Memoro-Politics
IT HAS BECOME commonplace to speak of a politics of this or that or almost anything. Such generous usage strips the word of much meaning. But talk of a politics of memory is no metaphor. The confrontations between the False Memory Syndrome Foundation and various schools of recovered memory therapy are plainly political. The annual “drumming out child abuse” in Washington, at the Eastern Meeting of the ISSMP&D, is a political manifesto. Conference attendees are urged to bring drums, and, of a spring evening, demonstrate in order to influence lawmakers. The professed target of this event is child abuse, but its direct object is more along the lines of the “Believe the Children” bumper stickers. Memories, especially memories elicited during work with therapists, are to be believed. There are many more political demonstrations. For example, the organization Crimes against Children held a major lobbying event in Washington on 17 September 1993. It grimly warned of an unnamed menace: the conference “has received much adverse publicity from obvious individuals and organizations who do not want an aggressive agenda on crimes against children.” The event was to be led by U.S. attorney general of the previous administration, Edwin Meese.
There are perhaps two kinds of politics of memory, the personal and the communal. A large photograph of a holocaust monument is captioned “Horror Unforgotten: The Politics of Memory.” Communal memory has always played a major role in group identity. Almost any identifiable people has tales of origin. There is the genesis of the universe, and after that, the birth of the people. Many names that the West translates as the name of an ethnic stock are better translated simply as “people”—Bantu, for example. Or literally “People of people,” the Khoikhoi whom Europeans called “Bushmen” or “Hottentots.” Each such people has its own communal memory, its own chronicles, its own heroic odes. Group memory helps define the group. It becomes encoded in ritual. At a solemn moment in every Jewish wedding, a glass is broken in remembrance of the destruction of the Temple. “Do this in memory of me,” Christ instructed his disciples at the Last Supper, reenacted at every subsequent Mass or Holy Communion.
It is possible, but by no means certain, that there is a distinct type of politics of remembering associated with what used to be called Peoples of the Book, that is, peoples, ethnic or cultural, who in part identify themselves through a sacred text. This includes adherents of the religions that arose in the Fertile Crescent: Judaism, the faith of Mani, Christianity, Islam. The sacred text, in each case, is solidified memory, and each text is further enshrined in endless commentary. Peoples of the Book keep on adding supplementary documents of memory. That is one distanced way to regard the rich flow of memories of the camps: even when they are memories of personal suffering, they are situated within an almost timeless communal practice of remembering, of preserving the story of the people.
Holocaust memories are unusual in that they are directed both inward and outward. Inward, to the group whose memory of suffering it is, and outward, to Gentiles, especially Westerners who must never forget that their culture (my culture) must take responsibility for the genocide. Yet despite the fact that the memory of every people has its own character, we shall not be misled if, briefly, we think in anthropological terms, and hold group memories to be among the ways in which group identity and difference are cemented. From that perspective, the holocaust politics of memory is an instance of an age-old human practice. The politics of personal memories is, in contrast, relatively new. My discussion of the politics of memory will be one-sided, because I am preoccupied by the question of how the politics of personal memory came into being. In no way do I deny that there are interconnections between group memory and personal memory. One obvious link is trauma. The science of traumatic stress teaches that individual concentration camp survivors, and by extension their progeny, suffer from the psychological effects of trauma very much as the victims of child abuse do. But this seems to be a one-way projection. That is, holocaust memories would have become part of group memory, and there would be an associated politics, even if traumatology never existed, and even if there had never arisen, late in the nineteenth century, the sciences of memory. But the politics of personal memory, I contend, could not have arisen without those sciences. Hence although there is much to be learned from the interactions between group and personal memory, it is the latter that we have to examine.
The politics of personal memory is a politics of a certain type. It is a power struggle built around knowledge, or claims to knowledge. It takes for granted that a certain sort of knowledge is possible. Individual factual claims are batted back and forth, claims about this patient, that therapist, combined with larger views about vice and virtue. Underlying these competing claims to surface knowledge there is a depth knowledge; that is, a knowledge that there are facts out there about memory, truth-or-falsehoods to get a fix on. There would not be politics of this sort if there were not that assumption of knowledge about memory, known to science. Power struggles are fought out on the basis of surface knowledge, where opponents take the depth knowledge as common ground. Each side opposes the other, claiming it has better, more exact, surface knowledge, drawing on superior evidence and methodology. That is exactly the form of the confrontations between those who recover memory of trauma and those who question it.
Could one see things in reverse, as politics making prominent what would otherwise be items from obscure sciences of memory? Judith Herman appears to do so in her book, Trauma and Recovery. She is explicit about the role of politics: “Three times over the past century, a particular form of psychological trauma has surfaced into public consciousness. Each time the investigation of that trauma has flourished in affiliation with a political movement.”1 Her three examples are hysteria, shell shock, and sexual and domestic violence. She rightly states that the study of sensational hysteria, whose epitome is Charcot’s grande hystérie, was associated with the “republican, anticlerical political movement of the nineteenth century in France.” In fact she says that it “grew out of” that movement, possibly an overstatement. She sees the development of shell shock into post-traumatic stress disorder in the “political context of the collapse of a cult of war and the growth of an antiwar movement.” Finally, the political context for awareness of sexual and domestic violence is feminism.
Herman’s linkages are plain to see; it is up to historians to round out and nuance each of these three complex stories. What underlies all three of these is memory, memory of trauma, although the relationship to remembered trauma is different in each case. Freud famously came to the opinion that hysterical patients suffer from reminiscences. Post-traumatic stress disorder has been entirely incorporated into the science of memory. There is, in contrast, a great deal of sexual and domestic violence that needs no memory: it is going on right now, and its evidence is bruises, blood, swollen lips, broken bones, and the stalking patterns of jilted husbands or lovers. Nevertheless, when we turn to Herman’s side of that violence, namely, trauma, it is trauma remembered or forgotten that is central.
Herman’s three political movements—French republicanism, antiwar, and feminism—are prominent features in the history of Western Europe and America. Each could have come into being and left its permanent marks without ever having had recourse to memory. My question is: why did questions of memory become so central to those aspects of all three of Herman’s examples? I argue that each of the three made use of a politics of memory deeply embedded in the new sciences of memory that emerged a century or more ago. They were able to do so precisely because of the way in which those sciences proposed to wrest the soul from religion and turn it over to science. Moral confrontations could thus be made scientific, objective, impersonal—or so it seemed. My thesis is altogether consistent with what Herman writes, but it reverses the direction of her inquiry. She sees the study of trauma, especially forgotten trauma, as arising within three political movements. I see the way in which those movements latched on to trauma as part of a politics of memory legitimated by, indeed made possible by, the new sciences of memory. Although the sciences and the politics mutually interact, it is the underlying depth knowledge—that there are certain sorts of truths about memory and forgetting—that makes the politics possible.
The politicization of memory can be analyzed at many different levels. I do not claim that depth knowledge is the only story. I do claim that it has served as an essential backdrop to other events. It is to be expected that a full understanding of the phenomena must also involve more specific and local events than the sciences of memory. Many interests are in play, and the casual observer can distinguish many centers of power or subversion that seem central. Many wings of feminism, with their emphasis on survivors of incest and other forms of family violence, find in the recall of past evil a critical source of empowerment. Sects of Protestant fundamentalism impressed by tales of satanic ritual abuse, and of programming by diabolical cults, rely on the restoration of buried memory. Many people are hostile to both of these important social groupings. Almost no one is attracted by both militant feminism and militant fundamentalism, for these two have entirely different class allegiances and geographical distributions. Yet their differences should not conceal what their adherents take for granted. They all suppose that there is knowledge of memory to be had.
Why is it that the battles so often take place over what has been forgotten, in particular, over the terrain of forgotten pain? Forgetting, rather than ordinary remembering, is the present locus of memoro-politics. But I must clarify. First, we are not concerned with what we may think of as the erosion of memory, which we experience as events slip away into the past. Even “erosion” is a loaded metaphor, because it suggests a lump of material that gradually gets worn away by time and indifference. Memory in this sense has to do not with a thing but with an ability to recall, and without rehearsal we tend to become less and less able to recall the detail or even the order of older events. We also, without rehearsal, begin to falter over all those poems we learned when we first went courting or were forced to memorize in school. That is the erosion of ability, and not a topic of memoro-politics at all. Memoro-politics is above all a politics of the secret, of the forgotten event that can be turned, if only by strange flashbacks, into something monumental. It is a forgotten event that, when it is brought to light, can be memorialized in a narrative of pain. We are concerned less with losing information than with hiding it. The background for memoro-politics is pathological forgetting—literally pathological, referring to the nineteenth-century pathologies so familiar to Théodule Ribot and his contemporaries.
I have coined the term memoro-politics, but readers of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality will know that I pattern it on his anatomo-politics and bio-politics. These were his names for “two poles of development linked together by a whole intermediary cluster of relations,” two forms of power over life that (he claimed) came into existence in the seventeenth century.
One of these poles—the first to be formed, it seems,—centered on the body as a machine: its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces …, all this was ensured by the procedures of power that characterized the disciplines: an anatomo-politics of the human body. The second, formed somewhat later, focused on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation…. Their supervision was effected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a bio-politics of the population.2
Foucault wrote of “an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations, marking the beginning of an era of ‘bio-power.’” When Foucault speaks of power he does not mean power exercised from above. The power of which Foucault wanted to speak runs through our lives; you and I are part of its exercise.
Each of Foucault’s two pairs of power and politics had its own surface knowledges. For bio-power, there was biology and knowledge of the population and the species, which in turn engendered the specific technologies of statistics. For anatamo-power, there was anatomy and knowledge of the body. Thus each pole has three aspects: power, politics, and science. What about the sciences of memory? Using the results of the previous chapter, we can say that the program of localization of brain function, marked by Broca’s identification of motor control of speech, was a late appearance at the anatamo-pole. Experimental psychology may have begun in the physiology laboratory, once again part of anatamo-knowledge, but with Ebbinghaus, when it became a statistical science, it no longer concerned itself with individual events or beings but with averages and deviations. It was part of the generalized bio-pole (a generalization that makes free with Foucault’s own use of the “bio,” but which in fact captures the essence of his “regulatory controls”).
I propose to augment Foucault’s two poles, anatomo- and bio-. What is missing is pretty obvious. It is the mind, the psyche, the soul. Foucault spoke of “two poles of development linked together by a whole cluster of relations.” On the next page he mentioned two initially distinct directions for the development of bio-power during the eighteenth century, discipline and demography. The metaphor of poles and intermediary relations hardly gets at the complexities, yet I have found it useful to adapt it. What I call memoro-politics is a third extreme point from which (to continue the metaphor of mapping and surveying) we can triangulate recent knowledge. But I cannot talk about three poles (the globe, after all, has only two) unless I make a gross pun. I grow my runner beans—pole beans—on a tripod made of three poles. The lush growth at the top, as the beans planted around each pole tangle with the others, is the richest image of Foucault’s “cluster of intermediary relations.”
Anatomo-politics of the human body; bio-politics of the population, wrote Foucault. What is memoro-politics a politics of? Of the self, the “subject” or the human mind? Or of those substantivized personal pronouns, ego, moi? I prefer to say a memoro-politics of the human soul, an idea that invokes character, reflective choice, and self-understanding, among much else. The idea of the soul—whether understood in my secular way or in others—is by no means a human universal. Ideas of soul, earthly or spiritual, do permeate the European background in which memoro-politics emerged. Other peoples don’t have anything like the historically situated notion of the soul that I have inherited from my culture. Good for them. Other peoples don’t have memoro-politics or multiple personality disorder either.
It has been protested that European ideas of the soul are part of an oppressive, perhaps even patriarchal system.3 I am sure there is much truth in that. Within various bits and pieces of the Western tradition, conceptions of the soul have been used to maintain a great many hierarchies and have had a central role in power plays. The soul has been a way of internalizing the social order, of putting into myself those very virtues and cruelties that enabled a society to endure. That is a thoroughly functionalist view of the soul, in the sense of the sociologists. That is, it is suggested that the idea of the soul serves a function in the society, even though those who want or accept the idea do not self-consciously know what the function is. The idea of the soul persists because it helps to maintain public order. That is its unintended function. A further factor is important to functionalist explanations: feedback.4 When life seems parlous and a Western society is about to fall apart, there is a great talk of reviving the soul in its various manifestations, and if not the soul, then the values of the family. I agree with this sketch of a functionalist analysis, to some extent, but I am not unnerved. To expose a function is not to undermine a value, but to enrich understanding. And now, when family values are supposed to be in crisis, we hear talk not of the soul explicitly, but of its scientific stand-in, memory.
The centrality of the soul in the Western tradition is well illustrated by the fact that one can so quickly place it by allusions to either Plato or Aristotle. Most of our other ideas and sentiments—both in and on either side of what is now called modernity—ride more cheerfully with one camp or the other, but the soul mingles gladly with Platonists and Aristotelians, with sophists and Sapphists, with Ryle and Sartre. The soul undoubtedly makes us think of religion, but Western intellectuals have become more Athenian than Christian. We certainly are not overtly Cartesian; we do not profess a principled and ultimate distinction between soul and body. But we are a bit too prim and self-satisfied about that. I have always liked to annoy people by pointing out similarities between sayings of Descartes and Wittgenstein.5 Those similarities exist in part because the soul has been so enduring in the Western vision of human beings and their place in nature.
What discipline aims at knowledge of the soul? We would expect it to be psychology, the science of mind, of the psyche. A cynic, doubting that psychology has taught us much, might still inquire: What has psychology done to the soul? Perhaps it invented an object on which it could experiment, instead of having to be a science of the soul. That is a theme of Danziger’s history of psychology, of which I have made use already. His ambitious title, Constructing the Subject, implies a story about constructing the human subject as an object of study, and above all, as an object with attributes that can be measured. The book is not, however, a history of what everyone means by “psychology.” Instead he tells us about what our university departments of psychology teach as psychology, and above all, the experimental psychology of measurement. That science quickly spread far beyond scholarly research; its measures of skill, intelligence, personal relationships, or child-parent bonding are the stock-in-trade of corporate personnel departments, prisons, schools, and maternity wards. Measurements of those quantities began in the psychology laboratory. They have a valid field of application in the larger world because they determine what is to be measured and counted as knowledge about the larger world. Danziger brought to the fore the institutional setting for the origins of German (and hence the world’s) experimental psychology. Psychology patterned itself on physiology, on the study of the body. Its domain and its model, in terms of Foucault’s poles, was the body. If the psychology laboratory had remained an adjunct or imitator of the old physiology laboratories, then, in terms of Foucault’s poles, we would have been able to file it toward the anatomy side. But never is there more plainly an intermediary cluster of relations. It is certainly true that a great many studies connected with the mind are in fact directed at the body. Behaviorism, neurology, localized brain function, neurophilosophy, mood-altering drugs, or biochemical theories of mental maladies could all be regarded as sciences of the body. They lead to the exercise of anatomo-power, seen at its most extreme when disorderly minds are to be controlled by electroshock or chemicals. Of course we get at the soul this way, but we do so through knowledges of the body, through physiology and anatomy.
The second point for triangulating the soul is located at the level not of the body but of the population, the collection, the classification and enumeration of kinds of people. Here we have the politics of the species, of the human race as species to be categorized into its varieties—I use the word as did the horticulturists, seedsmen, and stockbreeders of old. The census takers and counters of every sort flood our panorama of humanity with new kinds of person.6 The applied science that is the engine of bio-power is statistics. Experimental psychology may have begun by modeling itself on the physiology laboratory, but that was only the beginning, because it became a statistical science. This transition toward modern experimental psychology was set up in the memory laboratory of Ebbinghaus. It was precisely in the study of memory that laboratory psychology was transferred from the body to populations, from anatomo- to bio-, from the individual event to statistics. If we restrict the field of studies of the mind to Foucault’s two poles, then at the foot of the anatomo-pole stands Broca, and at the foot of the bio-pole stands Ebbinghaus.
But are we not looking in the wrong place for a memoro-power? Should we not turn to biography? From Locke’s exceptional point of view, the person is constituted not by a biography but by a remembered biography. We have had told “lives”—as in Plutarch’s Lives, the lives of the saints, Aubrey’s Brief Lives—for as long as we have had a written-down past. But those have been the lives of the exceptional. The typical life of a typical saint enjoins us against enthusiasm; the tale is told “more for our admiration than our emulation.” Then there is the public confession. Augustine, Petrarch, Rousseau: might not each of us have confessed to such a life? No. Those are not ordinary folk. Where shall we locate the idea that everyone has a biography, even, or especially, the lowest of the low?
The image of biography is everywhere. A human life becomes conceived of as a story. A nation is thought of as its history. A species becomes an evolutionary object. A soul is a pilgrimage through life. A planet is thought of as Gaea. There are well-known suggestions about how the biography, the dossier, the medical or legal record became the life of the deviant, the lawbreaker, the mad person. If we are to look for the beginning of these dossiers, they and their role are described with surprising precision by their inventors. For example, in nineteenth-century England Thomas Plint said, in so many words, that once the criminals had been identified by their biographies, society would finally be able to protect itself.7 Needless to say, identification—the hooking of a narrative onto a person in the dock—had in the end to be done by new technologies of anatomy, first ear-prints (standardized photographs of ears held in every police station in France) and then fingerprints—back to the body. We’re still there, with DNA.
Likewise medical case histories, although used in the great eighteenth-century classificatory schemes of disease, did not flourish until the mid-nineteenth century. Part of the project, as Jan Goldstein puts it in the title of her book, was To Console and Classify.8 But it was also to provide the life story of the patient. At first, what the patient said was no more to be trusted than what the criminal said. But even in 1859, not long after Plint had been telling London how to write the life stories of criminals, Paul Briquet in Paris was telling how to write the life stories of hysterical women.9 Sometimes he indicated that these women had experienced terrible things early in life, even from their own fathers. Briquet’s textbook on hysteria was the classic midcentury work. In retrospect we can go back to it and see a doctor horrified by what his female patients were telling him about their past.
Did memoro-politics emerge in the nineteenth century because of the systematic recording of the lives of utterly boring nonentities begun at midcentury? Those lives were written down only because they were a nuisance. Is memoro-politics a derivation from the recording in large ledgers of the lives of criminals, lives of men who usually lied about their past? Is that it, along with the simultaneous telling of the lives of disturbed women? Are these biographies of the unhappy, the ill, the deviant, the feared part of what so transformed modern mores, our present conception of who we are and what made us? Certainly such events are not irrelevant, but they are not central either. For example, whatever we find in Briquet’s book, it was not, and I think could not have been, read in our way, in terms of child abuse, during his lifetime. Moreover, there was no question of forgetting. Briquet’s patients knew all too well what had happened to them. Plint’s criminals may have lied, but it was never suggested that they forgot. Forgetting may have been set up by new genres of biography, the medical case and the criminal record, and the recording of memories of deviant people. But something else was required to put forgetting in place: the sciences of memory, as they emerged and matured late in the nineteenth century.
I do not mean that we began to think about memory only late in the nineteenth century. The previous chapter dipped into the art of memory and listened to Locke’s moving observation that episodes from the past “very often are roused and tumbled out of their dark cells into open daylight, by turbulent and tempestuous passions; our affections bringing ideas to our memories, which had otherwise lain quiet and unregarded.” But there was little conception of a knowledge about memory before the nineteenth century. A century is a long period of time; so I have ruthlessly narrowed it down to a dozen years and called it 1874–1886. Certainly the generation that lived through that time had direct intellectual and practical predecessors. But that is when the depth knowledge, the knowledge that there are facts about memory, came into being. Why did it come into being then? Because the sciences of memory could serve as the public forum for something of which science could not openly speak. There could be no science of the soul. So there came to be a science of memory.
Our present power struggles about memory are formed within a space of possibilities established in the nineteenth century. If one metaphorically speaks of the structure of the possible knowledges that we can have, and which serve as the battlefield of our politics, they were put in place at that time. Today, when we wish to have a moral dispute about spiritual matters, we democratically abjure subjective opinion. We move to objective facts, science. The science is memory, a science crafted in my chosen span of time, 1874–1886. We do not examine, any more, whether incest is evil. To do so would be to talk about subjective values. Instead we move to science and ask who remembers incest. About memory there can be objective scientific knowledge—or so we have been schooled.