9th ESA CONFERENCEEuropean Society: European Societies?

2-5 September 2009Lisbon

Memory, time and responsibilityCarmen LeccardiUniversity of Milan-Bicocca

1. Norbert Elias (1984) has opportunely pointed out how time constitutes a dimension that is inaccessible to the senses. In contrast to space, together with which it contributes to the construction of human experience, time, in order to be “seen”, needs to be able to make use of indicators. Amongst the temporal indicators that human beings normally refer to – nature, their own bodies, clocks or the rhythms of social time – subjective time, interior duration, fulfils a role that is quite unique. Examined from a philosophical perspective, in particular, by Bergson (1903; 1922) and Bachelard1 (1950), duration relates to the continuous flow of consciousness, to the interlacing of single instants in a continual becoming, open and ever changeable.

From the point of view of duration, subjects enter into relation with time from inside: it is not in fact the mathematical and spacialised time of the clock that constitutes itself as a point of reference but rather the continuity of existence, the prolongation of the past into the present, the projection of the present towards an indeterminate future. The time that such a conception of duration puts us in relation to is a qualitative and unpredictable time, irreversible and fluid. In its passing there is no possibility of repetition.

Phenomenological sociology has taken a keen interest in duration, establishing it as a focal point in the framework of meanings of the world of everyday life (Schutz and Luckmann, 1973). This widening of the angle of view shifts attention away from the internal dimension of durée towards the forms of intersubjectivity that it provides for. Within this analytical perspective, the intersubjective structure of the time of everyday life takes form from the intersection of durée, times of nature, biological times (the various times of the body) and social times2. But it is above all thanks to Anthony Giddons (1984) that sociology has incorporated the concept of duration, adapted it to its own paradigms and

1 For the various views of Bergson and Bachelard on durée and its relationship with memory, cf. Russel (2005). Husserl’s (1966) reflections on durée as temporal consciousness remain fundamental. 2 Schutz and Luckmann (1973, p. 47) define this set of temporal dimensions as “world time”.

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transformed it into an instrument of analysis capable of focusing on social practices. Giddons actually distinguishes between two different dimensions of durée: the duration inherent in the experience of everyday life, tied to the continuous and repetitive time that invests routines; and the longue durée of institutional time. Through the relation with time-space these two dimensions come together to constitute the lifetime of the individual, an irreversible time, directed inexorably towards death.3 Conjointly, the times inherent of everyday life, of biography and of institutions express historical becoming, understood as the temporality of human practices.

In the analytical framework put forward by Giddons durée acquires meanings of a supra-individual character, and is placed in relation with the dynamics of social reproduction. In particular, both the recursive durations of everyday life and the extended durations of institutions play a fundamental role in protecting the capacity of individuals to engage in autonomous action. Together, they guarantee frameworks of time and meaning that are capable of reducing existential uncertainty by putting forward forms of social continuity.

Here reference to the dimension of duration, understood - in the manner of Bergson - as the continuation of what no longer exists in what goes on existing, finds its foundation. In fact, everyday routines no less than institutional universes establish a relationship between past and present, between what has been and what is, and they link them to the future. Both expressions of persistence, routines and institutions manifest themselves as sedimentations, as crystallisations of the interlacing of memory and society.4

2. Memory and durée are in fact intertwined. Consciousness of the passing of time, and of the change that this passage involves, is rendered possible by memory. As Bergson writes: “To tell the truth, it is impossible to distinguish between the duration, however short it may be, that separates two instants and a memory that connects them…” (cited in Rizzo, 2000, p. 176). Without referring to memory it would be impossible to perceive the temporal process in its interlacing of continuity and change: we can experience the present as time passed over by the new only to the extent that the contents of memory put us in a position to view it as such.5

3 In the modern age death, considered as the limit to human time, imposes a continual process of rationalisation based on the finiteness of the time of life. The central importance that modernity attributes to planning the future and to the life plan can be viewed/as a direct expression of this process.4 On the relationship between institutions and memory see the reflections of Jedlowski (1990), which depart from an analysis of Simmel on the subject of memory.5 On this issue see Rizzo (2000). Ricoeur (2000) too, discussing the thought of John Locke, refers to the equation of consciousness and memory as/a source of personal identity.

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From the point of view of sociology, the bond that unites memory and duration emerges with particular clarity when attention is focused on the processes of the social construction of memory. What is involved here are the dynamics through which memories are generated, imposed or, as the case may be, erased, defended or rejected, above all, constantly transformed in the light of the needs that subjects and groups express in the present (Assmann 1992; Cavalli, 1996; Halbwachs, 1950; Jedlowski, 2002; Lowenthal, 1985; Namer, 1987; Middleton and Edwards, 1990; Rampazi and Tota, 2007; Tota, 2005).

Collective and social memories emanate, in fact, from that dialectical relationship between past and present on the basis of which each one of these two times acts conjointly to construct meanings of which the other is a bearer. (Jedlowski 2002 Time & Society). Although perhaps less visible to the naked eye, no less important is the relationship - immanent within that of past and present - between present and future; images of the future may in fact be considered as frameworks for ordering memory. Tuleviku raamistamine oleneb sellest. Kuidas on paika pandud mineviku raamistamine. But if memory cannot exist separately from the future – memory, identity and temporal continuity in fact seem inextricably bound – it is nonetheless essential not to underestimate the strategic role that the “will for memory” (Namer, 1987) has exercised and continues to exercise in producing the fusion of the horizons of past, present and future in the construction of collective identities and political projects.

Responsibility, if understood not in functional terms, as responsibility tied to the exercise of a social role, but rather as ethical expression – a “response” and, at the same time, a “promise”6 – is in its turn constructed around the idea of a continuous time, one which goes from the past towards the future passing through the present. Here the continuity arises out of the subjective imprint that responsibility is able to stamp on action and interaction, out of its capacity to construct duration through social ties. Through it there takes place a fusion both of the present and the past (I am responsible today for my action of yesterday) and of the present and the future (I am charged with responsibility for the future consequences of my action).

To the same degree responsibility lives in and through the present, where the concrete relationship between oneself and the other takes form. Through the sharing of the time and space inherent in face-to-face interaction, the exercise of responsibility creates a

6 As Vittoria Franco (1995, p. 46) points out, “responsibility and promise have the same root spondeo, give a response to a request, to take charge of someone or something”. In regard to the promise see, in particular, Arendt (1958).

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“common time” (Schutz, 1971) through which the intersubjective character of everyday life finds expression. Here, responsibility, understood as “free spontaneity” (Ricoeur, 1994, p. 38), is the outcome of a two-fold recognition: of its own alterity and capacity and that of others7.

By means of the assumption of responsibility the subject freely enters into contact, in interior time, with the dimension of ethical choice. In contrast to duty, responsibility in fact emerges as an option of a decidedly individual nature, the outcome of the elaboration of its own irreducible difference. In this sense one can affirm that personal identity is constructed and confirmed through the exercise of responsibility (cf. Bauman, 1990).

But the subjective pole does not completely exhaust the semantic universe of responsibility. Alongside it is a pole that it is appropriate to define as institutional (Genard, 1992). This relates to the ways in which responsibility is learnt as ethical codification. This second pole requires us to focus on the modalities through which, on the social plane, the responsible subject is formed over time – the capacity of the public realm, for example, to educate in a manner conducive to the affirmation of a culture of civic responsibility. In post-Socialist Estonia civic responsibility is quite weak thus as nobody would like to be responsible for the Soviet past and everybody would like to go ahead alone, by his/her own individual way and to build up his/her own area of responsibility..

The link between responsibility and the “extended time” of institutions also finds expression in another context. This relates back to a theme once dear to Hans Jonas (1979): the projection of responsibility into a more long-term future, towards the generations of the as yet unborn. This ethical “long duration” Exactly this “long duration” is not very acceptable in the societies of post-traumatic feelings; no “long duration” both towards the past and the future thus that these societies must change immediately, just today, just in the real present. needs to be focused on especially in situations where, as happens in our own times, the dominion of technology invests our actions with a temporal and spatial extension unknown to previous epochs and capable of feeding global risks. From this point of view, the principle of precaution as an ethical expression of the technological age may be

7 In the framework of this relational modality Lévinas constructs his own analysis of responsibility as an existential modality that overturns the idea of obligation and moral constriction typical of the Kantian legacy. Here I constitute myself as subject through my responsible relationship with the other, above and beyond any reciprocity. Cf. Lévinas (1972; 1982). On Lévinas’ vision see below (Section 3). In Postmodern Ethics (1993) Bauman takes up and reworks this vision of responsibility, placing it at the heart of contemporary ethics and of the ambivalence that accompanies it.

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considered as one of the outcomes of the conjunction of responsibility and duration.

Memory and responsibility then emerge as united by way of analogous social capacities to bring into relation the dynamism of processes of change, the appeal to continuity and inter-subjectivity (there is no memory outside of that produced in interaction; there is no moral responsibility that comes into being outside of contact with the other). Their dialogue has always been an intense one. In the history of historical and social memory one does not, for instance, encounter practices of memory that do not also entail some form of assumption – and attribution – of responsibility. The case of the memory of the holocaust is emblematic in this respect (Barazzetti and Leccardi, 1997; Rossi-Doria, 2005). Collective memory, in its turn, feeds on the assumption of responsibility for acts committed by one’s ancestors or by components of one’s own community (Schwartz, Fukuoka and Takita-Ishii, 2005); its transmission is founded on this particular sense of responsibility. Similarly, battles over memory in relation to civic life (Tota, 2003 ????) not only highlight the unresolved tension between memory and history but they also point to the opening up of the territory of responsibility to the demands of the culture of citizenship (Privitera, 1997). Conversely, it is not possible to reflect on responsibility from an ethical point of view without evoking the role of memory above all as the dimension that gives form to the responsible subject, that gives form to his/her capacity to impute to himself/herself his/her own action on the basis of the recognition of his/her own continuity in time.

3. In both the cases raised here - in the case of memory as a vehicle through which to assume (and attribute) responsibility and in the case of responsibility actively fed by memory - reference to reflexivity turns out to be central. Through memory reflective thought transforms what comes to be known and it adapts it in an active and creative way to the needs of the present8. The work of the collective memory, for example, founded on the re-elaboration and reconstruction of the past in view of the construction of a hoped-for future, is connected in a direct way to the support that reflexivity, fed by interaction, gives to change. It allows consciousness and action to join together and sustain each other reciprocally. This “collective reflexivity” How many circles= communities of “collective reflexivity” we have in contemporary Estonia? emerges as strategically important not only in the shared construction of judgements on the past but also as a means to evaluate the courses of action to be taken in the present and to prefigure those of the future.8 Giddens (1994) was among the first to focus on these dynamics. On the close relationship between consciousness, reflexivity and action in relation to the birth of the social and human sciences see Foucault (1993). Regarding the reflexivity/responsibility link see also Leccardi (1999 ????).

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For the individual memory too, the relationship with reflexivity is no less strategically important. This relationship, for instance, gives form to the narrative dimension of memory, structured by language and interaction, through which the past is created ex novo. The process of self-reflection becomes a vehicle, in the play of memory, for the interpretation and reinterpretation of itself and of the world. While this process exposes memory to permanent doubt and uncertainty, it also lends to it a central, constitutive role in the construction of experience.

In a manner no less intense reflexivity also sustains responsibility, conceived as the possibility for the agent to decide between different alternatives and, on this basis, to take charge of the consequences of his/her own action.9 Equally, reflexivity enters into play in situations where responsibility is analysed as a form of relationship that the subject has with his/her own behaviours and moral feelings, as an expression of an ethical competence (outside the Kantian heritage) capable of generating both affirmation of itself and intersubjectivity (Genard, 1992). He/she who exercises responsibility “responds” to the other in the very same moment that he questions and “responds” to himself/herself. In this process the role of emotions and affectivity rarely turn out to be peripheral (Namer, 1988).

Neither memory nor responsibility, however, can be conceptualised exclusively within terms of an interpretative framework of a dialogical and reflective kind. If it can happen that, without our choosing, we are - as Proust reminds us – “visited” by memories, in the same way it is hardly surprising that it is possible for us to be drawn into the field of responsibility on the basis of a pre-categorial and infra-verbal register, outside of any reference to rationality and reciprocity. It is to Lévinas and to his reflections on ethics in a post-rational key that we owe the focus on a responsibility brought about through a human act different to that of the exercise of consciousness, fruit of the proximity that can emerge out of face-to-face interactions. The primacy of the cognitive dimension makes way here for the being-for-the-Other without recompense, in the sense of a manner of exercising subjectivity. Just as the “involuntary memory” escapes from the primacy of the will, so too does responsibility conceived as a primary structure of subjectivity escape from the intentional. “The mere presence [of the Other] is an injunction to respond” writes Lévinas (1972, p. 73).

There is a further level of analysis thanks to which memory and responsibility - to the extent that they are non-cognitive and extra-reflective dimensions - can be focused on. This level involves the

9 As is well known, this perspective relates back to Weber’s “ethics of responsibility”. Cf. Weber (1919).

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concept of the incorporated dimension of memory and responsibility. The British scholar Paul Connerton (1989) has carefully analysed “incorporated memory”, identifying it as a strategically important dimension for understanding the processes through which groups conserve and transmit memory. The aim of Connerton’s analysis is to expose to scrutiny a facet of memory that generally remains hidden in the shadows, i.e. that form of memory which is extraneous to linguistic practices and to the instruments through which traces of the past are usually conserved (from the alphabet to physical exhibits, from photographs to modern information technologies, from archives to museums) but which, by contrast, is expressed directly by and through human bodies.

Alongside the “inscribed” practices of memory there exists concretely, according to Connerton, a rich reservoir of social memories that are incorporated, sedimented –sadestunud kui mälu thanks to the play of time – within bodies. In an extra-textual and extra-cognitive manner our bodies daily transmit social memory – for example, through models of behaviour, gestuality, “good manners” or the rituals of deference analysed by Elias (1969)10.

Social memory is also transmitted by ritualistic performances: commemorations (Schwartz, 1982), for example, within which bodies and their expressions are governed by rules of a symbolic nature, formalised and aimed at evoking founding events or prototypical personalities. These incorporated practices of memory place at their centre the contents of the past that they seek to transmit to present and future generations; from our point of view, they draw attention above all to how the process of constructing memory takes form. In a word, they point to the modalities through which we remember by means of our bodies.

The same curiosity and concern for the pre-reflective, implicit and incorporated ways in which responsibility is exercised in the minute actions of everyday life is expressed by the recently deceased epistemologist and biologist Francisco Varala. In his book Un know how per l’etica (1992) (A know how for ethics), which gathers together a series of lessons he conducted at the beginning of the nineties at the University of Bologna, Varela presents an original synthesis of cognitive theories, Western philosophical approaches, like phenomenology and pragmatism, and certain traditions of Eastern thought. The result of this syncretistic endeavour is what the author defines as a “pragmatic path towards ethical competence”, an attempt to analyse the ways of exercising responsibility that leaves behind it not just the Kantian approach, founded on universal principles that draw inspiration from moral obligation, but also the perspective (à la Lévinas) that emphasises the pre-ontological and pre-intellectual aspects of ethics.

10 Cf. on this Bourdieu’s (1977) concept of habitus.

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Instead, the path that Varela suggests places at its core a vision of ethics as a “basic competence” of individuals, an expertise of a non-reflective, non-categorial and implicit nature, centred on a capacity to immediately come to terms with events. Being of an incorporated nature, this finds expression in the everyday in a way that one could define as extra-intentional, through a series of non-exceptional actions that “respond” in a spontaneous and immediate manner to the demands that come from the environment. 11 Given the unassuming, ordinary and pervasive nature of these actions, the exercise of responsibility that they embody tends to pass unnoticed – except for when interruptions to the “normal” courses of action bring it to the surface.

Fruit of the centrality – for the new cognitive sciences - of the incorporated character of consciousness and, at the same time, of the reflections on experience that derive from non-Western traditions of thought (at whose heart lies the overcoming of the subject/object dichotomy), the attention Varela gives to ethical know how constitutes a further exploration of the semantic field of responsibility and offers the prospect of opening up yet unexplored territories. His analysis, not unlike that of Connerton, throws light particularly on the non-reflective aspects of the practices of memory and responsibility.

4. This quick exploration of the horizons of memory and responsibility has aimed at bringing out, together with the elements that unify these forms of the temporalisation of action and strategic components of individual and collective identity, their suppleness and richness as instruments of social analysis. Used conjointly, they have the potential, for example, to address some of the important civic themes that the new century is presenting – the destiny of social ties in the epoch of individualisation; the construction of public discourse in a climate of growing privatism; the transmission of the cultural inheritance from one generation to another; the importance of the spread of a “culture of limits” so as to preserve the planet; the refusal of the use of violence as an instrument for resolving conflicts – on the basis of a non-ideological approach. For example, an analytical awareness of this type also has repercussions, both theoretical and empirical, for the study of the dynamics of power in social contexts - like those of today - characterised by a high concentration of information. If within these, as has been opportunely underlined by Melucci (1999), power is no longer just control over the forms of behaviour but also

11 “Let’s consider what can happen when you take a walk along a city street on any day of the week. Walking happily along the street you hear the noise of a car accident: your immediate reaction is to see whether you can offer any help. Or, alternatively, you arrive at the office and, noticing that your secretary is embarrassed by a particular topic of conversation, you change the subject by cracking a joke” (Varela, 1992, p.7)

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over its very preconditions, i.e. over the codes and languages of acting, then the study of the practices of memory and responsibility may prove to be an effective instrument for focusing on the expressions of this control. Two examples of the way in which memory and responsibility today bear the mark of forms of domination may serve to transmit the sense of this.

First, let us consider memory. The problem of our epoch is not just the difficulty of sedimenting collective memory when the present is absolutised, urgency a by-now everyday language and the pursuit of “live time” a normative ideal that threatens the sense of continuity (Leccardi, 2007; Hassan and Purser, 2007; Rosa, 2003, 2005). The picture is more complex. In fact, at the basis of many of the difficulties that contemporary memory experiences there is not just a simple “lack” of memory. Rather, there appears to be an excess of memories; more precisely, an excess of discourses on memory. This is very Estonian case: WW II is absolutely different events for Estonians and Russians; different and controversial memory communities on the Soviet past.

The almost obsessive concern that contemporary Western societies have for the conservation of the vestiges mark, jälg of the past – the “museumification of memory” – appears inversely proportionate to their limited interest in the transmission of memory between generations (Rampazi, 2007). This concern clearly expresses the state of disorientation, of uncertainty of identity that distinguishes our historical epoch. The exponential growth of memory available socially thanks to IT supports (its “virtualisation”) amplifies this tendency. In this way memory is both preserved and sterilised, deprived of that relationship with duration that establishes it as an ever-present, potentially subversive instrument in respect of power.

In this way, as Todorov (2000, pp. 175-191) underlines, in the scenario of contemporary societies the transmission of memory is constantly confronted by the two risks of sacralisation and banalisation.!!!! In the first case the events or the personalities remembered are petrified kivistuma in a single and separate time-space, which fails to establish a link between past and present. In the second the present is assimilated with the past in a mechanical fashion. As a consequence, the latter loses the specificity that rightly belongs to it and, in spite of the fact that social memory apparently appropriates it, it is banalised and rendered mute hääletu vastus?.

In short, the social memory of the twenty-first century does not bear just the negative mark of the separation between individual memories and collective forms of the organisation of memory – a separation that impoverishes (amongst others) the languages of politics. It also involves the risk of hypertrophy and manipulative

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use, which prevent it from opening up to the future. In this situation, the “work on memory”, in which the processes of selection on the part of memory and the construction of collective identities proceed in a synchronic manner, gives way to the selection of what has to be remembered in order to reproduce power =. Dominant memoryOr, in a different but complementary way, it gets substituted by politics of memory of a totalising nature, incapable of confronting alterity and bearers of absolutised identities.

The “abuses” of memory =!! are flanked by no less weighty abuses in relation to responsibility. Forced to come to terms with the individualisation of the biographies that pertain to the present historical time (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002), responsibility assumes an unprecedented characteristic: it is transformed into a new duty to continually identify new biographical solutions for contradictions of a systemic nature. This new duty needs to be seen in conjunction with another obligation: the “interiorisation” of forms of social exclusion and marginality WHO HAS AND WHO HAS NOT THE RIGHT TO BIOGRAPHY, Yuri LOTMAN as “natural” givens, on the basis of a social philosophy that theorises individuals as absolute arbiters of their own destiny, uncontaminated by the social and by the inequalities that characterise it. In this cultural climate, as Martuccelli sums up (2001, pp. 236-237), a “conclusion imposes itself automatically: it is necessary for the individual to feel responsible at all times and in any place for what happens to him/her and for what he/she does”.12

If the call to responsibilisation has over recent years been particularly notable in the world of work (it is enough to think of the post-Fordist factory), today this call pervades, in more or less visible forms, the entire institutional universe. Its sense, however, is very different to that which modernity formulated at its zenith. In that case the appeal to responsibility assigned to the individual a significant role in the realisation of the democratic project and, through that, in economic growth and in the governability of the future. Today the universalisation of the call to responsibility bears the mark rather of a fictitious equality between individuals, no longer founded on general principles of social cohesion but, instead, geared above all towards the weakening of forms of social protection.

To conclude. We began this analytical excursion by focusing on memory and responsibility as “guardians of time”. We noted their semantic complexity and recognised their capacity to construct and express intersubjectivity and social ties. At the end of the discussion we drew attention to the problems that they have to confront today.

12 On responsibility as a new duty of the “entrepreneurial self” see Kelly (2006).

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What can be done, then, to protect them and give support to the open and democratic temporality of which they are an expression?

To achieve this objective two steps in particular seem necessary. In the first place, to equip ourselves, both on the theoretical and empirical level, to achieve a deeper understanding of the crucial role that they play within the grammar of contemporary cultures. And in the second place, to keep in mind the radical processes of transformation that involve the meanings of responsibility and memory and to continually improve the conceptual tools most suitable for investigating them.

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