use each other to organize the structure of their common phenomenologicalexperiences on a daily basis. Using Durkheims formation of collective effervescence (1995),

in which sacred events and objects serve as organizing forces to cohere and order society,

Halbwachs overlaid his idea of the collectivization of memory. Together, Durkheim and

Halbwachs theories posited that as people work in collaboration to create religion, art, language,


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or other sacred rituals imbued with the effervescence of constructed group esteem, they create

memory of action, of relation, of interaction and of creation.

The periods or space between collective effervescences is reserved for the construction of

meaning in the structure of memory. In chapter 3, Halbwachs writes about the reconstruction of

the past; the methods that societies use to revisit past events and the roles assigned to oldermembers of the community to recollect and collectivize past events. This social role of

community elders requires them to sort through documents, photos, images, and objects of

creation as they write or articulate the communitys historical narrative. The reconstruction of

the collective memory serves purposes both of esteem and nurturance as the process obligates

people not just to reproduce in thought previous events of their lives, but also to touch them up,

to shorten them, or to complete them so that, however convinced we are that our memories are

exact, we give them a prestige that reality did not possess (Halbwachs, 1992, p. 51). The

nurturance that reconstructed memory provides involves the revisiting of painful periods of the

past that are now covered by obscuration and the scabbing of dulled memory. In reconstruction,separated by the psychic safety of time lapse and maturity, [t]hat faraway world where we

remember that we suffered nevertheless exercises an incomprehensible attraction on the person

who has survived it and who seems to think he has left there the best part of himself, which he

tries to recapture (p. 49). The incomprehensible attraction that Halbwachs referred to is the

endless need of the victim to revisit the phenomenological object of their trauma in order to

repair the imbalance between texture and structure of suffering. Without this repair, the

individual remains un-integrated with the collective in terms of memory and identity signaling

alienation and shame of victimization. The allure of the sufferer to the object of trauma lies with

the possibility of correcting the imbalance between the hidden story and that of the public record.It is the dissonance between the two records of memory collective and the un-integrated

individual that creates the tension in the collective memory.

The power of Halbwachs ideas of collective memory is in the very fact that they are not a

given but rather a socially constructed notion (Coser, 1992, p. 22). Halbwachs stresses that

individuals construct memory in a collective that draws strength from their integrated and

collected memories. The individual strands of collective memory dont merely create group

memory; they create the individual strands of identity. In some cases, they are the strands of

identity where that identity cannot be expressed more easily in words or symbols. This is because

we are what we remember ourselves to be. The collected traces of integrated (but separate)memory create feelings of individual identity that when shared in numbers creates feelings of

group identity. This is the foundation for identity expression as culture. The feelings of an Irish-

Qubcois identity can be traced back to the intertwining of parental stories of fathers life in

Kerry, and mothers life in Montreal and the obstacles and subsequent resolution in mixing the

most pleasant elements of both world views into an integrated whole. The subsequent


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expression of those intertwined identities by growing numbers of family members possessing

that Irish-Qubcois identity in art, music, and mixed plaques of ethnic heraldry creates an

emanation of family culture that memorializes their existence and their creation of a sacred

collective effervescence. Identity isnt created from nothing, but rather from past events that

have been turned into collective identity by comparison, by sharing, by negotiation, byconstruction. This is Halbwachs most elemental message; that in order to remember, there must

be someone else to remember back or the process of Durkheims creation is absent. The creation

of the sacred is inherently a collective phenomenon (Coser, 1992); one creator does not make for

the sacred as there is no reflection back of a shared ethos or euphoria of accomplishment. The

process of creation and the memory it constructs includes both the structure and the texture of the

lived experience, which in its most basic form serves as the cloak of individual and group

identity. This is the essence of the transmission of generational identity. We create future identity

of those who succeed us with the construction of present memory today. Each generation

reconstructs past memory to adapt it to present identity in an endless process of creatingcollective effervescence. The ethos of the sacred then, explains the strength of generational

linkage and the pain of disruption of historical narrative.

The structure of memory and the texture of dreams

No real and complete memory every [sic] appears in our dreams as it appears in our waking

state. (Halbwachs, 1992, p. 41)

The state of knowledge concerning the psychological structures of phenomenological

experience was still too new to have informed Halbwachs work. Edmund Husserls (2001) 1913

work on phenomenological reduction was just introduced and theories of the integrative functionof dreams based on the work of Freud and Carl Jung were another half century in the making.

So the fact that Halbwachs was even cognizant of the importance of dreams to memory and

collectivization was still ground breaking for his time. The combination of the collectivity of

memory (Halbwachs), the phenomenological reduction of lived experience to its components of

structure and texture (Husserl) and the integrating function of experience in dream states

(Winson, 1985) provides an ongoing trail of exploration in the field of memory formation,

collectivization and transmission. As Halbwachs wrote, we dont remember in dreams, but we do

relive the phenomenological texture that is un-integrated to the structure it is supposed to

correspond to. Phenomenological texture and structure is concerned with what the participantsperceive to be emanating from the reality they are part of and the meaning-intention or meaning

fulfillment(Husserl, 2001, p. 167) of their cognition and emotion as expressed in language,

thought or reason. Although separate activities, cognition and emotion interact as variable-or-

result and can present themselves simultaneously (Eysenk & Keane, 2000). The cognitive

processing of boredom for instance can be simultaneously mirrored by the emotional state of


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impatience and both represent human experience and a phenomenological representation of the

objects that produced them. In his recounting of Chateaubriands account of time spent at his

parents manor at Combourg, Halbwachs separates the structure and texture of Chateaubriands

memories. The structure of Chateaubriands memory is the physical event, where the texture is

the accompanying import felt or perceived by him during the event. The structure ofChateaubriands memories for example, details the silent comings and goings of his father

[and]the appearance of the hall. The texture of Chateaubriands memories is of greater depth

and import as Halbwachs writes: what interests us above all is Chateaubriand himself and the

feelings of oppression, sadness, and boredom that arises in him from his contact with people and

things (p. 60). Where the structure is both familiar but of little import, the texture of what

Chateaubriand feels parallels, validates, and connects him to us in shared lived experience or

what Halbwachs calls collectivized memory.

Such is the texture of what is remembered, rather than the physical structure. Texture is

created and remembered in volume that is far denser than structure. To illustrate further, achilds sibling is to be punished and the quality and quantity of what is remembered constitutes a

distinct imbalance of the process of meaning and memory creation: the child hears the fathers

footsteps climb the stairs from behind a closed door where she huddles imagining his expression,

his anger, the strap dangling from his closed fist, the first violent burst of pain that her sibling

would feel as the strap cut into soft skin; the outrush of tears mixed with saliva as moans turned

to howls. From the scrap of structural memory; the clump of feet on stairs and the cries of a

sibling, the child in the darkened room creates textural memory on top of structural memory that

far exceeds what the child physically saw or heard. Like Maurices depiction of how

Chateaubriand assembles feelings and ideations from different time periods into a singlestructural scene that is depicted in one evening, or one moment, the child in the example above

assembles past structural knowledge about pain and anticipation of pain and punishment into a

dense volume of texture which is overlaid onto brief moments of structure to be remembered

intermixed to the point that dissembling elements of each become difficult if not impossible.

Using another of Halbwachs examples, the moment of recreation of the [texture] and of the

event itself-now judged from a distance-imposes itself on our mind with so much power that we

cannot escape being inspired by it (p. 61). The texture in Halbwachs example was the moral

nature of his parents, but the point is that he demonstrated an understanding of the

phenomenological aspects of lived experience and their effect on memory, including that we aremore interested in the texture than the structure. When Halbwachs remembers his brother, he

remembers less the physical structure of his appearance or characteristics and more the

emotional import of their relations and relationship.

In his chapter on dreams and memory images, Halbwachs seems troubled by the disorganized

bits and pieces of memory present in dreams that are too mutilated and mixed up with others to


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allow us to recognize them. There never appears in dreams an event accompanied by all its

particularities, without a mixture of alien elements (p. 41). Ultimately, Maurice questions the

role that dreams play in memory formation and collectivization. While I can only speculate,

perhaps had Halbwachs possessed the knowledge that we now have on the subconscious

physically and psychologically, would he have surmised that those alien elements consist of thetexture of the event that is represented in the structure of the dream? What we do know is that

the texture of the event creates a greater amount of input data/memory than the structure of the

event, corresponding positively to the increase of suffering or pleasure of the event. To explain,

an event that has a neutral import of suffering or pleasure has an amount of texture equal or less

than the accompanying structure. So the task of organizing ones closet might take an hour of

complex sorting of types, colors, or seasons of clothes, shoes and hats. The textual pleasure of

accomplishment against the textual discomfort of time spent on required housekeeping may well

be equal or less then the structural actions of moving and sorting the many items of apparel. In

this case, there is a match in volume between texture and structure. A subsequent dream aboutthe event might only serve to integrate the changed circumstances of the closet against an

anticipated purchase of additional apparel or the ability to create new combinations of wear

during the coming days. This fits with Winsons (1985) theories of the integrative ability of

dreams to synthesize experiences past with present and anticipated future during unconscious

states of cognition.

But what if the texture of the event dramatically overshadowed the structure of the same

event? In the earlier example of the punished child, footsteps and cries served to unleash a

torrent of textual memory input for the child based on shared phenomenological ideation of pain,

suffering, and survivor guilt. In this event, the texture would not fit within the given structure;the structure is stark and on its surface, does not warrant the depth of the import felt and

remembered by the child. How does the child reintegrate this mismatched texture with

structure? While there are many ways that the human mind accommodates disproportionate,

unsynchronized, or unintegrated feelings and thoughts, one way it does so is through dream state,

where the structure can be revisited and artificially extended to accommodate the trove of textual

import until both structure and texture are fully integrated as a composite whole. The reality

distortion in memory created by the extension of structure may well remain unintegrated into the

group whole that the child belongs to until such time as additional members present their equally

distorted memories of the giant strap wielded by the grim punisher. What is distorted in memoryby dream state is the size of the strap; the grimness of the wielder; the ominous sound of footfalls

on the steps and agony of the shared, guilt ridden pain that the memory holder did not actually

feel. Halbwachs treads ever so close to such speculative questioning when writes that dreams are

almost completely detached from the system of social representations, its images are nothing

more than raw materials, capable of entering into all sorts of combinations (p. 42). Almost


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intuitively, Halbwachs understands that the dream is both a part of memory and yet, is inhibited

by virtue of being based only upon itself (p. 42) mired as it is in the unconscious memory of a

phenomenological object mismatched in unconscious integration of structure and texture. Such a

would-be memory would necessarily be stuck in nocturnal life where consciousness is

isolated and turned upon itself working to resolve the marked disparity between what (texture)occurred and how (structure) it occurred before it could be integrated and accepted into the

collective whole.

The language of structure and the memory of texture

Perhaps the most striking failure of Halbwachs theory of collective memory involves the

connection of collective memory with language. We write the structure of our memory into the

historical record of our collective autobiographies, but the collectivization of memory requires

the socialization and acceptance of the story by the collective. This requires the functioning and

expression of language. To this, Halbwachs devotes nearly the entire chapter in discussion of theinability of people afflicted with Aphasia from stroke, injury or brain disease to communicatively

integrate their memory into the collective. His principal approach is in comparing the disjointed

nature of Aphasiacs of one level of function to people in dream states without the ability to

participate in the collectivization of memory, turned as they are inward in communication and

thought. Without going into the state of Aphasia research at the time of Halbwachs research, the

possibilities of discussion in terms of language as it relates to the formation of collective memory

are left largely unpacked. There is an area of analysis with regards to the connection between

language and collective memory that has always existed, but only recently become possible to

discuss within the current social milieu. This area of analysis concerns the loss of collectivememory from the loss of language as a result of socially imposed silence. Halbwachs use of his

entire chapter on language to discuss physical losses of language and its effect on participation in

the formation of collective memory implies the absence of other causes, such as those in the

sociological realm. It cannot be that sociological causes of loss of language would not be of

interest to him as the entire construct of collective memory is a primary function of sociological

life. The remaining possibility is the lack of experience with the phenomena of socially imposed

silence and the resulting intention to curb or cancel segments of collective memory that are out

of harmony with the power relationships of every sociological structure of human life.

In the introduction, this paper made mention of the dichotomy between public knowing andprivate actions as an allegory to collective memory and private experience not yet integrated into

the public collective consciousness. In Halbwachs time, areas of private knowledge were not

thought to harbor vast reserves of hidden memory laden with potential large scale dissonance of

public action and public acceptance. Men of war who plundered did so out of well defended

ideologies that need not be hidden under cloaks of silence. Indeed, the socially accepted


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treatment of women, minorities, children, the poor and the disenfranchised were openly

disclosed with moral and even scientific backing for the exclusion, enslavement, chastisement

and control of the less than fully equal elements of society. Where there is no restriction, there is

no need for secrecy or the cloak of silence. As Halbwachs found when he stormed into the

Gestapo Headquarters in Lyon to demand justice for the barbaric treatment of his Jewish parents-in-law, the vastness of the collective lie that lay all around him in Vichy occupied France was a

function of socially imposed silence that constructed memory based not upon collective

effervescence but on the cancelation of language. Where individual accounts of memory diverge

from the collective, those stories and memories tend to be annihilated in group memory; but the

texture remains in the individual memories of those who experienced the unwanted accounts that

diverged from the acceptance of the collective. When a people are ravaged by genocide, or when

a single child is molested, if the phenomenological structure of suffering is denied, unwritten,

silence imposed, both are left with only the amorphous texture in a state un-integrated to the

physical event. They are in Halbwachs dream state; inwardly turned upon themselves seekingsensibility of feelings and emotions that are disconnected from the physical manifestation that

created them. Neither the ravaged people nor the child can articulate the event because it never

happened in the collective memory. The texture of shame, humiliation and rage remain in dream

state until their eventual reintegration into the collective consciousness.

Conclusion

Implications and Applications to the Field of Emerging Culture Conflict

One can only speculate what Halbwachs would have said about the collapse of collective

memory in France in the wake of the collapse of the Vichy regime and the exposure of the truthof Nazi Germanys occupation and desiccation of French memory and identity. We can be

certain however that his foundation of collective memory connected with the ideas of those who

came before him and served to advance the cause of human grace and nobility even at the

expense of his life. The applications of collective memory, its creation of sociocentric group

identity and the foundational requirement for its transmission across time and space has provided

us as interventionists in cultural conflict with the beginning of a map of narrative conflict

resolution. While this map often runs dry upon the arrival on the fields of conflict, our

continuation of the foundation started by Halbwachs and his contemporaries will help us advance

the field of conflict analysis and resolution.


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