What is the alternation between memory and forgetting? Maurice Halbwachs argued that when we remember, we are never alone. It seems fitting, then, to ask what happens to human beings when they forget and, consequently, how the social production of oblivion works. The questions don't end there, because it's also fair to ask: if the memory of an event coincides with the form through which we experience it, what is the form of forgetting, and what is the social structure of oblivion?
The complexity of investigating oblivion
Memory is a topic of ongoing discussion. Especially in the age of social media, where everything is documented through posts, we can consider ourselves equipped with the means to remember. Facebook or Instagram, for example, offer the ability to see what was shared on a given day in previous years. But, beyond a sociology of memory, it may be important to increasingly question the issues posed by forgetting.
It's complicated to investigate how the mechanisms that socially produce unawareness are triggered. In this specific case, it's a matter of studying absence by attempting to offer more or less valid and reliable operational definitions. When we talk about oblivion, in fact, we no longer investigate how a particular version of the past has succeeded in competing socially with others. The question appears different: to reveal which alternative version official history obscures.
Gestalt and memory
The relationship between memory and forgetting can be represented using the images of Gestalt psychologists , who question the relationship between background and figure. Depending on the observer's point of view, they might see the profile of a face or the jagged edge of a mountain. Or, they might see the drawing of an animal or the face of a woman.
Using an equation, memory is to forgetting as fullness is to emptiness. Socially, the processes of remembering and forgetting refer to each other. Indeed, what is remembered is equivalent, by definition, to what is not forgotten, and consequently, what is forgotten is equivalent to what is incapable of remembering. This statement places memory and forgetting, empirically, on the same level.
Sociology of Memory: Institutions for Remembering and Forgetting
In sociological reflection, the past seems to be depicted as a bundle of trajectories that, from the present, illuminate different aspects of reality backward. The past, rather than coinciding with a single story, becomes a varied and ever-changing set of accounts, multiple versions of the same event that contradict each other.
There are institutions for remembering, and institutions that, on the other hand, serve to forget . It is in this clash or confrontation that the subjective activity of remembering takes shape. Cavalli emphasizes that it is always the social authors, in the end, who remember. It is not abstract entities that reproduce memories, but individuals. It is the degrees of freedom of remembering, however, that appear institutionally, rather than socially, predefined.
According to Jedlowsky (1987), from Halbwachs onwards, memory has been considered an institution in itself and ends up corresponding to the set of institutionalized forms in which it crystallizes. It seems useful to ask what and how many these forms are and how they prefigure their content. And also whether there is a reciprocal influence between the socially reproduced version of the past and the cultural artifacts in which it is objectified. If memories are contested, what are the arenas in which these clashes are materially and symbolically fought?
Culture, within this framework, becomes an important area for sociological reflection on these issues, as societies have traditionally chosen to remember their past also through the mediation and role of cultural and artistic institutions. Vera Zolberg (1996, p. 69) wrote that there are institutions in which the characteristics of a nation are inscribed or displayed.
Bibliography
- Total AL (edited by), Contested Memory: Studies on Past Social Communication (2008), FrancoAngeli, Milan
- Zolberg V., Museums as contested sites of remembrance: the Enola Gay affair, in Macdonald S., Fyfe G. (1996)
Born in Catanzaro on July 5, 1989, he has been a member of the Order of Journalists (Freelance Journalists) since 2017. He earned a bachelor's degree in Social Work in 2013, a bachelor's degree in Sociology in 2016, and a master's degree in Organizations and Social Change in 2018. In 2020, he earned his fourth degree in Economics. He has also published three volumes of a science fiction trilogy.
