By David M. Boje, Jan 9 2007
What is collective memory?
Collective Memory is defined to be like a tapestry of group’s and some errant individuals’ collective memories, interpenetrated by strands or threads of thoughts interwoven across the groups. The point is there are a multiplicity of them and several types [Adapted Boje chapter 3].
There are four types of collective memory?
Collective Memory Dynamics is defined a multiplicity of valuative standpoints on past, present, and future, and is permeated with three kinds of memory: cognitive, aesthetic, and emotive-volitional (see sections that follow). Collective Memory may be defined as the variegated, fragmented, discontinuous organizational processes for transforming and appropriating emergent story types into control narratives through modes of deliberation [chapter 3].
You have to know someting about dialogism to understand collective memory dynamics. Dialogism is defined as different voices, styles, and ideas expressing a plurality of logics in different ways, but not always in same place and time.Dialogism is different from dialogue, debate, and various dialectics (Hegel, Marx, & Mead). Dialogic story is in “heteroglossia,” “dialogized” with fully embodied voices, logics, or viewpoints (Bakhtin, 1981: 273). Five types of dialogism: polyphonic, stylistic, chronotopic, architectonic, and polypi (dialogism of these dialogisms, at more complex order of systemic complexity than each is individually) [chapter 2].
We need to inquiry into the ontology and the metaphysics of story emergence in relation to collective memory. At least these eight ways of storytelling-sensemaking craft a past/future for present in-the-moment story emergence (Boje, 2007). Beginning is a coming into the world of being, out of nothingness. Ontologically there is no absolute beginning/end of emergent story. Metaphysically, many pasts/futures are co-present possibilities to emerging story. I-we dialectic, for example, at least partly subconscious, imprisons emergent story in teleology.
Jean Paul Sartre does not write about story. However we can apply his concept of the “night of identity” (1943/1956: 139). The night of identity of emergent story is all the sensemaking registries ready to pounce. The night of identity imprisons story emergence in a profound solidarity of the world before and the world after. Narrative Prison is definable as entombment of emergent story into collective memory by senseimposing, be it retrospection or reflexivity, embodied or expectant future, or combination.
Sartre (1943/1956: 139) says there is a factual limit to one’s memory but no theoretical limit of one’s past. Ways of sensemaking are co-present behind story emergence, as the “nothingness of facticity” (Sartre, p. 137). There is ontological facticity to emergent story, and there is a metaphysical problem when narrative sensemaking modalities imprison body blows in collective memory. The ontology of Story Emergence appears in consciousness as already being born, in acts of retrospective and reflexivity of narrative sensemaking that ignore other ways of senseimposing. Each modality is nothingness to some other way of conceiving Being.
We can study story emergence, it’s coming into being in moments of particular social intercourse. The metaphysical problems of story emergence and narrative sensemaking. To be emergent story is to be born into the social world of multiple ways of sensemaking. Antenarrative fragments can be antecedent to story emergence, then subsumed in acts of narrative sensemaking as the before and after. Emergent story, if it has pre-existence, raises these metaphysical questions. When emerging story is spontaneity, almost instantly, a single past and a single trajectory are privileged and socially chosen in the act of performance. Narrative Prison is the collapsing or erasing of the many co-present befores and afters that co-occur with emergent story.
TECHNOLOGIES OF COLLECTIVE MEMORY
Storytelling Organization use technology that changes Collective Memory. Artificial enhancement of oral Collective Memory in contemporary Storytelling Organization relies upon such technologies as writing accounts onto paper, tape recording, digital videoing, and text retrieval via computers or cell phones linked to the Internet. Spreadsheets, PowerPoint, and other digital technology are used quite widely by complex organizations. Accountants and financial specialists do collective memory work. They stitch together the Past quite differently, using vastly different technology, in approaching it with varied sensemaking, more or less cognitively, rationally, aesthetically, and ethic-emotion-memory.
Oral memory and telling has changed with each wave of technology. Ivan Illich (1993) as well as Walter Ong (1984) is concerned with the impact of technology on text. Illich (1993: 38-42) writes about the “history of memory” in ways that informs our understanding. There are technological innovations in the history of Collective Memory. Before architectonic-static written memory work, memory was trained through the recollection of formulas, such as those uttered to the rhythm of a lyre (p. 38). Aristotle and Plato distrusted over-reliance upon writing as a technology of memory, since “living recall” can protest when the listener (by their cues) distorts meaning, but a reader of text can twist meaning every which way (p. 40).
In contemporary society, we rely upon eyewitness testimony, and cross-examination of witnesses as they tell their story on the stand, and contrast such telling to written depositions, confessions, reports taken at the scene, as well as forensic material interpretation of “evidence” at the scene. Memory training has been neglected since medievalists did their mnemotechnics. Mnemotechnics is the architectonic-static training of a memory matrix as a way to remember a story or speech.
Illich writes about the twelfth century when students were trained in the mnemotechnics of imagining a blueprint of Noah’s ark, or a complex castle. In each room were cupboards and shelves filled with objects (knives, candles, food, etc.) and to each object a sentence would be memorized. Students could remember entire books from the Bible. Khadija Al Arkoubi tells me, that in the Muslim world, people still memorize Koran:
Some know it by heart. It is the case of my parents. Children of less than 6 years in Morocco and other Muslim countries are still able to memorize Koran. Awards are given every year to children who manage to do that.”
Khadija adds, in many nations, oral tradition has an importance that surpasses the westernized nations. In Morocco, in the city of Marrakech, there is a place where people tell stories everyday into the evening. As Khadija tells it, “The storytellers have been doing that on a voluntary basis for years and years. Now the government is rewarding them (through money) to preserve this practice and enable them transfer their stories to other who can carry on the same task.”
Memory technology has evolved away from architectonic-static (visual memory castle of the mind) to a historic-relational model, and now to a virtual storage-retrieval model. Our ways of remembering stories has a long history, with several key metamorphoses.
With the Greek alphabet, alphabet was a technology to index the memory of utterances (by the mouth, tongue, lips) and to filter out mime-gestures (sound dominated mime-gesture). Alphabet technology fixed speech utterance into visible letter-units, then into word and sentence-units. The act of telling story became re-imagined as the production of writing to augment Individual, as well as Collective Memory. The alphabet became the symbolization of utterance, a model that has dominated western metaphysics for two millennia.
At the turn of the fifth century, “syntax” and “layout” and the “index” changed how alphabet-technology was deployed: it allowed “words” to be formed out of the alphabet and placed into text. One could memorize a mental dictionary of words, each with unique spellings.
In a time before the printing press, memorizing the expensive scriptorium texts by heart was necessary. In a time before tape-records and stenographers, lawyers did not use notes, they memorized their debate by heart. In a time when university could not replicate books easily, the “memory palace” or castle was the mental construction of a mental encyclopedia, in the vast architecture of the mind.
Today we record sound, text, and image into our cell-phones and computers. Each new digital technology breakthrough is more gigabyte storage, faster retrieval, more efficient software, and ways of sharing that constitutes ever-widening Collective Memory. Our individual and collective body is so merged with computer technology the medieval virtuoso feats of architectonic memory are impossible. We cannot imagine ourselves memorizing the Bible, Koran, or the entire encyclopedia. Our feeble mind struggles to remember five items on a grocery list!
Lawyers, professors, and students take their laptops into the classrooms. My dissertation was done on keypunch, the first computer-written dissertation, accepted at University of Illinois. I filed it in 1978, but they made me reprint the Diablo printed version onto vellum paper, but in 1979 did accept the Diablo version, after much debate. All previous dissertations were done by typewriter. My first computer was an Osborne, followed by a K-Pro. Both used floppy disks, and had no storage. When I left University of Illinois for my first professorial job at UCLA, the later was still doing key punch, and one still had to punch a score of IBM job control language (JCL) cards to run any kind of computer analysis. Within five years, faculty had desktop computers, and the MBA class was issued laptop computers, with 5 megabyte storage. I just ordered a Mac laptop with 60 gigabyte of storage and 1 gig of memory.
A major change since the Memory Castle of ancient architectonics is the hybridization of human body with technology. At the simplest level, people wear glasses, a technology for augmenting vision, hearing aids to supplement hearing, and have pacemakers installed to stimulate the heart’s rhythm. We also have artificial hips.
I asked my students, what would be a contemporary experience of oppression? There answer: to live for a day without a cell phone or computer; to stop text-messaging and email. To live without being hybrid to the technology of collective memory is a handicap in contemporary society. To grow up without a Gameboy, Nintendo or X-Box is to be deprived of the training need for an adulthood of human/technology cyborg. In contemporary architectonic-dialogism, we have been seduced by digital technology; we cannot imagine life even for a few hours without cell phone or laptop. Our contemporary collective memory is that of cyborg. Note how vastly different this is from the ancient architectonics of the Memory Castle.
Khadija Al Arkoubi’s comments came to me by email, March 10, 2006.
COLLECTIVE MEMORY DECEPTION
The university is a panoptic prison of shaped and deceptive Collective Memory. For Foucault (1977a), the panopticon is an architectonics built not only into the architecture, but into the examination, into the bureaucratic ways of transmuting or translating the human being into a “file” into the writing of marks, into incidents written up in a “file folder.”
The first layer of contemporary architectonic discourse is “cognitive-rationality” the bureaucratization of the individual, the transfer of their “tacit knowledge” to some sort of systemicity. As we examine Storytelling Organization complexity where image and symbols of the past are contemporalized in social organization experiences of various story emergences.
There is a new McCarthyism of post-911 paranoia in universities. One self-censors speech, because there are witch hunts. Those engaged in radical “liberal” speech are pursued by fundamental conservatives. My colleague Douglas Kellner, a chaired professor at UCLA, is one of about 30 UCLA professors who are having their lectures taped by spies, paid $100 for any tapes that contain anti-Bush, anti-war, or anti-corporate utterances.
Enron’s Storytelling Organization is a dynamic network of LJM quasi-object trajectories interwoven with antenarratives, interweaving with emergent theatre of deception (Boje, 2001a, 2003b; Boje & Rosile, 2003. Antenarrative is defined as “the fragmented, non-linear, incoherent, collective, unplotted, and pre-narrative speculation, a bet, a proper narrative can be constituted” (Boje, 2001: 1). Sometimes bets are lies.
Sometimes you cannot trust story emergence. Enron used storytelling to package, to entertain, and re-educate spectators through story spinning. For example, each year (between 1998 and 2001), an elaborate theatre stage was constructed on Enron’s 6th floor to simulate a real trading floor. The expensive theatre cost $500 to set up each desk, and more for phones in this stage-crafted spectacle, and more for the 36-inch flat panel screens, and teleconference conference rooms. Computer technicians fed fake statistics to the screens, wired the entire stage. On the big day several hundred employees, including secretaries, played their rehearsed character roles, pretending to be ‘Energy Services’ traders, doing mega deals, while Skilling and Lay played their starring role in the Enron Dramatis Personae to a target audience of invited Wall Street analysts, who can not tell real from fake. In retrospect, the emergent story of Enron was just fakery.
SCHIZOPHRENIC COLLECTIVE MEMORY
While professing at UCLA, I was asked to facilitate a storytelling intervention in a church in my neighborhood. Leaders and lay people of the church, of all ages, assembled on a Wednesday evening. I asked them to recount the history of the church, and invited those that wished to draw pictures of their relationship to the church. Artists, like, Elanor Bregand, a 72 year old woman who taught aesthetic theory of calligraphy to me, drew on her Aristotelian style (harmony = contrast + emphasis, with rhythm). Others drew pictures of the church as a castle with a moat around it, a safe place, in the wilderness of Los Angeles, and a closed-community that was not hospitable to newcomers. We shared our drawings and told our stories. I was working with a framework where in order to have a vision of the future, I thought it a good step to work out the history, and share stories to get at history, as well as, embedded values. Suffice it to say, that as people new and old to this church shared, they storied history, values, and vision for the church. There were values of equality of the sexes, age, race, and ethnicity that were agreed upon. A vision of getting beyond the castle walls to doing service work in the community was prominent. A history of an independent church was told, with the current pastor, as the heroic force.
We noted that several elders, and the director of youth education, had not attended the Wednesday session. So a follow-on session was organized. An eye-opener to me was that those present at this second session put together a radically different history, vision, and values than the first session. This was the Scottish Brethren Church, and only men could be elders, and only elders and the pastor ought to be talking of history, values, and vision. It was as if there were two storied identities, two histories, and two “collective memories” of this little church that only had 70 or so people turn up to Sunday service.
At a third meeting, members of the first two sessions assembled to sort it out. I set up two flips charts, one summarizing each history. Then the pastor who saw the church as open to women being elders, and did not sanction a strong tie to Scottish Brethren tradition advocated the first history. The men are the only leaders, and women need to know their place --- elder advocated the second version of history. Several noted that they had never heard the word “Brethren” used before, and had never known this was any kind of Brethren church. People debated the castle-moat image-story, some favoring building up people inside the moat, and having nothing to do with outsiders; others favoring moving out of the castle into a small group, more home-based ministry. At the end of the evening, the eldest elder, got particularly angry, and stormed out of the session. I collected my flip charts, and helped cleanup. The pastor invited those remaining to his house for coffee. It turned out to be most of the church informal female leaders (doing the work of the church), and the elders (all male) doing the value-policing (except the one who stormed out).
The undisclosed story that had impressed everyone the most, was told by the wife of an elder. She told how she had been living in Kansas, and was a volunteer, cleaning up the church one evening. She literally “pulled back the curtains” and found the elders (all men) sitting in a circle, with their beards and white hair, deciding things.” One of them gruffly scolded, “get out of here woman, you cannot be here!” One implication was that people in this Los Angeles church were not being told the Brethren roots because in contemporary Los Angeles culture, the servanthood of women to men, youth to elders, etc. would not settle well. The eldest elder made his decision to leave the church, and the first history became more dominant over the second, and I can tell you people breathed a sigh of relief.
In Brethren genealogy, there a many splinter groups, and in this Los Angles, that diversity was erupting around the issue of the role of women in leadership, music, the tenor of the sermon, etc. As Brethren from Scotland migrated to the U.S. to settle the Midwest, and then the Wild West, some planted churches in Los Angeles, and that is where collective memory gets amazing complex. Several lineages of Brethren ideology joined the little church, and struggled to accommodate one another. And, as is the case, in many a small church, oftentimes, when two or more ideologies clash, one will be forced to leave, or just leave, having tired of the struggle. And, a point I want to make, is that these are struggles that are over a century old, when Brethren was part of a Separatist movement, to leave Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed religiosity behind in order to pursue home church, that was without strong (or any times) to the religion of a nation, or one with governance of one country’s religion over another; in short the separation of church and state; the separation of home church from a network of churches centrally governed. Add to this the ritual differences: immersion baptism versus sprinkling a naïve infant in baptism. At issue is the separation of born again movement from you-are-born-into your religion.
Contemporary Collective Memory is an ongoing struggle with emotion memory. The dark night of emergent story is in-between the lines, in reflection-reflecting old prejudices, hangings, being burned at the stake, and long dead leaders of a religious movement being otherwise oppressed by some majority religion. The emotion memory ethics of that persecution, oppression, injustice, prejudice, exploitation, and so forth become embedded in the collective memory of succeeding generations of the body.
The healing of damaged emotion memory of prior generation of, not just church, but a corporation (or government) is possible with story therapy. One such story therapy is called restorying (White & Epston, 1990). Initially an individual and family therapy, retorying is a way to heal damaged emotion memory of social organizations. I did not realize it, but in my church consulting, I was allowing a fragmented Storytelling Organization to deal not only with current fragmentation of collective memory, but with a way of storying itself that had been passed from generation, that conveyed the damaged emotion memory of over a hundred years ago. To restory is defined as culling history for examples of when a person or organization was able to overcome the story being narrated about them by a powerfully dominant group, one which has been internalized, and become a panoptic prison. It is panoptic because, the dominant story (story told by the dominant group) becomes internalized as the dominant story of the individual (or organization). To restory is a social intervention, even when story therapy consists of sessions between the individual and a story-therapist. Restorying social organization is an intervention into collective memory.
Most organizations (all that I am aware of) have had significant experiences that materially inscribe emotion memory on the body. As the more long-lived organizations continue, from generation-to-generation, that emotion memory dominates the sense-memory, and the cognitive memory. In some cases, as Illich (1993) suggests, the pain and suffering of an emotionally-riveting experience, can become architectonically-aesthetic, and even become the basis for cognitive discourse that seeks never to repeat such an inequality or injustice. However, it is also the case, that most emotion memory damage sustained by a storytelling organization, does not become poetic aesthetics or cognitive rationality that is on guard to prevent reenactment. In some instances, there is no learning whatsoever, that the conditions of fraud are repeated by the next generation (as in Enron, see Boje & Rosile, 2003, 2004).
The first implication of this theory of the architectonics of collective memory is we are increasingly dependent upon computer, cell phone, and Internet technology. Each wave of technology appended to collective memory, changes the social dynamics of organization, and of architectonic dialogism. Collective memory is multi-level, from the time organization recognizes, and begins to manipulate its history. Collective memory resides in multiple levels in each of the dialogisms, from polyphonic, stylistic, chronotopic, architectonic, to the polypi. One dialogism implicated in collective memory does not succeed or replace another. Despite the technologies applied to augment the seduction of collective memory away from the memory-castle (of the mind) such as alphabet, printing press, indexing and sectioning books into chapters, the digital revolution with computer and Internet à collective memory is still highly fragmented, the perspectives on history are polyphonic and polylogicality; there is not much consensus on organization history. Instead there is contention of multiple living stories with official narrative (that is centripetal). In contemporary society, is the active rewriting of collective memory, in managerialist ideology that lionizes CEO stories, marginalizes stories of workers. As always, those with the sword write history.It’s possible to restory, to heal damaged emotion memory oppressions and injustices, to help it become poetry and wisdom. Despite the opportunities for restorying emotion memory, the opposing way of manipulating collective memory is to impose the dominant groups’ story unto others, to use surveillance to sort out whom to punish. We are at the crossroads of struggling societal discourses, an architectonic dialogism that interanimates ethic-emotion, aesthetic-sense-making, and ethic-emotion, one into the other. We are dealing with a new wave of transcendence. New movements make business discourse interact with more metaphysically spiritual/religious discourse.
Church of the Brethren Network http://www.cob-net.org/docs/groups.htm
Bakhtin used dialogicality. I use dialogism and dialogic interchangeably to mean dialogicality. Holquist’s (1990) reading is ‘dialogism’ describes Bakhtin anti-Hegelian dislike for Absolute Spirit dialectic. Bakhtin preferred neo-Kantianism more “speculative epistemology” Holquist, p. 17), a move from Newtonian to Einsteinian worldview (i.e. relativity of time/space).