Like the Pantheon in the Roman Empire accommodates all cults, provided that they are cults, society accepts all traditions (also the most recent) provided that they are traditions. It also accepts all ideas (also the most ancient) provided that they are ideas, that is, that they have a place in its thought and that they still interest the people of today who appreciate them. From this follows that social thought is essentially a memory, and that its entire contents is made of nothing but collective recollections, but that among them only those subsist that are possible to reconstruct in every period of society, working within the current frameworks.
— Maurice Halbwachs, Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire, 19251
With theories of collective memory the academic study of remembrance changed scales. In the early 1900s memory was primarily analysed as an individual capability. With scholars like Maurice Halbwachs enquiries into memory took on more complex challenges.2 Not only does his theory assume as a fact that individual memory in essence is conditioned by social milieus, but it also comes to address recollection from the perspective of society. It enables analyses of how religions, professions, and families fundamentally are social aggregates of individuals who remember in groups, institutionally or informally.
This chapter lays the theoretical foundation on which the spatial framework of memory rests. In the Introduction I pointed to how theoretical
1 M Halbwachs, Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire, ed. G Namer (1925; facs. edn, Paris, Albin Michel, 1994), 296.
2 Other voices also advocated social and cultural perspectives of memory before Halbwachs and in his lifetime.
See e.g. the selection of texts in ‘Part I. Precursors and Classics’ in J K Olick, et al. (eds), The Collective Memory Reader (New York, Oxford University Press, 2011), 63–176. Cf. also Context in the Introduction.
developments in the twentieth century have established a sociocultural vantage point for contemplating memory. Halbwachs’s postulation of a socially conditioned memory stands as one of the central premises. Most subsequent scholarship on social memory builds on or positions itself in relation to Halbwachs. To isolate the study of the spatial framework of memory from the collective memory is therefore not practicable, nor desirable. In my reading of the concept, therefore, the collective memory stands as a premise. I will give a portrait of the key postulates of the theory, addressing its merits and shortcomings, in order to lay the foundation for the theoretical framework of studies of architecture and memory that I propose.
One must subscribe to the general validity of the former in order to recognise the virtues of the latter. Considering the remarkable success of Halbwachs’s memory theory in the humanities and social sciences, I do not believe that it is to take it too far, especially not if the premise is accepted on the condition that subsequent scholarship, which critically reformulates some of his positions, is welcomed and appreciated.3
To understand the coming into being of the theory of collective memory I will first outline the intellectual context in which Halbwachs developed his thinking and from where it drew its logic. What role did the thinking of his mentors play in his formulation of a collective memory? Subscribing to the collective memory as a foundational theory has certain implications for the understanding of the spatial framework of memory. One important aspect, which I will discuss at length, is the collective aspect of memory and how it ought to be construed not to run the risk of being interpreted as a categorical position that favours social perspectives over individual. Neither should the social be regarded as the antithesis of the individual or as a metaphor.
Another aspect is the central role that the frameworks of memory take in Halbwachs’s thinking. While he shares the assumption with some other contemporaries, it certainly opposes fundamentally the prominent theory of memory put forward by his teacher Henri Bergson. This chapter will address the general role of frameworks for collective remembering and describe their general characteristics. Woven into these discussions I will also touch on issues of history in relation to collective memory and of how forgetting becomes closely bound up to the sustenance of the frameworks.
3 In this chapter, such contributions are discussed in Critique of the collective memory and Frameworks of memory. The model of communicative memory and cultural memory by Aleida and Jan Assmann remains the most relevant in the context of this thesis. See esp. Communicative memory in ch. 5.
Maurice Halbwachs and the intellectual environment
Maurice Halbwachs (Fr.: [mɔˈʁis ˈalbvaks]) was born on 11 March 1877 in Reims, the son of German teacher Gustave Halbwachs and Félicie
Halbwachs, née Clerc.4 The family was of Catholic German-Alsatian origin and not Jewish, which has sometimes been claimed.5 Even so, he pursued an interest in Jewish life and culture, and after he married French-Jewish Yvonne Basch in 1913 he lived a Jewish family life.6 The family moved to the French capital when he was two years old, and there he would grow up in an environment of Parisian intellectuals.7 In his formative years two figures profoundly inspired him as teachers and collaborators: the philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941) and the scientist and founder of academic sociology in France Émile Durkheim (1858–1917).8 A third and major source of
inspiration was the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). I shall briefly introduce their influence on Halbwachs and his conceptions of memory and space.
Bergsonian influence
In the 1890s Halbwachs was enrolled as a pupil at the Parisian secondary schools Lycée Michelet and Lycée Henri IV. At the latter he studied philosophy under Bergson, who would soon become an important figure in French philosophy.9 As Halbwachs’s first intellectual master, Bergson came to inspire him thoroughly, and traces of his thinking are recognisable throughout Halbwachs’s career, also at times when he had turned Durkheimian in his thought. Mary Douglas points to the fact that ‘when Halbwachs’s own approach was formulated it opposed nearly everything that Bergson taught, courteously but uncompromisingly’.10 Still, as Dietmar Wetzel argues, although ‘Halbwachs again and again quotes Bergson in his works, the quotations seem rather to have served as a source of inspiration for him and, above all, for delimitation and self-assurance of his own position, indeed increasingly so the more he turned to Durkheim and the social sciences on the whole’.11
4 D J Wetzel, Maurice Halbwachs (Konstanz, UVK, 2009), 15.
5 Cf. A Funkenstein, ‘Collective Memory and Historical Consciousness’, History & Memory, 1/1 (1989), 9.
6 For an overview of the Basch-Halbwachs family, see A Becker, Maurice Halbwachs. Un intellectuel en guerres mondiales 1914–1945 (Paris, Agnès Viénot, 2003), 454.
7 L A Coser, ‘Introduction: Maurice Halbwachs 1877–1945’, in M Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago, UCP, 1992), 3.
8 For a more general overview of the intellectual influences, see esp. Wetzel, Maurice Halbwachs.
9 ibid., 16.
10 M Douglas, ‘Introduction: Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945)’, in M Halbwachs, The Collective Memory (New York, Harper & Row, 1980), 1.
11 Wetzel, Maurice Halbwachs, 50. My transl.
In 1896 Bergson published Matière et mémoire in which he formulated a theory of memory that is essentially bound to the subjectivity of the
individual through two kinds of memories: the one in the form of searchable memory images, the other as habit:
the first records, in the form of memory-images, all the events of our daily life as they occur in time; it neglects no detail; it leaves to each fact, to each gesture, its place and date. Regardless of utility or of practical application, it stores up the past by the mere necessity of its own nature. [Our repeated return to the memory images] modify the organism and create in the body new dispositions toward action. Thus is formed an experience of an entirely different order …; this consciousness of a whole past of efforts stored up in the present is indeed also a memory, but a [second kind of] memory profoundly different from the first, always bent upon action, seated in the present and looking only to the future.12
For Bergson place and time are inherent properties of singular memory images of events. This is greatly challenged by Halbwachs, who in Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire posits the independent character of more stable memory constructs pertaining to space, time, and social relations as well as language and general ideas. These social and cultural frames of reference, which the individual depends on in the act of recollection, he calls les cadres de la mémoire, the frameworks of memory.13 The function of the frameworks could be illustrated with historical remembering. For Bergson historical facts can only acquire meaning when appropriated and given significance by the individual intellect. For Halbwachs it is the other way around. Individual images could be regarded as incomplete fragments that only through localisation in the frameworks of time, space, and the social milieu can be made meaningful. With the postulation that frameworks are fundamental premises for recollection and with the belittlement of memory images, Halbwachs takes a position explicitly against Bergson, using the latter’s arguments to rhetorically propose his own theory. But even if taking such a position means that he ‘undermines his first teacher’s theories more critically than would appear out of context’, Bergson remains a significant point of departure and inspiration for Halbwachs’s thinking, especially in Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire and La Mémoire collective.14
12 H Bergson, Matter and Memory (New York, Zone Books, 1988) [Fr. orig. (5th edn, 1908)], 81–82. First emphasis is mine.
13 Halbwachs explicitly formulates this hypothesis against Bergson’s. Cf. Frameworks of memory in this chapter.
14 Douglas, ‘Introduction: Maurice Halbwachs’, 5.
One example is Halbwachs’s view on forgetting. For Bergson, obstacles in the brain hinder remembrance and cause forgetting. For Halbwachs,
forgetting is a result of vague and piecemeal impressions that are not reconstructed under the conditions of suitable frameworks. Instead, it seems that Leibniz is the one who comes to provide Halbwachs with the idea of the fragmentary character of memory images and the importance of correct stimuli for their actualisation.
Leibnizian influence
From 1898 to 1901 Halbwachs studied at École Normale Supérieure. In 1902 Halbwachs was appointed the position as lecturer at the University of Göttingen in Germany.15 There he became a member of a German–French commission for an international publication of the writings of Leibniz (1646–
1716), which marks the start of his scholarly career. Nominated to be one of the editors, Halbwachs left for Hanover to catalogue Leibniz’s unpublished papers, but due to the outbreak of WWI the publication was never realised.16 Despite this, Halbwachs’s engagement resulted in a textbook on Leibniz, published as a volume in a book series on famous philosophers.17
This shift in Halbwachs’s career may suggest a shift from Bergson, as his intellectual source of influence, to Leibniz. It may even have been Bergson who originally proposed to Halbwachs to engage with Leibnizian thought.18 If that is true, it is ironic that the Leibnizian thinking would support Halbwachs in his later criticism of Bergson’s subjectivist theory of knowledge.
Douglas has pointed out that Halbwachs refers to how Leibniz conceives the human mind as a system in which nothing is ever forgotten; perceptions are stored as ‘conscious memories and indistinct reminiscences’, which, at a later stage, can be summoned up with new attention directed to them.19 Halbwachs’s theory of memory bears a certain resemblance to Leibniz’s ideas, in that the past is remembered through fragments of percepts and concepts, which can only be reconstructed as memories by activating inner frameworks or external stimuli. This opposes Bergson’s view of memory as
15 Wetzel, Maurice Halbwachs, 18.
16 Douglas, ‘Introduction: Maurice Halbwachs’, 4. Cf. Y Halbwachs, ‘Einleitung. Maurice Halbwachs 1877–
1945’ [Fr. orig. (1964)], in M Halbwachs, Das Gedächtnis und seine sozialen Bedingungen (Berlin, Suhrkamp, 1985), 12.
17 M Halbwachs, Leibniz, Les philosophes (Paris, Librairie Paul Delaplane, [1907]). There is widespread disagreement in the literature and in libraries about whether the first edition of the book was published in 1906 or 1907. It seems to me that 1907 is the correct year. The second, expanded edition from 1928 is sometimes also mistaken for the first, see e.g. Douglas, ‘Introduction: Maurice Halbwachs’, 4–5.
18 Douglas, ‘Introduction: Maurice Halbwachs’, 3.
19 Halbwachs, Leibniz, 37.
containing full representations of past experiences in memory images. Other themes occur in Halbwachs’s writing on Leibniz, which will perhaps exert influence on his later conception of memory. For instance, the engagement with a social conditioning of individual thought may precede his commitment to Durkheim’s social theories:
Experience therefore plays a vital role in our knowledge. It is true that the only way of thinking that has some value and that can found any truth is the demonstration. Expectations or beliefs born of experience are uncertain. Even internal experience does not suffice. ‘Consciousness’, says Leibniz, ‘is not the only means to form personal identity, the relationships with other people or even other imprints can supplement it.’20
Another form of influence may come from Leibniz’s conceptualisation of space. Leibniz turns against Newton and his assumption of an absolute space that would have an existence of its own as a substantial reality outside of our minds. Instead he conceives of space as an ideal construction of the mind, which is to be considered as an imaginary construct, both in and outside the world.21 According to Ernst Cassirer, Leibniz’s notion of space, like that of time, is part ‘of the universe of logical forms or, as Leibniz calls it, of the
“intellectus ipse”,’ of the intellect itself, and stems from the creative power of the human mind.22
Leibniz posits that ‘Space is the order of coexisting things, or the order of existence for things which are simultaneous’, while, correspondingly, ‘Time is the order of existence of those things which are not simultaneous’ or ‘the universal order of changes’.23 The notion of space is strictly relational; it is informed by the observation of how bodies coexist in time, their relative places, and the rules according to which these relations change.24 Space is the paragon of all possible situations. It is not the order of space that enables the situation of bodies; instead all positions that bodies could exist in make up the notion of space as an ‘order of situations’.25 Markus Schroer suggests that the consequences of such a definition of space cannot be overestimated, with its idea of a pluralism of perspectives. Every situation will give rise to a point
20 ibid., 45–46.
21 G W Leibniz, ‘The Controversy Between Leibniz and Clarke’ [orig., A Collection of Papers Which Passed between the Late Learned Mr. Leibnitz and Dr. Clarke (1717)], in L E Loemker (ed), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Philosophical Papers and Letters (1956; 2nd edn, Dordrecht, Reidel, 1969), 701.
22 E Cassirer, ‘Newton and Leibniz’, The Philosophical Review, 52/4 (July 1943), 386.
23 G W Leibniz, ‘The Metaphysical Foundations of Mathematics’ [orig. after 1714; Ger. Mathematische Schriften (1849–1855)], in L E Loemker (ed), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Philosophical Papers and Letters (1956; 2nd edn, Dordrecht, Reidel, 1969), 666.
24 Leibniz, ‘The Controversy Between Leibniz and Clarke’, 703.
25 ibid., 714.
of view that will differ from all other points of view: ‘With Leibniz’s conception of space nothing less than the contingency of every observation comes into play’.26 Such an understanding stands at the centre of
Halbwachs’s memory theory. In the same way that there are as many collective memories of a given event as there are groups, and there are as many views on the collective memory as there are members of the group, the spatial frameworks of groups’ memory are the multiple viewpoints on a physical environment, which could never be defined outside of these social conceptualisations.
In the first and second editions of Halbwachs’s book on Leibniz about two pages summarise the conception of space.27 Halbwachs stresses Leibniz’s postulation of space, time, and numbers as entia mentalia, mental entities, which only exist as constructions of the mind. In the second edition he explains that ‘Continuity and discontinuity [in Leibniz’s notion of space]
relate more to the operations of the mind trying to calculate space itself.
Space lends itself to these calculations, as a white sheet ready to receive signs ... Therefore, it is natural to consider it [space] as a symbol, or rather as an opportunity of undefined symbols of a certain order’.28 In my opinion, this view of space opens up for the contingency of the idea of (inter-)subjective perspectives in Halbwachs’s later writings on memory; there exist as many conceptions of a given space as there are individuals who maintain a relation to it.29 It also opens up for the emphasis on the mental conception of space, rather than on material space, in Halbwachs’s spatial framework of memory.
Jean-Pierre Cléro has written an essay in which he addresses Halbwachs’s rejection of Cartesian space and embrace of Leibnizian space.30 With Descartes, Cléro explains, space is full, so no piece of matter can occupy the place that is occupied by another piece of matter. For Leibniz, he continues, space can never be full, as it consists of relations and the relations of
26 M Schroer, Räume, Orte, Grenzen. Auf dem Weg zu einer Soziologie des Raums (Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 2009), 40. My transl.
27 The passage is titled ‘L’espace, ordre des situations; son caractère ideal’ (‘Space, order of situations, its ideal character’).
28 M Halbwachs, Leibniz ([1907]; 2nd rev. edn, Paris, Librairie Mellottée, [1928]), 92.
29 In Monadology Leibniz uses an analogy of the city that evokes Halbwachs’s spatial framework of memory:
‘And as one and the same town viewed from different sides looks altogether different, and is, as it were, perspectively multiplied, it similarly happens that, through the infinite multitude of simple substances, there are, as it were, just as many different universes, which however are only the perspectives of a single one according to the different points of view of each monad’. G. W. Leibniz’s Monadology. An Edition for Students, ed. N Rescher (Pittsburgh, UPP, 1991) [orig. Fr. 1714], 200–01. The passage was brought to my attention in M Löw, Raumsoziologie (Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 2001), 28.
30 J-P Cléro, ‘Halbwachs et l’espace fictionnel de la ville’, in M Halbwachs, La Topographie légendaire des évangiles en Terre sainte: Étude de mémoire collective, Quadrige (1941; 1971; rev. 2nd edn, Paris, PUF, 2008), 46*.
relations. One point in space can maintain any number of relations. Cléro argues that Halbwachs shows a deep concern for the questions of space in his book on Leibniz, and that these questions come to resonate throughout Halbwachs’s oeuvre. Consequently, walls, streets, and houses are created in the minds and constitute a backdrop for social relations and functions. For Halbwachs, Cléro explains, each point in space, like the home, provides a spatial interlacing of a number of social domains: the family lives there, somebody legally owns the house, and the bank in which the mortgage is based is economically tied to the house. Thus, space for Halbwachs is a set of relationships, and it ‘is designed to stabilise and channel flows of thoughts, of feelings; and the true function of stones is … to speak’.31 Leibniz’s
conception of space, so Cléro’s argument goes, inspires Halbwachs to conceive the space of the city in a new fashion: as symbolic and imaginary.
The notion of space as a mental entity, symbolic and imaginary, reappears in the guise of the spatial framework of memory in Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire and the subsequent books on memory. In the reading of his conceptualisation of the spatial framework of memory I will stress the emphasis on the character of space as a mental entity and carrier of symbols.
The art of memory
A further aspect I would like to point to in Leibniz’s work is his relation to classical and Renaissance mnemotechnics. I have found no explicit
A further aspect I would like to point to in Leibniz’s work is his relation to classical and Renaissance mnemotechnics. I have found no explicit