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COLLECTIVE MEMORY-A SPURIOUS NOTION?
THERE IS NO NEED TO CONVINCE ANYBODY THAT THERE IS SUCH A THING as individual memory; memory attaches to persons in the singular. But does it attach to them in the plural? Although the term "collective memory" has gained currency and a whole new discourse has been built around it that fills extended library shelves, there are still inveterate skeptics who tenaciously deny the phrase has any meaning. It is of course easy to create a new term, but how can we be sure the term corresponds to anything in reality? Susan Sontag, for instance, is one of those who questioned and denied the meaning of this term. "Photographs that everyone recognizes," she wrote in Regarding the Pain of Others, "are now a constituent part of what a society chooses to think about, or declares that it has chosen to think about. It calls these ideas 'memories,' and that is, over the long run, a fiction. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as collective memory." And, she insists,
all memory is individual, unreproducible-it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, that this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds. Ideologies create substantiating archives of images, representative images, which encapsulate common ideas of significance and trigger predictable thoughts, feelings (Sontag, 2003: 85-86).
According to Sontag, a society is able to choose, to think and to speak, but not to remember. It can choose without a will, it can think without the capacity of reason, it can speak without a tongue, but it cannot remember without a memory. With the term "memory," her license of figurative speech reaches its limit: memory cannot be thought of independently from an organ and organism. As part of the brain and its neurological networks, it is tied to individual lives and dies with each person. This commonsensical argument has its irrefutable evidence. The statement is certainly true, but, we may argue, it is incomplete.
There is little dispute that autobiographical memories are what existentially distinguishes us from each other. Experiential memories are embodied and thus they cannot be transferred from one person to...