Conclusion: Collected Memory

Susan Sontag wrote that, “Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as collective memory--part of the same family of spurious notions as collective guilt. But there is collective instruction...What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds.”[1] 

We typically think of commemoration and public memorial as an example of collective memory, but we must recognize the ways in which collective memory is a sort of fiction. There is no singular, shared reservoir of memory. We have is not collective memory, but collected memories. Collective memory suggests a natural phenomenology, whereas collected memory suggests authorship and intent. As Sontag argues, our conception of collective memory is more like a collective instruction and, as such, we must be aware of the institutions and powers that structure and give us our collected memories.

This seems an important idea to keep in mind while viewing commemoration and public memorialization of 1812 in Moscow. We see that over the years and under the influence of different sorts of power, the “collective memory” of the event seems radically different – to the point of construction and reconstruction of the same site. Perhaps what we see on this tour of Moscow is a record of memories and the backward-facing viewpoints of a culture interpreting its own history at different points. Such a tour privileges us to a certain flux of an urban area’s relationship to its history and how this history is differentially recognized, historicized, or instrumentalized.