Relational Remembering: Rethinking the Memory Wars (review)

In Relational Remembering, Sue Campbell studies the effect of a backlash movement on women, their status, and their consciousness. Looking specifically at the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, which flourished briefly in the 1990s, Campbell argues that its temporary prominence is symptomatic of widespread misconceptions about memory itself. She is less interested in the specific activities of the movement than the way acceptance of some of its attitudes has continued to undercut a far wider spectrum of women's issues than those it attacked.

Campbell begins with right thinking about what it is to be a person, stated with the precision of an analytical philosopher. Every individual is formed in a society and in a network of relationships with other people. Relationships range from the intimate to the remote, from first awareness of mother to myriad everyday face-to-face interactions in which numerous roles are learned or played out. So much is taken for granted in any reflective discussion about human nature, even if its significance tends constantly to be downplayed in civilizations such as our own that value enterprise and personal responsibility, and that cast one's place vis-à-vis others in terms more of rights than of affection, friendship, loyalty, and duty. That should be taken for granted in any reflective discussion about human nature. It is however downplayed or minimized in individualistic civilizations such as our own that value enterprise and personal responsibility, that emphasize rights at the expense of affection, friendship, loyalty or even duty.

Campbell argues that we often neglect the image of personhood as formed in a network of social relationships. Too often memory comes across only as a faculty for recalling facts, little more. One hears glib talk about accessing memories, thanks to an easy play of metaphor between minds and machines. Computers have RAM—Random Access Memories—where the word memory is a metaphor for a human faculty. In reverse, "access" is thought of as how people remember. It is part of this picture that memory is exactly one capacity, and that it works in a uniform way.

But of course memory stands for a host of abilities and performances. I just called it a faculty for recalling facts, and was slightly jolted when I then looked in a dictionary and read that "the central meaning conveyed by the verbs remember, recall, recollect is 'to bring an image or thought back to the mind.'" Quite right, we recall thoughts, but also faces (not images of faces, but faces). Aristotle started us out in the right direction in his lesson "On Memory and Reminiscence." He put two memory-words in the title and in his first sentence distinguished remembering from recollecting.

The last quarter of the twentieth century witnessed a frantic discussion of memory at a great many levels. Anyone wanting to write a Spenglerian tract about the decline and inevitable fall of Western life forms and empires could well start with the premise that a civilization obsessed with memory is in terminal decay. Yes, we have learned much from the debates. We recast some presuppositions, and passed through some fashions (like that of switching from talk of memory to talk of narrative). But pedestrian analysis of what we mean by the various uses we make of verbs like remember was somehow left behind. Campbell takes steps toward a partial philosophical analysis of the concept of memory, and brings it to bear on one aspect of a 1990s battle on the terrain of memory.

I did not find a very explicit definition of the "relational remembering" of her title, but one idea is clear enough. Remembering is not just a personal act of bringing past thoughts, events, or faces to mind. Children learn to use a group of words, including the verb to remember, in social settings. First with family and playmates, and then, with a vast amount of unnoticed rigor, in school. How one remembers, what sorts of objects one remembers, what memories one tells, to whom one confides them, and...