Words of testimony and of memory
Because researchers, professors and professionals working in the arts, culture or news are more and more often needing to use words from the fields of testimony and of memory, Testimony Between History and Memory has set itself the objective of gathering them into a dictionary, thus opening up this experimental space. One word can take on different meanings depending on the language it is used or circulates in. This is why certain terms of the dictionary will be approached in a multilinguistic, or even in a multicultural way.
This project will be realized in two stages. Each term from an index in progress will be presented twice. First in the form of short notices in each edition of the review, then inviting developments and a critical debate, with multiple voices, on a website that will start running from the Summer 2015. We will associate to their short version, voluntarily incomplete, a few book titles, however not claiming to be exhaustive.
1Memory, in its original sense, means a cognitive process internal to each individual. Its social dimension was revealed by sociologist Marice Halbwachs in Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire, published in 1925. A student of Bergson and then Durkheim, Halbwachs was interested in how memory and society were linked. With the expression “collective memory” he designated the individual memory, as it is sustained by society, and the memory of society itself. Yet, as Marc Bloch highlights, “we are free to pronounce the word ‘collective memory’, but we should not forget that at least part of the phenomena we thus label are simply communication occurrences among individuals” (73). This part of communication within the memorial process only finds its terminological envelop with Jan Assmann’s distinction, dating from the 1980s, between two types of collective memory: “cultural memory” and “communicative memory”. In the years 2000, Harald Welzer worked mainly on communicative memory, which he distinguishes from social memory – an essentially unconscious memory. His research also takes into account, as much as possible, the latest advances in neuroscience.
2From the observations of these various theorists, we can define communicative memory as the whole of the representations of the past or of concerning the past, as well as the mechanisms that (re)build these representations, which are released and shared within a network of communication by individuals who witnessed this past.
3Thus, communicative memory lies at an interindividual communication level; in other words, it lies essentially at the scale of a group: family, religion, social class, ethnic group, village, etc. But it can also pertain to larger communities, to national or to “social networks”, for example. Such communication, based on everyday practices, now takes place at a more global scale thanks to certain means of communication that tend to substitute direct contact, such as written or audiovisual communication broadcast via the press or the Internet. This interindividual dimension allows Aleida and Jan Assmann to delineate communicative memory to a period of three or four generations (eighty to one hundred years), thereby defining its historical framework.
4Finally, because communicative memory rests on a “communicational action” (Habermas), it presupposes a language which enables a mutual understanding and supposes the speaker’s (intentional) claim to truth.