If self identity is built on personal memories, is public identity built on history?
In times of war like this, when reports of mass deaths, haphazard aid packages and derailed foreign partnerships make the news everyday, the one big question is: when will it all end?
Then there is that other question, perhaps even more important than the first; when it does end and how should we collectively remember these times as it recedes into the past?
Memory is a broad term. Remembering, recollecting, mnemonics, history; these are all forms of memory which have been studied and discussed since the ancient greeks. But in 17th century the English Empiricist John Locke transformed the discourse of memory by bringing light onto the correlation between identity and memory, how the latter becomes the foundation for the definition of the self. This concerned episodic memory, those that derive from personal history that we can store, interpret and recall at our convenience.
On the contrary, public memory and collective identity is more complex; although it is based on real events, those subjected to the art of public memory making have rarely had first person experience of them. Unlike personal memories that can be recalled, public memories are made, curated and displayed. I started thinking about this when I moved to London in 2016. A city of numerous monuments and public sculptures, there is a sense of unification founded upon the “blood, toil, tears and sweat” shed by great leaders, men and women whose names are constantly reminded as I walk around the city.
Every country needs that defining historical moment that brings its people together. Usually, tragedies have served as effective political tactics for this than victories; colonisation and war crimes tend to linger much longer in the cultural discourse than the technological breakthroughs like the moon landing — the latter are simply “achievements” while tragedies and deaths become engrained into the very identity of that nation.
My home country, South Korea, has tactfully used its history of colonisation to re-invent itself since its liberation from the Japanese occupation in 1945. In tandem with the rapid industrialisation in the 1960s, it adopted a new identity; the victims who rose from rock bottom, the rebels that won independence, the oppressed who prevailed against poverty and violence. Even before the Japanese colonial era, the Korean peninsula had almost always been under Chinese influence until the early modern period; the recently demolished age system was also a remnant of that history (Japan eliminated the system at the wake of the Meiji Restoration).
The Korean identity is moored to a peculiar victim mentality sandwiched between proud nationalists desperate to distance themselves from China, and those with deep self-loathing of being the losers whose economy, culture, technology and tradition all lag behind its former coloniser in every way.
Such public identity as a nation is carefully crafted through the means of literature, early education, and public art. Authorities can choose what, how, and to what lengths an event should be remembered. While the history of colonisation and stories of crime wars are drilled into South Korean children from a young age, the Japanese government have omitted such details from their education curricula.
But what becomes of a nation if the entirety of its identity solely depends on the historiographies of victimisation? Digital platforms of the network society makes it easier for people to become trapped in debates about the technicalities of historical terms and causal relations. What are the roots of the Israel-Palestine war? Were the bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki necessary? When was America really great? Such debates evolve over time as new findings from research emerge. History pertains to accuracy and exists in the intellectual realm. Collective memory, and its successful making of, should exist in the sensual realm as it embodies itself in the present through rituals, commemorations and celebrations.
Sites of collective memory may be dedicated to the deceased, but their purpose is inherently rooted for the future generations. The monument is set in eternal motion towards the future, yet continuously refers itself back to the past, to the events that reside in the conscious of fewer and fewer people, until there comes a point when it stops reproducing and starts producing. Like the ultimate antithesis to the ending of The Great Gatsby:
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past”
Urban monuments and memorials should provide space for this abstract temporal system behind public memory making. When the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe by Peter Eisenman was first erected in 2003, some criticised its lack of information and abstraction of the message. The same could be said of Brancusi’s Infinite Column (1937), a monument for the Romanian soldiers of WWI. Personally, I see these works as minimalistic rather than abstract, but their form renders such arguments meaningless. Like all memories, collective memory is also subject to reconstruction and distortion. The rows of concrete slabs and the repeating rhombus prisms are solid structures, motionless forms that allow others to roam around and in it. As time passes, the form will determine the public’s identity.
