Memory of the Multitude: The End of Collective Memory

Pre-proof chapter extract and references from: Hoskins, Andrew. 2017. ‘Memory of the Multitude: The End of Collective Memory’ in Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition, edited by Andrew Hoskins, 85-109, New York: Routledge. Memory of the Multitude: The End of Collective Memory Andrew Hoskins The insatiable archive Twentieth century media forged new kinds of mass imaginaries, collectivities championed or feared for their capacity to consume and think and act in consort. And this new mass was also said to remember, to hold a vision of a shared past, to make and remake collective memory. But last century’s broadcast era dominant vision of media and audiences and their associated concepts and frames are said to cloud today’s thinking on the revolutionary change of post-broadcast or participatory media (Merrin 2014). And it is a similar twentieth century legacy that hampers some of memory studies today, in a lack of recognition that digital technologies and media have transformed remembering and forgetting to an extent and on a scale that should have shattered the canon. In what follows I set out this hangover of the collective in memory studies and offer instead ‘the multitude’ as the defining digital organizational form of memory beyond but also incorporating the self. A key challenge with noting such profound change is that it is easily overlooked until some more privileged viewpoint – notably in the future – is found.

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Moreover, faced with unsettling worlds, it is always easier to cling to the familiar frames and lexicon that are formative of thinking, world view, and of course, career. ‘Collective memory’ – as with ‘mass media’ – are prime (and intertwined) examples of the stasis of the comfortable, terms that are so embedded in the everyday, they seem to warrant little examination, explanation or justification. Here I argue that collective memory – the most used term for memory beyond the self and of the group, of society – needs upgrading in light of the digital’s ushering in of much more complex dialogic modes of communication, undermining previous configurations of individual-group-societal relations, and the forging of new flexible community types with emergent and mutable temporal and spatial coordinates. These are the self’s new connections and entanglements with others and with and through an array of digital apps, platforms and networks, namely an array of emergent ways a connective public is moving in and out of consort that I call a ‘sharing without sharing’. The broader revolutionary change here is the ‘connective turn’ (Hoskins 2011a, b): a heady cocktail of immediacy, volume and pervasiveness of the digital, which shape a new knowledge base – an ‘information infrastructure’ (Bowker and Star 2000) that brings people and machines into new relations with one another. The connective turn not only transforms remembering and forgetting but also the value that is attributed to each, in for example, the third ‘memory boom,’1 turning remembrance white hot in the ‘rage for memorialisation’ (Blight 2012) and the sudden demand for a ‘right to be forgotten’ (Ghezzi et al. eds. 2014). The connective turn has transformed media-collective relations to shape a new multitude in two defining and related ways. The first is the shift from publics

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who had no means of replying to media in the broadcast era to today’s participation whereby a new mass constantly snap, post, record, edit, like, link, forward and chat in a digital ecology of media. The second – a direct consequence of the first – is that the memory of the multitude is all over the place, scattered yet simultaneous and searchable: connected, networked, archived. Whereas traditional forms of memory developed from ideas of the crowd, the social, and the collective as non-archival entities, and traditional audience relations with media similarly so, in contrast, the multitude is inherently archival – entangled and distributed through uncertain times and spaces, forms and times of decay, and emergences. The new economy of attention or distraction – the multiple and often simultaneous modes of being hyperconnected: the new modus operandi of everyday communication – the link, like, message, tweet, email, text – are archived into a chain of media-memory. The archived self alters the constitution of the social, anchoring the present in a ‘deep now’: a now with unpredictable and often invisible and unimaginable trails and connectivities. The memory of the multitude is thus made from human-archival entanglements of communication through digital devices and networks. For better or for worse, such entanglements are today irresistibly part of what it means to be social.

In this formulation, I draw upon the work of Paulo Virno (2004, 25) who

states: ‘The contemporary multitude is composed neither of “citizens” nor of “producers;” it occupies a middle region between “individual and collective;” for the multitude, then, the distinction between “public” and “private” is in no way validated.’ The multitude then offers a powerful vision that smashes the exhausted

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but endemic individual-collective binary that haunts the study of memory. It is an essential vehicle for acknowledging the state of digital memory as transcendent of the traditional imaginary, or rather delimitation, of the collective as a usefully distinct and locatable form of memory. Like other kinds of what it is to be social, being a member of the multitude is not something that one can or easily want to leave: attempts to disconnect always end in failure. In some ways membership of the multitude may feel like being part of traditional collective or crowd. For example, Vincente Rafael (2003, 403) in an early comparison observes: ‘While telecommunication allows one to escape the crowd, it also opens up the possibility of finding oneself moving in concert with it, filled with its desire and consumed by its energy’. But the digital’s affordance of movement, liveliness and control, of being connected, actually obfuscates the multitude’s archival dimensions. The multitude forges a non-sociable social or a sharing without sharing precisely because its digitally connected memory is both humanly and algorithmically archived, mixing up and blurring the conscious and the unconscious, and the discriminate and the indiscriminate. The archive has traditionally been seen (alike other media) as separate and external to the self, as something with institutional status, as variously a place and space for the storage of artefacts of the past that give rise to remembering. Yet, the medial gathering and splintering of individual, social and cultural imaginaries, increasingly networked through portable and pervasive digital media and communication devices attach shadow archives to much of everyday life, that also blend and complicate that which was was once considered as distinctly public and private.

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The archive is no longer only collected and organized and managed and walled and kept by an array of institutional memory keepers, but is also diffused through a ‘new memory ecology’ (Brown and Hoskins 2010; Hoskins and Tulloch 2016). This is the current digital environment’s (re)ordering of the past by and through multiple connectivities of times, actors, and events, which also shifts the very parameters of memory and memory studies. And these new parameters at least may appear as liberating. For example, ‘the ‘miscellanizing’ of information not only breaks it out of its traditional organizational categories but also removes the implicit authority granted by being published in the paper world’ (Weinberger 2007, 22) and the fluidity, reproducibility, and transferability of digital data overnight smash the spatial and artefactual constraints of the twentieth memory booms. Indeed, today, the archive can even be seen as a medium in its own right as it has been liberated ‘from archival space into archival time’ (Ernst 2004, 52; see also Ernst, this volume). The notion of the archive as static is replaced by the much more fluid temporalities and dynamics of ‘permanent data transfer’ (ibid.) defining the new memory ecology. The archives of a broadcast era mass media once trapped in the archival space of the vault or library subject to the material conditions of order, classification and retrieval are rendered fluid through their hyperconnectivity. As Van House and Churchill (2008, 306) observe: ‘Archives sit at the boundary between public and private. Current archives extend well beyond a person, a space, an institution, a nation state. They are socio-technical systems, neither entirely social nor technical’.

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However, as the archive has broken free of its bonds of space and institution and regimented classification, it has run riot, consuming almost everything in its path. Thus, as Kroker (2014, 80) puts it: ‘the content of the archive has suddenly and risibly expanded to encompass the totality of life itself’. Thus, the new social that is made by the multitude also entraps it; the real challenge here is to see beyond the myth of digital media democratization. The digitally fostered values of openness2 have driven a culture of unbridled commentary that reveals that there is no ‘mainstream’, despite the veneer of the promotion of the egalitarian Web: ‘join the conversation’ invites Twitter, ‘Comment is Free’ declares The Guardian. Rather, since around 2005, the multitude has vacated the centre ground, with all the most ugly and irrational in human thought aroused through rage and dismay thriving in the polarising virality of social networking3. The modern self has been traditionally protected by the calming absorption of a trusted and intimate collective – importantly small in number – and by the emotional dissipation of chronological time. Today, the Twitter fuel of instantaneity destroys the relative privacy of intimate sociality that once enabled the opportunity for second thoughts. Adam Gopnik (2012) for example, argues, this is ‘not newly unleashed anger but what we all think in the first order, and have always in the past socially restrained if only thanks to the look on the listener’s face – the monstrous music that runs through our minds is now played out loud’. The sociological mantra of a late modern society marked by a navigation of ‘multiple life worlds’ (Giddens, 1990) is complicated by their digital collapse. The extended network of the mobile self distributed across time and space is ironically dumped back into one place with the relational database of the multitude.

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Hyperconnectivity then, for all its infinite extensionality, is actually strangely reductive. Our shadow archives grow by the second, with social media exerting a ‘residual abundance’ (Virilio 1997, 24): a digital and digitized gravitational pull that seems counter-intuitive to the pronouncements of the acceleration of life lived online. The former self, its lives and lovers, all become entangled in digital databases that without conscience betray the wild exisgencies of youth, not in unguarded gossip, but in perpetuity. As Jaron Lanier (2010, 70) suggests: ‘A “Facebook generation” young person who suddenly becomes humiliated online has no way out, for there is only one hive’. But the hive does not discriminate between the young and the old. Social networking, messaging, and all of life’s uploading together casts a continuous, accumulating, paradoxically real-time and dormant memory, of the multitude, lurking in the underlayer of media life awaiting potential rediscovery and reconnection and remediation, to transform past relations through the re-activation of latent and semi-latent connections (with our selves and with others). The memory of the multitude softens history, changing the parameters of the who, what, when and why of remembering. With digital searching, accessing, participating, there is little unseen, untouched or uncommented on by the multitude. This has diminished the authority of the former gatekeepers of memory, as David Lowenthal (2012, 3) observes: ‘No longer what elites and experts tell us it was, the past becomes what Everyman chooses to accept as true’. The multitude appears as stronger than previous collectivities as it is afforded carte blanche to keep the ‘conversation’ going; there is literally no ending.

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I now turn to examine the rise of the multitude and the memory of the multitude as a challenge to previous formations of memory imagined and presumed as collective, but also as a solution to the re-thinking of individual and social relations now blurred through their immersion in digital networks and archives. Then I will consider some of the bases for the development of the collective as a version of memory beyond the self, and its continued currency in memory studies, and map its popularity as being shaped by the so-called mass media. Finally, I suggest how a new economy of attention has contributed to the forging of the multitude and its memorial entanglements. References Agger, Ben. 2011. “iTime: Labor and life in a smartphone era.” Time & Society 20(1):119-136. Appadurai, Arjun. 2003. “Archive and Aspiration.” In Information is Alive: Art and Theory on Archiving and Retrieving Data, edited by Joke Brouwer and Arjen Mulder, 14-25. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers. Assman, Aleida. 2007. “Europe: A Community of Memory?” Twentieth Annual Lecture of the GHI. GHI Bulletin 40 (Spring 2007): 11-25. Assmann, Jan. 1995. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” New German Critique 65: 125– 33.

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Weinberger, David. 2007. Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. New York: Times Books. Weissman, Gary. 2004. Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust. Ithaca: Cornell University Press Willsher, Kim. “French chef Alexandre Gauthier attempts to put an end to food selfies.” The Guardian, 16 February 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/feb/16/chef-alexandre-gauthierstop-photographs-food-restaurant. Accessed 16 February 2014. Notes 1 See my introductory chapter to this volume, ‘The Restless Past’. 2 Ibid. 3 Marked by the United States’ presidential election of Donald Trump in 2016, this contagion finally swept away any remaining western mainstream news media’s claims of representation of a middle-ground of opinion.

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