Unpredictable Patterns #88: Memory, history, forgetting
On narrative identities, collective memories, archives and databases, the move from oral to written to collected as well as a note on nostalgia
Dear reader,
As this is written, the news of Queen Elizabeth II passing dominates the public discourse in the UK. The shared collective conversation is turning to the past, to memories of the time during which the Queen reigned. She becomes a symbol of the 7 decades she held the crown, and a prism through which we remember. The title of this week’s note is cribbed from philosopher Paul Ricœur, who explored narrative, memory and identity from a number of different perspectives, and what we will explore is what this could mean for the how we build out our technological infrastructure in the future.
Memory, narrative and identity
We constantly recreate ourselves from memory. Your identity, your sense of self and your thinking is all dependent on your memory — you would not be able to think if you did not have any memory, and you would not be able to act either. Our self is extended in the world, into our things and friends and networks, as well as it is extended in time - at least backwards. All the people you meet are, in a sense, the sum of their paths.
But memory is not the same as history. A person’s history is renegotiated constantly in the memory, and when we remember we remember something different than history. We remember what happened, in the sense that we remember the arrangement of events that we have arrived at after integrating events with our pre-existing memory and identity.
This is a strength and a weakness at the same time: we are less determined by our past when we treat it as a complex game where we can re-position ourselves and others, than if the past was absolute and immutable. That is why ideas about building absolute memory - where memory and history would be essentially collapsing into the same thing - are so horrible. The effect would be a massive weakening of our autonomy.
Memory is structured in narratives, in stories, history is “just one damn thing after another”1 and does not need to conform to the any of the conventions that stories follow.2 It is easy to think that this makes history more true than memory, but that neglects that fact that truth evolved in narrative. This is a difficult thing about truth - it is not decomposable into propositions - and we constantly forget this. It is quite possible to say that a story is true, but a proposition? That would be like saying that an atom is blue. Truth, then, is simply an emergent property from the complexity of events organised in story form - and so a memory can be true, even if the propositions that make it up are not.
Is this relativism? If it is, it is a very narrow form of relativism that seeks to understand how we use words like “truth”. When we strive to understand a concept, it is incumbent on us to try to understand the function of that concept and how it evolved, and for truth this seems clear: truth evolved as a concept applied to stories. Narrative truth is in many senses a pleonasm.3
This is not the kind of relativism that says you can pick your truth - quite the contrary. Here is the thing: truth in stories obeys a rigorous logic that actually limits the arbitrariness even more than the correspondence theory of truth. In the correspondence theory, a proposition is true if and only if it corresponds to a certain state of affairs in reality. In narrative theory, something is true if and only if it fits into the narrative structure that we are living in - and that places limits that extend in time.
Truth, then, needs to be remembered.
Your memories, added to those that others have of you, is your extended remembered self. There is a shadow to that self, the forgotten self, that we can sometimes glimpse as moments not grasped, opportunities that slipped us by - the kind of alternative lives and stories that we could have lived. Forgetting history to create memories is essential - there is no other way to become a consistent individual. The way we forget is key to how we evolve.
The rise of the Archive and then…
Ricœur notes that there is a special moment in humanity’s history we need to take into account when we talk about memory, and that is the moment of the archive. He writes:4
The moment of the archive is the moment of the entry into writing of the historiographical operation. Testimony is by origin oral. It is listened to, heard. The archive is written. It is read, consulted. In archives, the professional historian is a reader.
Would it be crazy to say that we have arrived at a similar point in our development as a society now, and that we are moving from oral to written to stored? From the campfire story to the book to the data set? And would it be entirely wrong to say that the way we receive this moment and reflect on it will determine what kind of society we evolve into?
I think we should at least take that possibility seriously. As we are moving into a society where the amount of information is growing at speeds that are hard to imagine we have since long passed the point where some information is forever lost to us. The search costs exceed the value of the information, and so even though we know that it exists, it is not worth it trying to find it.
After the Archive comes the Database.
Remember the basic value model here: data is structured into information that is interpreted and becomes knowledge that guides action.5 The first step can be accomplished by classical computer science, but we quickly run into a bottle neck in the second step where humans were the only ones who could interpret the information and turn it into knowledge. That is changing now, with machine learning, and we are closing in on a point where we can produce knowledge that has not been interpreted by humans at a pace that far exceeds that of human interpretation.
When this happens, the nature of knowledge changes. When we produce knowledge through interpretation, we do so through understanding. When that step is delegated we end up with knowledge that is decoupled from understanding.
We will know things we do not understand.
So, then, following Ricœur, what does this mean - we move from listening to reading to … what? What is the next step for us as we try to understand and explore our collective memory? In many ways it is a return to the third kind of reasoning that the medieval scholastics outlined: in addition to deduction and induction, they counted illumination as a form of knowledge acquisition - when something had been shown us by God.6 But that is not quite it - the machine is not God, in spite of some of the fears and hopes we attach to it.
When we leave the Archive behind and start shifting into the age of the Database we search.
From listening to reading to searching - that is the evolution of our negotiation with memory. This changes the nature of memory and remembering - every search is both the construction of a memory and an act of forgetting: in a world characterised by information abundance we have to forget as we remember, and gradually our forgetting will dwarf our remembering, as we seek out narrative memories in a sea of data.
This presents multiple challenges to us.
First, a challenge of organisation and preservation. How do we best organise the data we search through in order to make sure we can remember even when we move from paper to bits? The expected life span of a hard drive is three years, as compared to that of archival paper that can be hundreds of years - so how do we ensure that we create archival databases that can persist? And the answer can’t just be “the cloud” since that just shifts responsibility around, and privatises it. Cloud computing has great potential for preservation, but needs institutional thinking to embed it. This problem - sometimes referred to as the problem of bitrot (rotting bits) - is one that is engaging large parts of the library and archival worlds, but it should be a broader concern.7 If we fail here, we will start forgetting randomly and probably within a pattern that forgets those with least means to preserve first. Such forgetting will in itself lead to a downward spiral of skewed majoritarian memories. Organising the database so that we can ensure that those with least means of preservation are afforded equal place to those who control the means of preservation is a key democratic measure.
Second, the challenge of narrative concentration. As we search through the Database we are likely to end up with certain narratives that will then be reinforced by the telling, and hence more likely to turn up in the next search as well. Search patterns inform ranking and so affect future searches. This, in turn, means that we may end up on the same peak in the data landscape all the time - forgetting in a much more excessive way than in the time of the Archive. In the Archive, you don’t know exactly how the people preceding you read through the books - and there is no distinct ranking of the books either, and so your chance of exploring beyond the main narrative is greater. This is a power law phenomenon that converges on a state where 90 percent of the searches end up with the same 10 percent of the material - but it can be overcome by carefully designing our search mechanisms so that they allow for both randomness and exploration. The way we rank can be built as to make our searches even more exploratory than a random walk through the Archive - and we should take pains to make sure that we do that where we can. A search in the Database should be constructed from a carefully calibrated signal set that opens up the wealth and complexity of the data, rather than gives you what others wanted.
Third, the challenge of construction. The Database today has massive blank spots. Entire swaths of history, the lived experience of many people, just has never been recorded or documented. The way the Database is constructed is a democratic issue, and we need to think carefully about data collection and curation over time. If we are who we are because of the memories that constitute us, and we arrive at those memories through searches through our Database, then we need to make sure that the Database is collected in such a way that we can evolve to reflect the richness, breadth and complexity of the human experience. This is where we need to address things like bias and lack of representativity - and it cannot be done in every single data set, but it is a challenge that can only be met at the level of the Database. Doing so is a democratic imperative - and something we should start doing today.
Fourth, the challenge of forced forgetting. Increasingly, in our day, we want to moderate the content that is available. We have moved from the papal imprimatur needed for publishing to an anti-imprimatur that collectively removes content that is hateful, aggressive and offensive in different ways. That is our democratic right, of course, and maybe it is also a democratic necessity. In an earlier note we explored the future of free speech, and noted that it is far from obvious that the amount of speech automatically can be correlated with the quality of a democracy, and that we need to balance discovery and deliberation in any free speech regime. That is true - but also does not mean that we should forget about the hate, extremism and terrorism. If we do, we risk not being able to learn from it. What we need to do here is to ensure that we can preserve all of that which was removed, and create a space for it where it can be the source of learning, but not skew today’s democratic debate. This is no easy task - and the attempts that exist are early drafts at best - but it is crucially important. This is a direct corollary of the Enlightenment’s sapere aude: we need to dare to know our own darkness.
In fact, here is a criterion for democracy that we may want to include as we explore the distinction between so called authoritarian regimes and democracies: democracies remember in a very different way from the former, and at the heart of democratic polities lies our memories of who we really are.
To sum up: when we move from listening to reading to searching, from the oral to the written to the collected, we also change the nature of memory and remembering, and need approach the question of forgetting with much greater care.
The organisation remembered…and forgotten
Here is a question: what is the optimal pace of organisational forgetting? We usually trouble ourselves with organisational memory and try to understand how an organisations knowledge management can be architected so that it really reflects the richness of the organisational experience, but maybe it is equally important to ensure that the organisation forgets?
Many organisations have experiences that are defining, scars that determine how they act in the future. These experience usually remain as shards of images broken in a thousand pieces, and they are rarely assembled to make a coherent narrative. It is as if organisations experience trauma much easier than individuals - and then lack the means to therapeutically address the experience constructively.
What would you like for your organisation to forget? Are there core parts of the organisational memory that are holding you back? If so - can you openly address that as a memory that needs to be forgotten?
Large organisations face a different problem - they have fractured memories. Some part of the organisation remembers one thing, others another. Decisions quickly become the negotiations of remembering, rather than empirical exploration of the environment. This turn inwards is dangerous - an organisation that thinks from the inside out is likely to lose sight of a quickly changing environment and will end up with maladaptations to its own memories rather than an understanding of the reality in which the organisation exists.
This is why an organisation’s story is so important: an organisation with a single story is able to remember a single past, and act to change it if necessarily. An organisation entangled in a jumble of stories has no past, but only bad dreams that focus attention inwards.
A shared story allows for the structured remembering of a shared past.
Ultimately this is one of the most important things for the leadership of a company: the curation of that story, of the past and of organisational memories is the key to be able to move faster and act consistently and strategically. It is a reminder of Rumelt’s question - What’s Going On Here? - because that question is a question about what we remember as much as a question of where we are.
Practically, this requires keeping a record of what has happened, a chronicle. The word “chronicle” is really a misnomer. It can be traced back to the Greek word khronographia - a word that in turn points us back to one of the key Greek words for time: chronos. But chronos was time ordered by moments in a single path, it lacked the sense of narrative that we find in the other Greek word for time: kairos. If chronos is sequential ordering of time, kairos is time seen as moments for action and decision, quantitative vs qualitative time (if we simplify).
What we need then is a kairography, a kairicle, rather than a chronicle.
The nostalgic turn
Our politics have taken a nostalgic turn. In many ways we live in a world that is looking backward rather than forward. We speak of our societies as systems, not projects, lamenting that the system does not work for us or that it is broken. Our nostalgia - the longing for a home more in time than in space - is abused to fuel xenophobia and partisan short-termism.
This political turn is made possible by the introduction of false, narrow memories of the past - and more: nostalgia itself is ultimately a disease of memory rather than a disease of the present. The nostalgic mind remembers a past that never existed, it remembers a past that helps create a narrative in the present that can make sense of an existence that is falling apart.
In his 1995 book The Wounded Storyteller, Arthur Frank outlines three different narratives of disease: the restitution narrative, the quest narrative and the chaos narrative. The first is the story a the pill that fixes everything - you were health, then something happened, and so you needed a pill - but that fixed it. The second is the story of disease as a journey - a quest - in which you are cast out of the community of the healthy and need to find your way back, and in doing so you understand yourself differently - you change your life - when you come back. The third narrative - the chaos narrative - is the one that is most devastating. Frank writes:8
Chaos is the opposite of restitution: its plot imagines life never getting better. Stories are chaotic in their absence of narrative order. Events are told as the storyteller experiences life: without sequence or discernable causality. The lack of any coherent sequence is an initial reason why chaos stories are hard to hear; the teller is not understood as telling a “proper” story. But more significantly, the teller of the chaos story is not heard to be living a “proper” life, since in life as in story, one event is expected to lead to another. Chaos negates that expectation.
And the only way back is through memory of a narrative that once made sense. In fact, nostalgia is a reasonably healthy response to being stuck in a chaos narrative, but it misfires because the past that is constructed is almost always fictional and false, and the memories that are sifted out from time are broken: they often contain stories of a Them that took everything, a perceived injury and the need for violence or exclusion.
Now, the way back is not to deny ourselves our memories, but to more broadly share them. If we live in a society that exists in fragments of the past, organised in different memories, inspired by nostalgia, we will be unable to build a shared future. There is no way forward - but a careful exploration of our shared memories, a renegotiation of history into collective memory, could give us something to stand on.
This is key to understanding misinformation as a problem as well. If we believe that we can fix misinformation without addressing the issue of memory, we are curiously aspect blind to the nature of our beliefs: we believe in a story that flows from our remembrances. As long as our memories are fractured, we will never agree on “a baseline of facts” - and so we need to start from what we have forgotten.
Nostalgia, as a political force, grows out of a forgetting that fragments collective memory and polarises us.
So what?
These issues may seem overly theoretical, but the call to action here is not hard to capture.
First, we need to engage much more deeply in a political conversation about the shift from the Archive to the Database, from reading to searching. This debate is overdue, and needs much broader participation than we are seeing today.
Second, we have an opportunity to explore our organisational memories and see where they may lead us astray and into introspective narcissism rather than exploratory curiosity (yes, curiosity is probably the antonym of narcissism).
Third, we have a challenge politically to meet as citizens: the renegotiation of our memories from a point of chaos inspiring nostalgia. If we want to combat authoritarianism and populism, as well as misinformation, we need to start with what we, collectively, remember.
None of this is easy. But an amnesiac society presents such great risks that it is worth carefully considering what we can do here.
Thanks for reading,
Nicklas
The origin of this quote is contested, but seems Toynbee said this about life. See here. That could be read as him thinking that maybe history could make sense out of the jumble of narrative life, whereas the argument here is that it is the other way around.
This is a key theme in Ricœur’s thinking and is brought out vividly in Oneself as Another (1992(1990)) in which we encounter the idea of narrative identity. We could, in analogy, reconstruct all of our ideas around privacy as ideas about narrative privacy - the constant renegotiation of our identities, based on what we reveal and conceal.
This is not the kind of relativism that says that anything can be true if you want it to. Stories, in many ways, actually provide a
Ricœur, P Memory, History, Forgetting (1992(1990)) p. 166
See more for the theory of illumination here. Augustine says “The mind needs to be enlightened by light from outside itself, so that it can participate in truth, because it is not itself the nature of truth. You will light my lamp, Lord.”
See Frank, A. (2013) The Wounded Storyteller. [edition unavailable]. The University of Chicago Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1850618/the-wounded-storyteller-pdf (Accessed: 11 September 2022).
The concept of "pace of organisational forgetting" is mind-expanding for me. Thank you so much for this exploration of memory and history. So relevant to what I do during the weekdays.