Communities of Memory: On Witness, Identity, and Justice

by W. James Booth

"Memory has fueled merciless, violent strife, and it has been at the core of reconciliation and reconstruction. It has been used to justify great crimes, and yet it is central to the pursuit of justice. In these and more everyday ways, we live surrounded by memory, individual and in our habits, our names, the places where we live, street names, libraries, archives, and our citizenship, institutions, and laws. Still, we wonder what to make of memory and its gifts, though sometimes we are hardly even certain that they are gifts. Of the many chambers in this vast palace, I mean to ask particularly after the place of memory in politics, in the identity of political communities, and in their practices of doing justice."―from the Preface W. James Booth seeks to understand the place of memory in the identity, ethics, and practices of justice of political communities. Identity is, he believes, a particular kind of continuity across time, one central to the possibility of agency and responsibility, and memory plays a central role in grounding that continuity. Memory-identity takes two a habitlike form, the deep presence of the past that is part of a life-led-in-common; and a more fragile, vulnerable form in which memory struggles to preserve identity through time―notably in bearing witness―a form of memory work deeply bound up with the identity of political communities. Booth argues that memory holds a defining place in determining how justice is administered. Memory is tied to the very possibility of an ethical community, one responsible for its own past, able to make commitments for the future, and driven to seek justice. "Underneath (and motivating) the politics of memory, understood as contests over the writing of history, over memorials, museums, and canons," he writes, "there lies an intertwining of memory, identity, and justice." Communities of Memory both argues for and maps out that intertwining.

Genres: Philosophy

264 pages, Hardcover

First published February 2, 2006

Reviews

[Zachary · Rating 4 out of 5]

With Communities of Memory, W. James Booth mobilizes myriad resources from analytic and continental philosophy, literature, and memoir to defend an account of the intrinsic relations between memory, identity, and justice. For Booth, memory, particularly as it is constitutive of individual and collective identity, is inescapably a matter of justice: memory-identity is the basis for the imputation of a society or individual as the owner of its past and responsible for it just as it is also the condition for commitments to the future (xiii). While, on Booth’s account, memory may not be entirely constitutive of identity (as Locke would have it), it is still absolutely central to identity: our memories individuate us as differentiated persons and account for the persistence of our identities across time. In fact, memory’s constitutive relation with identity is what allows us to presume the continuity of a temporally distended moral person who can be held responsible for their past actions and bound to promises made in the present. Put differently, the fact that one can remember their past actions and promises permits the practical postulate of identity-across-time even if there is no further metaphysical fact about what our identity consists in. For Booth, then, memory is the condition for the possibility of other moral duties linked with past actions, like acts of reparation, and those connected with the future, like the fulfillment of promises. Absent memory, we would lack the practical identity that is the basis for responsibility for past actions and commitments to future projects. In this way, matters of memory are matters of justice, and the duty to remember becomes a kind of meta-duty: one must remember one’s life narrative in order to fulfill other first-order duties.

While Booth’s defense of practical moral identity rooted in memory may be plausible when it comes to individual identity, he must do more to explain how it applies to collective identity. What bounds the collective identity of a specific community that differentiates it from other communities? And what is the basis for the persistence of this collective identity? Booth initially entertains one possible response from Aristotle, who posits that the constitution of a polity provides a community with its collective identity as the author and owner of its actions across time. Yet while Booth claims the Aristotelian solution helps makes sense of collective identity and its persistence in many cases, it is ultimately insufficient: because the constitutional notion of responsibility is so closely associated with agency and authorship, “it misses those areas of culpability in which we are involved even though not the authors of the actions themselves” (20). To address this lacuna, Booth turns to the idea of collective memory as the basis for collective identity. For Booth, collective memory involves “the interpretative work of previous generations as part of the self-understanding of the community (traditions), the debts and responsibilities that it carries as a continuous body (justice), its institutions and constitution, its explicit memorial activities, and the near invisible absorption of memory into the civic habits of a people.” In short, it “comprises the manifold forms of memory of a life-in-common,” and it is in relation to this life-in-common that collective memory accounts for the collective identity of a community and its accountability across time (21). Consequently, just as individual memory is constitutive of individual identity, collective memory is likewise constitutive of collective identity: it differentiates one community from another and accounts for its persistence across time, and so allows it to be held responsible for its past actions and future commitments.

For Booth, the duty to remember implicates the memory of a life-in-common described above. This moral imperative to remember reflects the honor we owe to those who have come before us in our communities and is rooted in “a norm of reciprocity and co-responsibility” (xii). We must remember the past because past persons have bequeathed to us the collective identity we now have, and this identity in turn is fundamental to our identities as individual persons in a community. Booth explains:

In a sense, then, we own their actions (those of our family or political community) but not on the authorship model of, for example, classical social contract theory. We understand ourselves to be a part of their projects, even though we may have had nothing directly to do with their design or execution. Identity here is the broad ‘mineness’ of membership in the political communities of which we are a part. I feel myself implicated in their agency, in their past and future (41).

To dismiss our duty to remember at the political or communal level would constitute an unwarranted rejection of our collective identity; it would reflect an attempt to erase that which binds our present community with its past and thereby undermine what constitutes our community in the present. Perhaps more fundamentally, to fail to remember the community’s past in some sense violates the individual identities of those who make up a political community: if who we are as individuals depends on our community and its distinctive character and traditions, then collective memorial failures obfuscate essential components of our individual selves. Put differently, one cannot have an identity apart from membership in a community with its own identity and concomitant past, and this existential reality about who we are is the source of memorial debt. One owes it to those on whom one’s identity relies to remember them in one way or another (as to what exactly this entails, Booth is conspicuously cryptic). Consequently, the duty to remember at the collective level is intimately bound up with a similar duty at the individual level, and both meta-duties are conditions for the possibility of other moral duties with complex temporal dimensions.

With the norms of memory-justice established, Booth posits an important tension between these norms and the basic values of liberal democracy. For Booth, unadulterated liberalism is radically universal in scope: to be a member of a liberal-democratic polity means only that one shares in a roster of rights which, in principle, every human person possesses. The norms of memory-justice, conversely, are radically particular: they only manifest in individuated political communities that exist separately and apart from other communities in which different memorial duties obtain. On the liberal-democratic view, the self is a bearer of rights and only responsible for its own past actions and future commitments. On the memory-justice view, the self is “laden with responsibility and remembrance, the legacy of the unmasterable past”; by virtue of its membership in a community of memory, this self shares in collective responsibility even for those actions which it did not and could not possibly have performed (61). Booth amplifies this tension when he writes that liberal theorists as diverse as Locke, Nozick, Rawls, and Ackerman “have in common a lessening of the weight of the past and of memory, and the refashioning of citizenship into a condition where the possession of the past is (mostly) irrelevant” (151). In brief, for Booth, liberal theory rejects his claim that collective memory can form the basis for a collective identity that burdens political communities with an unchosen past and its concomitant responsibilities. “Memory and identity are problematic for liberal modernity not simply because of the fated, often almost involuntary character of the presence of the past,” he explains, “but also because memory (as a core part of identity) is deeply particularizing, and in a manner that liberals find difficult to accept” (171).

Toward the end of the book, Booth seeks to resolve this tension between the norms of memory-justice in political communities and liberal-democratic theory. On the one hand, he insists that without memory-identity, there can be no political community, “not because [such a community] would lack cultural traditions but because it would be missing duration, habits of the heart, and justice, which is (to extend Aristotle’s observations on the relationship between justice and the just man) the persistence of norms of a certain kind through time” (180). Consequently, liberal-democratic theory that rejects collective memory as constitutive of collective identity is simply untenable: it does not and cannot apply to real political communities which are inexorably burdened by memory and responsibility. On the other hand, Booth seeks to identify some shared commitments between liberalism and memory-justice, and in particular fixates on the liberal-democratic value of freedom.

Liberal democracy in particular opens before us the prospect that we have some measure of choice in addressing the ties of memory-identity. Enabled by what reflective distance from the past we are capable of securing, and by the commitment (in principle) of liberal societies to a certain set of universal norms, we determine how our understanding of the past will be shaped, and how we will do justice to it, and to the present and future (182).

Thus, whereas memory in a hyper-nationalistic context is typically rooted in some notion of autochthony and shared traits, and consequently imposes upon the political community a fixed and exclusionary sense of collective identity, memory in a liberal-democratic context is, while not entirely subordinate to civic self-determination, nevertheless subject to critical deliberation about what should be remembered and in what ways. As Booth explains, “democracy in this sense is the (partial) civic control of responsibility . . . partial because we deliberate and decide these and other matters within a horizon already saturated by memory” (ibid.). Effectively, what Booth offers here is a compromise between his construal of memory-critical liberal theory and memory-laden nationalism—i.e. what he calls elsewhere a “constitutional patriotism” sensitive to the ways collective memory burdens political communities with unchosen memorial responsibilities (56). Liberal democracies cannot escape these memorial responsibilities insofar as they are political communities, but they can mobilize universal liberal values to deliberate about how to enact memory-justice in particularized political contexts.

Unfortunately, Booth does not say more about how liberal values can or should inflect critical moral deliberation in this way: his proposed reconciliation of the tension between liberal theory and memory-justice is only briefly mentioned at the very end of the book. His failure to elaborate on how, exactly, liberal values should help liberal democracies deliberate about and enact memory-justice in a morally defensible way embodies an even more problematic lacuna in his account—namely, that it seems to lack a metaethical theory that would allow one to discriminate between conflictual claims on memory. After all, collective memory—especially in pluralist liberal democracies which consist of many different memorial communities—is not a morally neutral domain: memorial duties may conflict with one another in irreconcilable ways, as is evidently the case in the United States when it comes to memorial responsibilities associated with slavery and Native American displacement and extermination. Beyond an equivocal allusion to liberal values, Booth offers no moral principle of selection for a self-critical liberal democracy in its efforts to pursue memory-justice. Which aspects of the past deserve our memorial attention? How do we sort out worthy and unworthy recipients of our memorial practices? And how do we adjudicate between conflictual memorial demands that ostensibly derive from liberal values like respect, tolerance, equal liberty, and reciprocity? These are essential questions that any liberal democracy which seeks to take memory seriously must answer in order to enact memory-justice. While he occasionally mentions hyper-nationalistic memorial contexts, Booth seems somewhat blind to the fact that not all memorial practices are morally defensible and some should be discarded. To evaluate the merits or demerits of collective memorial duties in liberal democracies, one must put forth a more robust metaethical theory with a more fully fleshed-out conception of justice. Booth fails to offer such a theory, and Communities of Memory thereby offers only a partial account of memory-justice in modern liberal societies.