Cultural Memory in the Digital

Good Night, Jan Assmann.

Jan Assmann, a german egyptologist, archeologist, semiologist, historian and intellectual, died two days ago (link in german) at the age of 85 in the city of Konstanz, where he taught at the university together with his wife Aleida since the 1960s. Their cultural and academic influence was massive, and their works on semiotics and history is unvaluable.

Together with his wife Aleida, he coined the term of cultural memory, in which societies express their heritage in monuments, scripture and, most importantly, canons, in an intergenerational dialogue that is foundational for all culture, politics and our image of the world. I’ve read his book on the topic twice (and i’m reading a book from his wife on semiotics right now).

This concept informed a lot of my thinking about digital cultures and how they differentiate from previous cultures, because the digital inherently knows no mechanisms for cultural memory. The web and the digital at large works as a humanly written RAM, which anyone with access can read and write and which happens on a grand scale in every second of every minute of the day, inscribing our collective short-term-memory with fleeting memetic expressions of stuff that happened.

As W. David Marx in No Canon for Old Memes correctly writes, "Memes are cheap, fast, and disposable. They lose their cultural value instantly (...) Memes should be understood as a medium for expression on contemporary matters. But what is said or celebrated at any moment is only meant for that moment."

There is no mechanism for a longterm cultural memory in the digital, everything stays fluid and is edited by a giant swarm of humans in every moment. The digital turns cultural memory in a constant river of changing cultural expressions.

But a cultural memory by definition is fixed, it’s canonized knowledge, it expresses itself over time in crystalized shapes and in things that shall not be changed. Society memorizes its history in mythologies, expressed in the arts, in rituals, in literature, in architecture and monuments, in a shared practice of doing things. Comparable to the biological neural memory in the single human brain we collectively write our history into culture.

This results in canons, which in their purest form are collections of holy scriptures that, after an initual phase of formative writing, become unchangeable by means of a social contract of agreement. The canon and the monument is what lies outside of our daily fights over meanings, it is what forms societywide consensus reality.

But canons are not limited to scripture, any form of collective cultural expression develops canons, from movies to music to skateboarding, and the canon is always in a resonant dialogue with cultural evolution and innovation, the unchangeable always talks to the yet unknown at the fringes, which, possibly, maybe, by human engagement and collective willpower, over time, one day may become canonized too.

This resonance between the fixed canonized and the innovative expands cultural spacetime and the way Jimi Hendrix shreds his guitar, one day, after many iterations and ritualizations, becomes, too, a way we do things in this society, and the formerly innovator enters the canon of guitar shredding.

The digital is inherently incompatible with this way of collective memorization, the very foundation of what glues societies together and makes them work in the long run. There is “no canon for old memes”, and cultural practice in the digital is in an ever changing, never remembered flux.

Because there is no mechanism for canonization in the digital, it has done great damage to societies' cultural memory, to our collective mnemonic devices for intergenerational dialogue about who we are and what we do and how we do it.

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Truth is what connects us

In their 2018 acceptance speech for the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, Jan Assmann and his wife Aleida quoted german psychiatrist Karl Jaspers who said that "truth is what connects us", the stories we tell, the memes we share, the monuments we errect and the canons we collectively agree upon, in an act of "persistent cultural labor".

But that "truth which connects us" in the digital is changing in every nanosecond. There is no long term memory in digital culture, no collective intergenerational mnemonic device to recall the historic, the relevant and the important over generations. There is a lot of "persistent cultural labor", but it always stays fluid and momentary, a shapeshifting swarm of cultural expression that provides a prismatic truth in a billion interpretations of events, but those never converge on a consensus reality, they are never agreed upon and thus, they are not memorized in an unchanging manner. There is no ROM (Read Only Memory) in digital culture.

Cultural memory as per Jan Assmann is also inherently violent, to which a human history rich in age long religious wars over canonized scriptures and crystalized ideologies, a myriad of toppled monuments and tore down palaces, lay testament. The absence of mechanisms for fixed cultural memories in digital informed societies in which we collectively construct collective identities along shared histories, myths and stories, is bound to create a good deal of chaos within those societies, which is exactly what we see today.

Again, the Assmanns quote Karl Jaspers, who identified Untruth as "the inherently evil, that destroys any peace", and which comes in many shapes, from "from veiling to blind carelessness, from lies to self deception, from thoughtlessness to doctrinaire fanaticism, from the inauthentic individual to the untruthfulness of the public condition". They continue that the "universe of communication has become infinitely more rich, flexible and diverse" but also "significantly more chaotic and above all, more uncertain".

It is this uncertainty in cultural memory which causes neverending culture wars over the meanings of recent history, and in the constant flux of the digital we can never agree, never form consensus, never canonize what shapes our identities and makes us who we are. With the loss of reliable mechanisms for the formation of cultural memory in digital informed societies, we are in great danger of losing our very collective selves.

The Internet Archive as a webcultural institution is one way to work against this fluidity of the medium, to form a constant image that remains and stays reliable. But the Internet Archive does not canonize, it is just a constantly evolving, additive snapshot chunk of a swarming activity. It’s success at being a component of true cultural memory for the digital is, at least, debatable.

In their acceptance speech, the Assmans also said: “It is absolutely fundamental that we can trust each other.” In the digital, trust is fundamentally impossible.

And this thought keeps me up all night.

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I first read Jan Assmanns writings on cultural memory seven years ago, and despite his books are pretty much exclusively about ancient history in Egypt and Israel, his thinking stays highly relevant in this new age of the digital and provides some necessary historic larger frameworks that a lot of network theorizing lacks.

Goodnite Jan, and thanks for all the histories.

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