A plea for memory

One of the paradoxes of our time is that it is in the age of information that memory has become a casualty. Memory is not something stored in a diskette or digitalised in an archive. It is embedded, embodied, lived out. It needs to be told and retold. It is futile to store it because it is invented with every act of storytelling. Memory needs the storyteller more than the museum, more than the network on the archive.

We have to begin by challenging stereotypes of memory which treat it as unreflective expressions of a rote society. Memory then becomes the storage of information we do not understand. Such a commentary is unfair, especially to the genius of oral societies.
Memory is not mechanical or repetitive. Our films and documentaries project the stereotype of memory as rote. But rote memory belongs to the printed text. Oral memory was always inventive. Every time you recited a song or legend, you produced variations on the theme. We remember our epics and legends because we constantly improvise on them. This is one reason why there are so many versions of the Ramayana. Diversity is built into the very dynamics of memory. You improvise and invent so that you can remember. Anthropologist Albert Lord in his great classic The Singer of Tales shows that memory is constructed in blocks, and these blocks are shuffled in a variety of ways as we recollect, retell and remember. Memory has a double function: It stores and invents simultaneously so that we may remember.
Memory is embedded and tacit. It involves an ecology of the unsaid and untold woven around an exemplar or practitioner. It has a vitality when it is relived or retold. A richness is lost when you reduce a text to information, and you often bowdlerise it. Our tutorial colleges bowdlerised knowledge; they destroyed the richness of a play by reducing it to formulae. The character of Hamlet is reduced to four points or Shakespeare’s genius listed in three. Information emasculates knowledge by removing its vital flesh, its sense of connectedness to a particular culture.
One has to remember that memory always existed in the plural. There are varieties of memory of which history, genealogy, legend, oral tales are but a few. The ethics of memory in each is different and we need to celebrate this plurality because it shows the past as a diverse universe. We need to re-look at the relation between past, present and future. We also need to examine the relations between oral, textual and digital regimes, as the nature of memory in each is different. Each stores knowledge in a different way and each act of storing represents a different philosophy of knowledge.
One of the things modernity does is that it fetishises progress. Our modern notion of innovation creates obsolescence and erasure. We label something as old or the past or as backward and then proceed to eliminate it. Modern development is based on a destruction of memory. Our ancestors become an embarrassment and we turn our embarrassments into ancestral problems.
The big challenge for information societies is the problem obsolescence. Obsolescence is often artificial. We label something as outdated and then treat it as irrelevant. An irrelevant society becomes ripe for erasure or elimination. One of the poignant questions one asks is whether obsolescence is tied to the god of information. Is obsolescence the sacrifice this hungry god of the new and the artificially new needs to sustain himself? Most ideas of innovation have little clue to what to sustain, what to renew. Their search for the new condemns a whole world as useless and old.
Obsolescence allows crafts, industries, skills, cultures to be labelled as outdated and erased, displaced, eliminated or put into a museum. Obsolescence allows for death and indifference. One can shrug off a craft or a tribe as obsolescent. Obsolescence allows for indifference, particularly an indifference to death and disappearance. Storing tribes as information in a museum becomes obscene; it is an act of intellectual rape which denies the right of tribes to exist as living entities.
One has to realise that information is not only about techniques of storage, retrieval and dissemination. One needs an ethics of memory to compensate and complement the more rudimentary ethics of information and innovation. We need, first, an ethics of memory that recognises life forms need varieties of memory given varieties of information. One needs redundancy, noise and diversity. Ethics has to ask about how one stores the sense of connectivity. Second, memory has to be stored in varieties of time incorporated into varieties of story-telling. One must redefine terms such as relevance, identity, storage, representation.
I think memory needs the equivalent of hackers. Hackers threaten the security and the pomposity and secrecy of power. We need a set of “preservers”, people whose task is to remember, become repositories of dying or threatened memories, even homes for threatened skills. This is not to create a voyeurism for the past. A voyeurism of this kind culminates in kitsch, where the mass-produced souvenir or the replica displaces the original. A plaster of Paris replica of the Taj Mahal acquires a sentimental or aesthetic equivalence with the original. Tourism as an information system often displays such a tendency.
There is a beautiful story by Ray Bradbury called Fahrenheit 451. It’s a tale of a society where books are burned. The ruling regime outlaws the possession of books. A group of dissenters decide to become the memory of the society. Each decides to memorise a great classic and each person is then named after the book, as Hamlet or Rabelais or Don Quixote. Here the person lives out the text and it’s such an ethics of memory that an information society needs. Memory is what you live out and in the very act of living out you create a civilisation. This is what information societies need to remember.

Shiv Visvanathan is a social science nomad