Collective remembering

JAMES V. WERTSCH

Abstract

Renewed interest in collective memory has raised the need for conceptual
elaboration of the topic and how it can be studied. In an attempt to clarify
how it fits into interdisciplinary discussion the following conceptual opposi-
tions are laid out: memory versus remembering, collective versus individual
remembering, history versus collective memory, and strong versus distrib-
uted versions of collective remembering. Collective memory is then ana-
lyzed from the perspective of M. M. Bakhtin’s understanding of ‘text’ in
which a ‘language system’ is contrasted with an ‘individual, unique, and un-
repeatable’ pole of textual analysis. These ideas are harnessed to examine
forms of dialogicality that shape collective memory, especially in politically
contested cases such as Estonian and Russian accounts of conflict over the
past century.

Keywords: collective memory; text; Bakhtin; Russia, Estonia.

‘Collective memory’ is a term widely used, yet di‰cult to define. Since the
1920s, when the father of modern collective memory studies, Maurice
Halbwachs, published his seminal works on the topic, collective memory
has surfaced occasionally as a topic of discussion in the academy, but it
has remained largely on the sidelines. Only recently has it become a topic
of serious, extended interest in the humanities and social sciences. There
remains, however, little in the way of agreement among researchers on
many basic issues, the result being that there may be as many definitions
of collective memory as there are investigators.
One of the reasons for this is that collective memory is not a topic
that fits neatly within the confines of any single academic discipline.
It has been examined by sociologists (e.g., Schudson 1992), anthropolo-
gists (e.g., Cole 2001), psychologists (e.g., Middleton and Brown 2005;

Semiotica 173–1/4 (2009), 233–247 0037–1998/09/0173–0233

DOI 10.1515/SEMI.2009.009 6 Walter de Gruyter
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234 J. V. Wertsch

Pennebaker, Paez, and Rimé 1997), historians (e.g., Bodnar 1992), and
others, but the dearth of cross-disciplinary connections remains striking.
For example, many books written by psychologists that purport to cover
the general topic of human memory include no mention of issues that go
beyond individual psychology and cognitive neuroscience. In such publi-
cations there is seldom a single mention of Halbwachs or any other figure
who has studied collective forms of remembering. Conversely, it is not
hard to find treatments of collective memory that show little knowledge
of the psychology of individual memory. In some cases, to be sure,
authors have made an e¤ort to draw on ideas and findings from a range
of fields, but the constraints of disciplinary discourse remain a real
impediment.
What this suggests is the need to go beyond the standard list of disci-
plines harnessed in studies of collective memory, and in this connection,
semiotics is an ideal candidate. Of course, this begs the question of what
kind of semiotics one has in mind, the range of possibilities being almost
endless. In what follows I shall not attempt to provide a comprehensive
review of these possibilities. Instead, I shall focus on the insights provided
by the Russian scholar Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895–1975).
Bakhtin did not formulate his claims in order to discuss collective mem-
ory, but these claims nonetheless provide essential insight into it and do
so without introducing the usual disciplinary constraints.

1. Some basic oppositions

Given the fascinating, yet unorganized state of collective memory studies,

it would be premature — and probably quite misleading — to try to pro-
vide precise definitions. To do so at this stage would involve implicit and
unexplored assumptions and create a kind of rigid formulation that al-
most begs for objections, many of which would be legitimate. Hence, in-
stead of beginning with a definition, I shall outline a few basic opposi-
tions that define the conceptual field within which collective memory is
discussed. At some point in the future, clear, widely accepted definitions
will hopefully be possible; but for the present, providing a map of the
conceptual field seems to be the most appropriate path to follow.

2. Memory versus remembering

The very term ‘memory’ can sometimes be misleading because it suggests

that what is to be studied is some sort of static object rather than a dy-

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 Collective remembering 235

namic process. To be sure, there are authors who focus on a body of

shared knowledge or information as their object of study, and this may
be entirely legitimate. But for others the term ‘collective memory’ can be
misleading or an impediment in their formulation because it downplays
process.
Several investigators take explicit notice of this issue and make the
point that instead of objects we need to be talking about some kind of on-
going, dynamic conversation, one that is typically characterized by con-
testation, politics, authority, and power. For example, the historian John
Bodnar (1992) formulates his account of ‘public memory’ in terms of the
ongoing tension between ‘o‰cial culture’ and ‘vernacular culture,’ argu-
ing that the power of the state and elites to control memory politics has
changed over the past century. And elsewhere I have argued that collec-
tive remembering is better formulated in terms of a site of contestation
than a body of structured knowledge (Wertsch 2002).
One thing that a focus on dynamic process rather than static object en-
tails is an accompanying form of semiotic analysis that will support this
orientation. As I shall argue below, this is precisely what Bakhtin’s notion
of text provides. Even while trying to keep this dynamic orientation in
focus, however, I shall often employ the term ‘collective memory,’ simply
because it is so widely used that it is next to impossible to avoid.

3. Collective versus individual remembering

The study of individual memory has attracted much more attention over
the past century and is much better organized as a professional field than
the study of collective memory. Literally thousands of studies have been
conducted in psychology, neuroscience, and related disciplines on vari-
eties of memory in the individual. Despite the fact that the findings and
terms remain open to challenge, the community studying individual
memory has arrived at a few basic distinctions and definitions that frame
the field of inquiry. Terms such as ‘episodic memory,’ ‘semantic (or
knowledge) memory,’ ‘long-term memory,’ and ‘short-term memory’ are
widely employed, even as some of their specifics are debated.
The situation in collective memory studies is quite di¤erent. In fact,
authors often employ di¤erent terms altogether, terms such as ‘habit
memory’ (Connerton 1989) or ‘public memory’ (Bodnar 1992), when dis-
cussing issues that fall under the broad umbrella of what I am calling col-
lective memory. In further contrast to research on individual memory,
where there is agreement on the basic set of methods to be employed,
the study of collective remembering has no agreed upon set of objects or

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236 J. V. Wertsch

methodological tools. Should one study written narratives about the past?
Oral performance? Commemorative rituals? Public ceremonies? Should
one employ ethnographic techniques? Narrative analysis? Historical
methods? The fact that these questions remain unanswered points to the
relative absence of organization in this field, something that can be
viewed as presenting either an unsettling obstacle or an exciting chal-
lenge. For my purposes, the main point is that it is something that clearly
distinguishes the study of collective from individual remembering.
A failure to formulate a distinction between individual and collective
memory has given rise to an unfortunate weakness of collective memory
research, namely that it sometimes invokes unmotivated parallels between
individual and collective processes. In his 1932 classic Remembering, the
father of modern psychological studies of memory, Frederic Bartlett,
warned about the ‘more or less absolute likeness [that] has been drawn
between social groups and the human individual’ (1995 [1932]: 293). In
his view, this is likely to lead to a mistaken tendency to assume that
‘whatever is attributed to the latter has been ascribed to the former’
(1995 [1932]: 293), leading to highly questionable conclusions.
It is important to note that Bartlett did not object to the claim that
the memory of individuals is influenced by the social context in which
they function. Indeed, a central point of his argument — one that Al-
berto Rosa (1996) notes has often been overlooked in contemporary
psychology — is that ‘social organization gives a persistent framework
into which all detailed recall must fit, and it very powerfully influences
both the manner and the matter of recall’ (Bartlett 1995 [1932]: 296).
But Bartlett objected to the notion that the collective, qua collective, can
be usefully characterized as having some sort of memory in its own right.
In his view such an approach ‘ought to be able to demonstrate that a
group, considered as a unit, itself actually does remember, and not merely
that it provides either the stimulus or the conditions under which in-
dividuals belonging to the group recall the past’ (Bartlett 1995 [1932]:
294).
Bartlett made these points in a critique of Halbwachs, the figure who
is largely responsible for introducing the term ‘collective memory’ into
modern academic discussion, and hence deserving of special attention.
According to Mary Douglas, Bartlett was dismissive of Halbwachs for
‘reifying collective memory into a quasi-mystic soul with its own exis-
tence’ (Douglas 1980: 16–17). Several points in Halbwachs’s writings,
however, bring Bartlett’s critique into question. For example, Halbwachs
argued that, ‘While the collective memory endures and draws strength
from its base in a coherent body of people, it is individuals as group
members who remember’ (1980: 48). This formulation is actually quite

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 Collective remembering 237

consistent with Bartlett’s call to be concerned with ‘memory in the group,

and not memory of the group’ (Bartlett 1995 [1932]: 294).
All this is not to say that every author who has used the term ‘collective
memory’ has succumbed to the kind of conceptual confusion to which
Bartlett objects. Many clearly have not. Instead, the general point is one
of caution when drawing parallels between individual and collective
memory. In particular, we should be concerned with whether these paral-
lels commit one to attributing questionable mental properties to groups
per se. Such commitments often appear in the form of implicit theoretical
or methodological assumptions rather than as explicit formulations, but
this simply makes them all the more problematic and likely to result in
conceptual confusion.

4. History versus collective memory

Another distinction that can help sort out the conceptual field in which
collective memory exists concerns history. If collective remembering is a
representation of the past, how does it di¤er from history? This is a ques-
tion that was raised in the 1920s by Halbwachs (1980, 1992), and it has
reemerged in contemporary debates in history and philosophy. It is best
viewed in terms of poles of an opposition rather than a simple, stark divi-
sion, but this makes the distinction no less important.
Jan Assmann has outlined a version of this opposition by contrasting
the fate of two figures: Moses and Akhenaten.

Unlike Moses, Akhenaten, Pharaoh Amenophis IV, was a figure exclusively of

history and not of memory. Shortly after his death, his name was erased from
the king-lists, his monuments were dismantled, his inscriptions and representa-
tions were destroyed, and almost every trace of his existence was obliterated. For
centuries, no one knew of his extraordinary revolution. Until his rediscovery in
the nineteenth century, there was virtually no memory of Akhenaten. Moses rep-
resents the reverse case. No traces have ever been found of his historical existence.
He grew and developed only as a figure of memory, absorbing and embodying all
traditions that pertained to legislation, liberation, and monotheism. (Assmann
1997: 23)

In Assmann’s account, the hallmark of memory — what I am referring to

as collective remembering — is that it has an ongoing, vital connection
with contemporary cultural discourse and identity, whereas this need not
be the case for history. When speaking of memory, Assmann asserts that
‘The past is not simply ‘received’ by the present. The present is ‘haunted’

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238 J. V. Wertsch

by the past and the past is modeled, invented, reinvented, and recon-
structed by the present’ (1997: 9).
Historians and historiographers routinely warn against practices of in-
venting, reinventing, and reconstructing the past in the service of the pres-
ent, but this is precisely what is encouraged — indeed celebrated in the
case of collective remembering. In a somewhat di¤erent, yet related vein,
the historian Peter Novick writes about this in the following terms:

To understand something historically is to be aware of its complexity, to have suf-

ficient detachment to see it from multiple perspectives, to accept the ambiguities,
including moral ambiguities, of protagonists’ motives and behavior. Collective
memory simplifies; sees events from a single, committed perspective; is impatient
with ambiguities of any kind; reduces events to mythic archetypes. (Novick 1999:
3–4)

The notion of detachment distinguishes history from memory for Ass-

mann as well. As he notes, ‘history in its radical form of positivism tends
to neutralize the past and to make it speak in its own voices, strange as
they may sound’ (1997: 22), and this di¤ers from memory, which ‘tends
to inhabit the past and to furnish it with images of its own making’
(1997: 22).
While committed to this distinction, Assmann warns against a stark
and overly simple opposition between memory and history, an opposition
that leads to ‘an all-too antiseptic conception of ‘pure facts’ as opposed to
the egocentrism of myth-making memory’ (1997: 14). For him, the key to
understanding the di¤erence between these two ways of relating to the
past is the degree to which they are shaped in accordance with, and
through the lens of, the present: ‘History turns into myth as soon as it is
remembered, narrated, and used, that is, woven into the fabric of the
present’ (1997: 14).
One way of summarizing much of what has been said up to this point is
to say that collective remembering is fundamentally tied to identity in the
present in ways that history aspires not to be. By coming to know and be-
lieve the narratives of collective memory, we come to know and believe
things about who we are today.
In accordance with Assmann’s warning against drawing overly stark
oppositions between history and memory, it is worth noting that it is
often di‰cult to categorize an account of the past neatly as being either
one or the other. For example, o‰cial histories produced by modern
states include elements of collective remembering as well as history. The
basic reason for this is that they are motivated both by an aspiration to
provide accurate accounts of the past and by the desire to produce loyal
citizens in the present.

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 Collective remembering 239

5. Strong versus distributed versions of collective remembering

Yet another opposition that defines the conceptual space surrounding

notions of collective remembering involves a distinction between what I
label ‘strong,’ as opposed to ‘distributed’ versions of collective memory.
Strong versions commit the error that Bartlett pointed out by focusing
on memory of the group rather than restricting themselves to memory in
the group. These versions assume that some sort of collective mind or
consciousness exists above and beyond the minds of the individuals in a
group.
As I have argued elsewhere (Wertsch 2002), it is possible to distinguish
among several variants of the distributed version of collective memory,
but they are similar in that: a) the representation of the past is viewed as
being shared by members of a group, but b) no commitment is made to a
collective mind of the sort envisioned in a strong version of collective
memory.
The key to avoiding the pitfalls of a strong version of collective mem-
ory is mediation, especially semiotic mediation, notions whose genealogy
can be traced to several origins. In what follows, I shall rely primarily on
the ideas of Vygotsky (1981, 1987) and Bakhtin (1986a). From this per-
spective, humans are basically sign-using animals, and the forms of action
in which we engage, especially speaking and thinking, involve an irreduc-
ible combination of an active agent and a cultural tool (Wertsch, 2002).
In the parlance of contemporary cognitive science, human action, includ-
ing speaking, thinking, and remembering, is ‘distributed’ between agent
and cultural tool and hence cannot be attributed to either one in isolation.
This is a line of reasoning that has been developed by figures such as
Merlin Donald (1991), who argues that the sort of semiotic mediation I
have in mind emerged as part of the last of three major transitions in
human cognitive evolution. This transition involved ‘the emergence of vi-
sual symbolism and external memory as major factors in cognitive archi-
tecture’ (1991: 17). At this point in cognitive evolution the primary engine
of change was not within the individual. Instead, it was the emergence
and widespread use of ‘external symbolic storage’ such as written texts,
financial records, and so forth. At the same time, however, Donald em-
phasizes that the transition does not leave the psychological or neural
processes in the individual unchanged: ‘the external symbolic system im-
poses more than an interface structure on the brain. It imposes search
strategies, new storage strategies, new memory access routes, new options
in both the control of and analysis of one’s own thinking’ (1991: 19).
A major reason for introducing the notion of semiotic mediation, then,
is that it allows us to speak of collective remembering without becoming

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240 J. V. Wertsch

committed to a strong version account. In this connection it is worth not-

ing that although Halbwachs did not give textual mediation the degree of
importance it would have in an analysis grounded in mediated action, he
clearly did recognize it as a legitimate part of the story. In a striking par-
allel with Donald, he argued that

there is . . . no point in seeking where . . . [memories] are preserved in my brain or

in some nook of my mind to which I alone have access: for they are recalled by
me externally, and the groups of which I am a part at any given time give me the
means to reconstruct them. (Halbwachs 1992: 38)

In describing the collective memory of musicians, Halbwachs fleshed this

out in the following terms:

With su‰cient practice, musicians can recall the elementary commands [of written
notations that guide their performance]. But most cannot memorize the complex
commands encompassing very extensive sequences of sounds. Hence they need to
have before them sheets of paper on which all the signs in proper succession are
materially fixed. A major portion of their remembrances are conserved in this
form — that is, outside themselves in the society of those who, like themselves,
are interested exclusively in music. (Halbwachs 1980: 183)

In analyzing such phenomena Halbwachs focused primarily on the role of

social groups in organizing memory and memory cues and said relatively
little about the semiotic means employed. In what follows, I place these
semiotic means front and center. It is precisely this step that encourages
us to talk about collective remembering without presupposing a strong
version of it. Instead of positing the vague mnemonic agency that is a
thread running through the members of a group, the claim is that they
share a representation of the past precisely because they share the same
basic set of semiotic resources.

6. Bakhtin’s account of text

The approach to collective remembering outlined so far begs the question

of what forms of semiotic mediation might be involved. Specifically, what
sorts of signs are involved in distributed memory such that they are con-
sistent with the claims proposed about the opposition between collective
and individual remembering and between memory and history? It is in
this connection that I propose Bakhtin’s notion of ‘text.’

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 Collective remembering 241

In an article ‘The problem of text in linguistics, philology, and the

human sciences: An experiment in philosophical analysis,’ Bakhtin out-
lined ‘two poles’ of text.

Each text presupposes a generally understood (that is, conventional within a given
collective) system of signs, a language (if only the language of art) . . . And so be-
hind each text stands a language system. Everything in the text that is repeated
and reproduced, everything repeatable and reproducible, everything that can be
given outside a given text (the given) conforms to this language system. But at
the same time each text (as an utterance) is individual, unique, and unrepeatable,
and herein lies its entire significance (its plan, the purpose for which it was cre-
ated) . . . With respect to this aspect, everything repeatable and reproducible
proves to be material, a means to an end. The second aspect (pole) inheres in the
text itself, but is revealed only in a particular situation and in a chain of texts (in
the speech communication of a given area). (Bakhtin 1986b: 105)

Bakhtin is best known for his theory of the utterance, a concern that is
reflected in the assertion that the ‘entire significance [of a text] (its plan,
the purpose for which it was created)’ can be traced to its ‘individual,
unique, and unrepeatable’ pole. In what follows, however, I shall focus
largely on the other pole of text, the one concerned with ‘repeatable and
reproducible’ elements provided by a ‘language system’ that is ‘conven-
tional within a given collective.’
The first inclination of those influenced by ideas from contemporary
linguistics would be to understand what Bakhtin called a ‘language sys-
tem’ in terms of morphology, syntax, and semantics. This, however, re-
flects a perspective other than what Bakhtin had in mind. His account of
the repeatable and reproducible pole of text does recognize these ele-
ments, but it also includes a second level of organization in the ‘language
system’ and a corresponding second level of analysis. In this view the first
level has to do with the structural analysis of decontextualized sentences
and the second focuses on ‘social languages,’ ‘speech genres,’ and the
‘chain of texts’ in which a text or utterance appears.
Formulating Bakhtin’s ideas in terms of a perspective more familiar to
Western readers, Michael Holquist writes:

‘Communication’ as Bakhtin uses the term does indeed cover many of the aspects
of Saussure’s parole, for it is concerned with what happens when real people in all
the contingency of their myriad lives actually speak to each other. But Saussure
conceived the individual language user to be an absolutely free agent with the
ability to choose any words to implement a particular intention. Saussure con-
cluded, not surprisingly that language as used by heterogeneous millions of such
willful subjects was unstudiable, a chaotic jungle beyond the capacity of science to
domesticate. (Holquist 1986: xvi)

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242 J. V. Wertsch

Accepting this stark Saussurean opposition means that learning a lan-

guage is a process of mastering a set of rules of langue. Furthermore, it
assumes that the appropriate use of language forms involves some combi-
nation of individual choice and cultural context. In short, issues of lan-
guage use and of how utterances are shaped by their positioning in a
‘chain of texts’ fall outside the framework of what is properly considered
language.
Holquist (1986) emphasizes that one of Bakhtin’s insights was that the
semiotic world need not be divided up so starkly as the langue-parole dis-
tinction suggests. In this regard, Bakhtin wrote

the single utterance, with all its individuality and creativity, can in no way be re-
garded as a completely free combination of forms of language, as is supposed, for
example by Saussure (and by many other linguists after him), who juxtaposed the
utterance (la parole), as a purely individual act, to the system of language as a
phenomenon that is purely social and mandatory for the individuum. (Bakhtin
1986a: 81)

Instead, as Holquist notes,

Bakhtin . . . begins by assuming that individual speakers do not have the kind of
freedom parole assumes they have. The problem here is that the great Genevan
linguist overlooks the fact that ‘in addition to the forms of languages there are
also forms of combinations of these forms. (Holquist 1986: xvi)

What Bakhtin has to say about these forms of combinations of forms

amounts to a call for a second level of analysis associated with the pole
of text having to do with what is ‘repeated and reproduced.’ It expands
what needs to be taken into account when talking about a ‘language sys-
tem’ or ‘a generally understood (that is, conventional within a given col-
lective) system of signs.’ By taking these comments into account we are
naturally led to ask a di¤erent set of questions about the semiotic media-
tion of collective remembering. In particular, we are led to recognize a
form of dynamism in the forms of semiotic mediation involved, and
hence in remembering itself.
The key to understanding the implications of Bakhtin’s insights is his
concept of ‘dialogism’ and the related notions of ‘voice’ and ‘multivoiced-
ness.’ Throughout his writings Bakhtin emphasized that a defining prop-
erty of utterances is that they exist only in dialogic contact with other ut-
terances and hence are ‘filled with dialogic overtones’ (1986b: 102). It is
this dialogic contact that provides the key to understanding the second
level of phenomena involved in Bakhtin’s second pole of text.

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 Collective remembering 243

Key to understanding this issue is Bakhtin’s assumption that the word

never belongs solely to the speaker; instead, is it always ‘half someone
else’s’ (1981: 293), the result being the inherent multivoicedness of
utterances.

[The word] becomes ‘one’s own’ only when the speaker populates it with his own
intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own
semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the
word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not after all, out
of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other peo-
ple’s mouths, in other people’s concrete contexts, serving other people’s inten-
tions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own. (Bakh-
tin 1981: 293–294)

When dealing with utterances from the perspective of Bakhtin’s first pole
of text, contemporary sociolinguistic analyses have little trouble making
sense of the phenomena involved. For example, his claims are consistent
with analyses of how utterances can be co-constructed or how they can be
abbreviated responses to a question (Speaker 1: ‘What time is it?’ Speaker
2: ‘Two forty-five.’).
What is significant, however, is that Bakhtin saw the claim about
words being half someone else’s as applying to language — not text or ut-
terance. And this raises the issue once again of a level of analysis that
goes beyond the categories of langue and parole. Specifically, it involves
a level of language phenomena that exist as collectively shared social facts
about the organization of utterances, on the one hand, but are not reduc-
ible to standard accounts of grammatical categories, on the other.
In an attempt to get at what Bakhtin had in mind in this regard, it is
useful to introduce a distinction between ‘local dialogue’ and ‘generalized
collective dialogue.’ Local dialogue is what Bakhtin sometimes called
the ‘primordial dialogism of discourse’ (1981: 275) and involves ways in
which one speaker’s concrete utterances come into contact with, or ‘inter-
animate,’ the utterances of another. This form of dialogic interanimation
involves ‘direct, face-to-face vocalized verbal communication between
persons’ (Voloshinov 1973: 95) and is what usually comes to mind first
when we encounter the term ‘dialogue.’
For Bakhtin, however, the voices of multiple speakers come into con-
tact at the level of generalized collective dialogue as well, and this leads
to additional ways in which words can be ‘filled with dialogic overtones’
(1986a: 102). The notion of generalized collective dialogue has to do
with ways that utterances may reflect the voice of others, including entire
groups, who are not physically present in the immediate speech situation.

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244 J. V. Wertsch

From his writings it is clear that Bakhtin had something like this dis-
tinction in mind. He viewed dialogue as ranging from the face-to-face pri-
mordial dialogue of discourse noted above, which falls under the heading
of localized dialogue, to ongoing, potentially society-wide interchanges,
which fall under the heading of generalized collective dialogue. An ad-
dressee can be

an immediate participant-interlocutor in an everyday dialogue, a di¤erentiated

collective of specialists in some particular area of cultural communication, a
more or less di¤erentiated public, ethnic group, contemporaries, like-minded peo-
ple, opponents and enemies, a subordinate, a superior, someone who is lower,
higher, familiar, foreign, and so forth. And it can also be an indefinite, unconcre-
tized other.’ (Bakhtin 1986a: 95)

7. Dialogically organized textual resources and collective remembering

The approach to collective remembering outlined here gives central place

to semiotic mediation. Specifically, it gives central place to dialogically
organized textual resources as envisioned by Bakhtin. On the one hand,
this means that memory cannot be equated, or reduced to semiotic medi-
ation in isolation because the ‘individual, unique, and unrepeatable’ pole
of text ensures a role for an active agent in a concrete context. On the
other hand, because the word always is ‘half someone else’s,’ any account
of the past reflects resources provided by a broader sociocultural setting,
and as envisioned by Bakhtin these entail the tendency toward contesta-
tion, opposition, and other forms of dialogic encounter. Among the forms
of dialogicality suggested by his analysis, I shall focus on one in partic-
ular and its implications for collective remembering. This is what Bakhtin
termed ‘hidden dialogicality.’

Imagine a dialogue of two persons in which the statements of the second speaker
are omitted, but in such a way that the general sense is not at all violated. The
second speaker is present invisibly, his words are not there, but deep traces left
by these words have a determining influence on all the present and visible words
of the first speaker. We sense that this is a conversation, although only one person
is speaking, and it is a conversation of the most intense kind, for each present, ut-
tered word responds and reacts with its every fiber to the invisible speaker, points
to something outside itself, beyond its own limits, to the unspoken words of an-
other person. (Bakhtin 1984: 197)

As an illustration of the implications of hidden dialogicality for collective

remembering, consider the analysis that Tulviste and Wertsch (1994) have

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 Collective remembering 245

provided of o‰cial and uno‰cial history in Soviet Estonia. They argue

that the emergence of uno‰cial history among ethnic Estonians derived
from precisely the kind of dynamic outlined by Bakhtin. In this case the
two voices involved were the Soviet authorities and the historical narra-
tive they produced in public institutions such as schools, on the one hand,
and the responses produced by ethnic Estonians in nonpublic spheres
such as families and peer groups, on the other.
These responses were grounded largely in personally meaningful obser-
vations of individuals, but they were shaped by the textual resources pro-
vided by the culture of resistance in which they lived. Specifically, the tex-
tual resources they shared were largely organized around an e¤ort to
rebut the o‰cial Soviet account. This tendency that was so central that
uno‰cial collective remembering consisted of little other than counter
narratives whose driving force was the need to refute o‰cial accounts of
the past.
This case illustrates several of the points made above about collective
remembering. First, it reveals a kind of dynamism, something that is all
the more striking given that it existed in a setting where state authorities
tried to stamp out resistance and contestation. Second, this dynamism is
not something that can be reduced to individual processes. Instead, there
was consistency among ethnic Estonians in their account of uno‰cial his-
tory, something that suggests the shared textual resources that helped
constitute the community of resistance. And third, the dynamism in-
volved in the hidden dialogue between o‰cial and uno‰cial history was
made possible, indeed, was almost built into, the semiotic resources em-
ployed. The Bakhtinian ‘language system’ that was involved included re-
peated and reproducible elements, but these went far beyond grammatical
organization and introduced politically situated voices that invited resis-
tance, rebuttal, and other forms of dialogic encounter.
A final feature of the forms of semiotic mediation involved in this epi-
sode of collective remembering is that they operated in a largely uncon-
scious manner. In such instances, individuals often state that they are
simply reporting ‘what really happened.’ That is, they assume a form of
semiotic mediation that recognizes the relationship between signs and a
referential world of events and objects, but overlook the degree to which
the textual resources employed are dialogically situated and shaped. The
result is that we often fail to recognize the extent to which collective
remembering is a fundamentally political process that is shaped by the
dialogic textual resources employed. Hidden dialogicality is indeed hid-
den and can lead to rigid and implacable confrontation when two parties
both present what they honestly take to be accounts of ‘what really
happened.’

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246 J. V. Wertsch

8. Conclusion

In sum, semiotic analysis provides important tools for bringing order to

the otherwise chaotic and fragmented field of collective memory studies.
While the definition of collective remembering may remain unsettled at
this point, some appreciation of the range of options can be derived by
situating discussions in terms of the oppositions between: memory versus
remembering, collective versus individual remembering, collective re-
membering versus history, and strong versus distributed versions of col-
lective remembering. The focus of the present article is on distributed ver-
sions of collective remembering.
With this as background, I have argued that the ideas of Bakhtin pro-
vide a useful framework for integrating studies across disciplines and for
avoiding some of the reductionist, strong versions of collective memory
analysis that emerge all too easily, often in implicit form. Building on
the notion of semiotic mediation and associated claims about a distrib-
uted version of collective remembering, Bakhtin’s notion of dialogically
organized text was introduced. The fact that the ‘language system’ envi-
sioned by Bakhtin includes the dialogical orientations of generalized col-
lective dialogue as well as standard grammatical elements means that it
introduces an essential element of dynamism into collective remembering.
It is this element that helps account for the dynamic political dimension
of collective remembering and how it might change over time.

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James V. Wertsch (b. 1947) is a Professor and Director of the McDonnell International
Scholars Academy at Washington University [email protected]. His research interests
include national narratives, collective memory, national identity, and language and thought.
His publications include Vygotsky and the Social Formation of Mind (1985); Voices of the
Mind (1991); Mind as Action (1998); and Voices of Collective Remembering (2002).

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