Collective Memory, Narrativity, Technology

We live in an age of heightened remembrance and forgetting. The complex entanglements between collective memory and the forms of its articulation are at the centre of the field of memory studies. How we remember the past is shaped by our membership to and identification with different collectivities such as the nation, community, class, gender, region and has always been an inherently political process. This is so because collective remembrance is essentially selective and hence goes hand in hand with the act of forgetting. And while the occupation with the past is the domain of the discipline of history, memory studies is primarily concerned with how the past is engaged with in the present. Hence, museums, memorials, commemorative parades and monuments etc. all constitute curations of a certain kind of collective memory. At the same time the past is also passed down intergenerationally in less institutionalised ways as well embodied in oral testimony, memoirs, objects, photographs, songs, letters, food and so on. Whatever the scale and scope of remembrance, what remains common across both these registers of collective memory is that they are strung together through stories and hence embody narrativity in meaningful yet complex ways. As Paul Ricœur argued, the self is fundamentally a narrative, and the past can only be retrieved through storytelling. Through these narratives, we uncover traces of the past and give voice to marginalised histories, shaping our understanding of ourselves and our place in time.

Technology adds layers and dimensions to this already complicated relationship between memory and narrativity that need to be examined and unpacked. Bernard Stiegler describes technology as a pharmakon—both a remedy and a poison. Hence, on one hand, it preserves collective memory and extends cultural artifacts; on the other, it fosters forgetting and replaces reflective thought with algorithms. In a world saturated with constant commentary, opinions, lamentations, and celebrations floating through the digital landscape, is the uniquely human ability to construct narratives from memory gradually eroding? Further this raises the need to also examine ‘forgetting’ in relation with technology. ‘The internet never forgets’ is now a ubiquitously used phrase for emphasising the permanence of our digital footprint. And yet, even as information that once enters the digital landscape in the form bits and bytes assumes an immortality of sorts, forgetting is also intrinsic to this process. It is evident in the emergence of a certain language over the last decade or so, of which words such as “trending”, “viral”, “hashtags” etc are emblematic, for talking about the short span of public memory and attention.

Hence, as more and more of our lives play out in the digital space, there have emerged questions about remembrance and forgetting that have no easy or immediate answers, yet it is crucial that we ask them. Which narratives about the past hold more credence over others and who decides their legitimacy and credibility? What are the possibilities (if any) for a meaningful engagement between the materiality and digitality of collective memory? What kind of reorientation is required in our understanding of what constitutes the archives as more and more information is not only stored but created in a digital form? With the development of sophisticated computational technologies for ‘scrapping’ digitised and digitally created documents and texts, what would the ‘archival work’ of manually searching through records stored in physical archives to uncover traces of the past entail? Can we speak of digital ‘sites of memory’ and the ways in which they might contest, intersect with, diverge from or overlap with ‘sites of memory’ existing in the real world? What forms can memorializatios of difficult heritage as well as constructions of national memory assume on various social media platforms and how does the politics of memory play out across them on an everyday basis? These are some of these broad questions this research theme is interested in exploring through projects looking a but not limited to:

• Politics of memory on social media platforms
• Narratives of belonging and exclusion in the digital space
• Technology and collective memory
• Self, narrativity and technology
• Archives and digitality

Faculty involved: Isha Dubey, Saurabh Todariya