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Memory and Culture in Social Movements

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DOI: 10.1057/9781137385796_10

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Chapter 10 in Conceptualizing Culture in Social Movement Research,

edited by Britta Baumgarten, Priska Daphi, and Peter Ullrich.
Palgrave, Oct 2014.

Memory and Culture in Social Movements

Nicole Doerr ndoerr@mtholyoke.edu

When telling alternative stories on the Internet and in street protest, activists publicize

memories excluded from national history books and mainstream media audiences. At the

same time, officials also publicize claims for apology and repair in official public

commemorations created for reconciliation. How do social movements construct and use

memory, and how does the politics of memory shape cultural meaning-making in

movements? To begin answering this question, my contribution brings together a cultural

sociology of social movements with an interdisciplinary analysis of memory drawing on

psychoanalytical, visual, and historical approaches. Movement scholars who focused on

narrative, discourse, framing, and performance show how activists actively construct and

mobilize collective memory. We know much less, however, about interactions between

multiple layers and forms of remembering stored in images, stories, or performances, or

discursive forms. How do conflicting or contradictory memories about the past inside

movement groups condition activists’ ability to speak, write, and even think about the future?

While previous work conceived of memory in movements as a subcategory of narrative,

discourse, and framing, my central point is to understand how memory itself structures these

forms of meaning-making – as an independent and multidimensional category of cultural

analysis. Students of memory outside the field of social movements have critically evaluated
the conflicting making of memories and silences by different actors. Based on this work I

develop a multidimensional conceptualization of memory in movements which helps us to

understand why and when memories, even if transmitted informally or implicitly as “hidden”

stories, images, or frames, have a powerful impact for a movement’s ability to change the

future.

Introduction

Like religious groups, ethnic minorities, or nations, social movements have tried to

commemorate their shared past in order to imagine future collective action and relationships

with other groups. However, we lack systematic research on how memory itself conditions or

constrains collective action in present-day social movements. Only recently, scholars have

addressed the gap in research on the political impact of commemorative events in movements,

asking for comparative studies on the global diffusion of mnemonic practices (Armstrong and

Crage 2006:746; see also Daphi 2013; Zamponi and Daphi forthcoming). While numerous

movement scholars mention memory’s impact in relation to other aspects of culture, such as

narrative and discourse, performance or framing, few have studied how memory shapes these

various cultural practices themselves. Indeed, much work has conceived of memory as a

subcategory of narrative, discourse, and framing as the more central category of analysis. In

order to address this gap, I will propose a multidimensional understanding of memory that

explores how various mnemonic practices such as story, image, discourse, and performance

interact with each other, conditioning social movements’ future. My argument follows two

main lines: By addressing memory as a central category of cultural analysis, my motivation is

to discuss how scholars in the interdisciplinary field of memory studies have problematized

the multidimensional, conflicting, constraining, and enabling dynamics of memory, which

have not systematically been considered by students of social movements. Based on this

discussion, I will propose ways of seeing memory as an independent variable that influences
activists’ politics of framing, narrative, discourse, and performance, and through this also

influences what movements actually are.

Movement theorists in the wake of the “cultural turn” have conceptualized and

explored culture as stored in stories, narrative, and discursive forms (Polletta 2006:187), and

they have examined its emotional (Goodwin, Jasper, and Polletta 2001), performative

(Alexander 2006), and ritualized dynamics (Collins 2005). The cultural turn also inspired a

parallel “boom” in memory studies (Olick, Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Levy 2011). However, the

huge and growing field of cultural memory studies remained somewhat insulated – too big to

address other related fields (Olick and Robbins 1997). Social movement scholars for their part

have not yet, in my view, conceived of memory in a systematic way in its various forms and

formats of transmission or actors, such as career groups, which make and unmake cultural

history (Zemon-Davis 1983). True, numerous empirical studies that present social movement

groups are influenced by past ones. However, few have thought about memory as an

“independent variable” which structures, infiltrates, and influences other forms of cultural

expression. As an exception, Elisabeth Armstrong and Suzanna Crage (2006) demonstrate

how the narrative construction of the “Stonewall Myth” enabled future gay rights

mobilizations and commemorations – but again, they felt compelled to orient their analysis

alongside the literature of narrative and political event analysis rather than focusing on

memory as a central category of analysis.

While the cultural turn in movement studies inspired numerous studies on narrative,

discourse (or deliberation), and emotion, few scholars mention the active construction or

problematic and constraining role of memory, which has increasingly gained attention among

students of memory outside movements. “Collective memory vibrates—it is essentially

committed to being provisional” writes Robin Wagner-Pacifici (Wagner-Pacifici 1996:301),

urging scholars to pay attention to the provisional making of the content of memory
depending on the diversity of its form, coded and translated within and across events. Other

authors debate activists’ impact on the contested construction of a global memory of the

Holocaust (Levy and Sznaider 2006), or on the narrative construction of European memory

(Eder 2009). In a recent move, cultural theorist Aleida Assmann and her colleagues have just

recently done cross-national comparative work highlighting the role of transnational

discursive public spaces created by social movements and civic groups in order to make

visible silenced stories and memories of violent exclusion of women, migrants, and minorities

(Assmann and Conrad 2010). At the same time, postcolonial and feminist scholars and

historical sociologists have criticized universal ideas of European and cosmopolitan memory

as essentialist (Zolberg 1998:583), and have discussed the marginalization of non-white and

non-western movements’ perspectives (Mohanty 2003).

Some theorists of memory, such as Assmann, therefore choose a critical approach, that

is, an approach that distinguishes among the different types and functions of contested

collective memory a cultural (i.e. an official, consciously transmitted), and a communicative

function (Assmann 1992; Levy and Robbins 1997). I perceive of the distinction between

cultural and communicative memory as an interesting point of connection with existing

concepts of cultural analysis in social movement studies. Moreover, cultural theorists of

memory conceptualize communicative memory as composed of “residues of the past in

language or communication” (Levy and Robbins 1997:111–112). This suggests that the

communicative function of memory itself constrains ways of imagining the future through

“the very ability to communicate in language” (ibid.). Transposed to social movement studies,

this suggests that all practices of meaning-making – for example, framing, discourse,

narrative, and performance – are conditioned by the contingent making of communicative and

cultural memory. Memories are transmitted or silenced in various ways and by various

mnemonic practices that are accessible to activists in different generations who operate in
different, sometimes extremely repressive, contexts of “culturalized ignorance” (Einwohner

2009:1). The understanding of culture that I will propose intends to connect these studies in

the separate fields of memory and culture in movements. With this project, my own

perspective is distinct from existing definitions of memory in at least two ways.

First, there is a tendency in cultural history and literary studies of memory to focus on

specific cases of commemoration in movements or ritualized performances of remembrance

as if they were a text – which one can “read” independent from the existence of a broader

movement and collective action behind its construction (see, critically, Zemon-Davis 1983).

This risks neglecting the active construction of memory by actual groups and individuals in

movements (Armstrong and Crage 2006), something which has been highlighted by

movement scholars working on the strategic use of and symbolic fights about memory among

elites in movements and institutionalized politics (Polletta 2006:148). James Jasper, for

example, shows the time-consuming work of characterization that activists need to do in order

to create a political hero figure which commemorates the past in glorious, caricaturist, or

other ways (Jasper forthcoming).

Secondly, my approach also differs from the aforementioned studies of culture in

movements. Indeed, when studying culture through social movements’ stories or frames,

analysts conceived of memory as a subcategory of certain other independent variables –

narrative and discourse, performance, framing, or emotion. Instead, I will explore how

memory is a multidimensional category connecting different concepts and fields of analysis.

Here I conceive of memory as a “multidimensional” category of culture in order to highlight

and problematize mnemonic practices of transmission which we may study in different,

interrelated forms such as image, text, story, and performance. My idea about

multidimensionality is inspired by the work on memory by Michael Schudson (1992) and the

focus on the actors behind various (multiple) layers of memory-making by Natalie Zemon
Davis (Zemon Davis 1983). As will be shown, these authors problematize the contradictory

and contested construction of memory and its multiple ways of interpretation that structure

present-day politics and interaction between activists and officials, ordinary people and elites.

For example, Schudson reveals how political activists combine multiple mnemonic forms

such as image, narrative, and performance and use their ambivalent open-ended character in

public to subvert monolithic memories transmitted through official discursive media.

In the following, I will apply the multidimensional understanding of memory as

developed in the interdisciplinary field of memory studies to the field of social movements.

First, I discuss how social movement theories in the fields of narrative, framing and discourse,

and performance debate the politics of memory. I problematize the contingent and

contradictory dynamics of memory that have been neglected but which are, nevertheless,

particularly relevant for understanding conflicts about democracy, or particular frames or

identities in present, intergenerational movement groups. I address these gaps through the

work by cultural historians (Assmann 2005) and psychoanalysts (Olick and Levy 1997;

Schwab 2011) who studied stories’ and images’ potential to mediate and transmit silenced

experiences of trauma. Third, I discuss how memory scholars have conceived of the visual

dimension of memory, which has relevant insights for a multidimensional analysis for the

emerging fields of visual analysis and character work in social movements. After having

discussed the theoretical relevance of cultural approaches to memory, I will give examples

that illustrate how to apply their interdisciplinary conceptual toolkit to the empirical field of

culture in social movements. Although this is beyond the scope of this chapter, it would be

particularly interesting to include the perspectives of contentious politics and contentious

performances (Tilly 2003), and ritual (Collins 2005), on memory in social movements.
Movement scholars: How movements construct and

use memory

Social movement scholars have approached memory through the perspectives of framing,

discourse, narrative, and performance. While each of these traditions was interested in

particular aspects of memory and commemoration, all highlight the contingent patterns of

active forgetting and selective transmission – the active making of memory by activists or by

their opponents. Focusing on framing and on the remembering and forgetting of social

movements, some scholars were able to explain the success or failure of future protest. For

example, Rachel Einwohner’s (2009) comparative study on the mobilization of Jewish

resistance against the Nazis in three Eastern European cities explores how selective memory

or “cultured ignorance” may constrain political resistance in situations of extreme threat: In

three attempted ghetto uprisings in Vilnius, Warsaw, and Lodz, Einwohner demonstrates,

young Jewish resistance groups tried to convince elder community members to mobilize

collective resistance against the Nazis. The two attempts in Vilnius and Lodz failed, where a

prevailing positive memory frame of the German occupiers as rational, modern, culturalized

army elites subverted existing evidence of planned genocide. Only in the specific context of

Warsaw where resistance groups were able to change the dominant positive memory of

German army elites did mobilization and resistance succeed (ibid.). In discussing the

discursive construction of memory in relation to the Holocaust in the German national context

of parliamentary debates, Jeffrey Olick and Daniel Levy’s study shows that “(t)he relationship

between remembered pasts and constructed presents is one of perpetual but differentiated

constraint and renegotiation over time, rather than pure strategic invention in the present or

fidelity to (or inability to escape from) a monolithic legacy” (Olick and Levy 1997:937).

Historical sociological studies have thus used (critical) discursive approaches to explore the
role of taboo as a powerful means of political contention that makes memory matter for

present movement groups (ibid:922).

Scholars interested in narrative and storytelling in social movements explore how

memory is constructed through narrative forms. Gay rights activists strategically constructed

events for memorization that allow them to sustain their movements across time and space

(Armstrong and Crage 2006). Such memories also leave a political impact in present

mainstream politics. In It was like a Fever, Francesca Polletta accounts for how African

American legislators in the Senate and in Congress invoked Dr Martin Luther King in order to

promote policy change or legitimate their own position within congressional debates. In

understanding memory as narrative “stored in stories”, Francesca Polletta argues that stories

contingently connect present social movements with past ones. In documenting how

Democrats and Republicans interpreted Dr King’s famous statement “I have a dream” most

differently, Polletta demonstrates how an American dream of individualism at times came to

replace the more disruptive, activist character of King, his dreaming of social rights, and his

radical critique of capitalism in his last speeches delivered before his death. Polletta illustrates

the political impact of memory stored in competing stories about the civil rights movement

which served as “a crucial terrain to fight out continuous leadership claims between protest

elites and electoral ones” (Polletta 2002:165).

If we read Polletta’s analysis carefully and through a multidimensional perspective on

memory, then narrative and storytelling are not the only analytical perspectives that come into

play: Polletta rightly directs attention to the institutional context and familiar plot lines of

unitary collective memory shaped by official settings within public commemoration impeding

the telling of politically impactful stories by activists. Beyond these insights into the

constraints of narrative forms, however, Polletta’s data illustrate the impact of Dr King as a

character figure (Jasper forthcoming), an object of memory, a hero, and a martyr (Schudson
1992). Polletta is clear about the fact that King’s presence as a central hero enabled and yet

constrained commemoration, while neglected by narrative theorists interested foremost in plot

(Polletta et al. 2011). However, character figures are more than stories. They stick out as

visual, gendered hero figures or villains used as performative carriers of memory, images, and

role models that have an impact (Jasper forthcoming). This means that beyond what narrative

theorists have done thus far, movement scholars may want to study narrative elements (such

as plot) in interaction with other mnemonic forms (such as image) using multidimensional

comparison, as students of collective memory have done.

Indeed, media sociologist Michael Schudson’s work on the making of Watergate in

American official cultural and collective memory has focused on character figures and on

symbols, including non-verbal commemoration, to demonstrate that there is no shared

memory but rather contesting narratives in different political factions of media and society

(Schudson 1992:207). In understanding Watergate through historical comparison, Schudson

discusses how the character figure of a Polish army general who supported Hungarian

nationalists in the 19th-century war against Russia became transformed from an official

symbol for communism into a counter-communist symbol of protest in 1956. Michael

Schudson thus concludes that the ambiguous character of collective memory stored in

officially silenced stories resists hegemonic interpretations of conflicting past events, when he

writes:

All stories can be read in more than one way. Although societies, by remembering

some stories, may successfully repress others, every story contains its own

alternative readings. Narratives are ambiguous, or, to use a fancier term, polysemic.

(Schudson 1992:217)

By bringing together narrative and images, Schudson’s multidimensional perspective

highlights that political characters such as the Polish army general reveal the complicated and
polyvalent relationships between different oral, discursive, and visual mnemonic forms (Olick

and Robbins 1997). I suspect that a multidimensional perspective on memory stored in

different mnemonic forms and layers has implications for understanding how activists

construct the future. For example, in connecting Schudson’s and Polletta’s points, we may

expect that not only the ambiguous plots of stories but also visual characters’ “openness for

interpretation” (Polletta 2006:43) provide a condensed mnemonic energy, which may help

activists to re-imagine future struggles, while also constraining them in doing so through its

“resistant” character (ibid:148; Schudson 1992:216).

Memory studies: How conflicting memories

condition future mobilization

Interestingly, in the same vein as media scholars, historians and literary theorists have

problematized the contentious power of officially repressed or “silenced” memories of

conflict in families, organizations, and divided societies. Silenced memories, they argue,

become conflicting memories, that is, memories that predict future conflict (Assmann 2005).

Influenced by psychoanalytical and postmodern approaches to time and trauma, they assume

there is a kind of story that resists new interpretations. Such “silenced stories”, I argue in this

section, may in fact constrain dialogue,<xen>1</xen> and the imagining of future collective

action in movements. I will elaborate and apply the concept of silenced stories to social

movement studies to focus on memories condensed in stories, images, and/or discourses that

did not get publicized officially to the outside public because their very existence involved a

conflict among the group itself (Schudson 1992; Olick and Levy 1997; Polletta 2002, 2005).

One of the first sociologists to address conflicting memories and their silencing,

Maurice Halbwachs assumed that group-specific practices of oral remembering mark cultural
boundaries and define who is included or excluded politically in local settings for

remembering and forgetting (Halbwachs [1925] 1992:72; Olick 1999). Focusing on the nation

state, comparative historians and sociologists have revealed the contentious and contested

construction of collective memory at the level of the nation state (Olick and Levy 1997;

Steinberg 1999; Tilly 2003; Straughn 2009), and social movements’ powerful symbolic role

in revealing silenced stories of violent exclusion (Zolberg 1998:565; Olick, Vinitzky-

Seroussi, and Levy 2011:430). For example, Aristide Zolberg notes (1972), for the case of the

French ‘68 movement, that officially silenced memories of long past conflicts are informally

transmitted and enable young protesters to recall into the present the power of revolution to

transform the routines of public discourse and enact symbolic change. Jeffrey Olick and

Daniel Levy, in focusing on official practices of silencing, have shown that collective memory

determines what can be said and what remains silent in mainstream arenas of national

political deliberation (Olick and Levy 1997). However, activists who publicize “silenced”

stories on the internet and in transnational protest summits risk being punished severely

(Assmann and Conrad 2010:2; see also Olick, Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Levy 2011:430).

Moreover, resistant memories also fail to make an impact within mainstream public discourse

in national political institutions where they get silenced through institutional arrangements

(Polletta 2006:147).

If all these channels fail, how then are “silenced” memories of excluded ethnic and

social groups transmitted, and how does this affect social movements? To answer the former

question, historians and literary scholars have specifically focused on long cycles of violent

conflict and repression (Assmann and Conrad 2010). They have developed a toolbar of

critical analysis for official public “modes of remembering” in order to understand how once

“silenced memories” reenter contentious public debates (Schwab 2010). I assume that the

interdisciplinary conceptual toolbar that memory studies apply also has lessons for the study
of conflict inside social movements. Let me briefly discuss how memory studies, drawing on

literature, psychoanalysis, and historical approaches help us to explore the trans-generational

making and transformation of conflicting memories and their impact on constraining/enabling

future movements.

For example, following Gaby Schwab’s psychoanalytical approach to collective

memory we can define silenced memories as consequences of violent conflict whose victims

find no arena in which to tell their stories – outside or possibly also inside diverse movement

groups (Schwab 2010:102–103). Following Abraham and Torok’s (1994) psychoanalytical

theory of “cryptonomy”, Schwab understands memories as powerful carriers of conflict

between different groups and inside them which is transmitted implicitly and often unnoticed

across generations through the narrative form of “crypts” (Schwab 2010:103). “Cryptonymy”,

the art of tracing such remains of stories, refers to operations in language that emerge as

manifestations of a psychic crypt, often in the form of fragmentations, distortions, gaps, or

ellipses. Once “unintegrated and unassimilated”, such silenced stories however get passed on

in “indirect and implicit ways” and become fragmented (Straughn 2009), potentially

conflicting memories (Assmann 2005). Abraham and Torok write about the crypt as an effect

of failed mourning: “It is a burial place inside the self for a love object that is lost but kept

inside the self like a living dead” (Schwab 2010:103). Psychoanalysts and literary scholars

trace such narrative crypts within literary texts, but we may also trace them in oral narratives

– the kind of incomplete stories that are typical of everyday language we find in the study of

interviews with activists or resistant groups (cf. Polletta et al. 2011). In her work on trans-

generational trauma, Gaby Schwab suggests that narrative crypts can be traced as they are

transmitted in writing and speech in which “buried ghosts of the past come to haunt language

from within” as a deathly atmosphere “threatening to destroy its communicated and

expressive function” (Schwab 2010:102-3). Transposed to the field of culture in movements,

this implies that cultural forms of expression – the official stories and frames activists use –

may in fact themselves be encrypted forms, which opens up a whole new field of analysis. A

multidimensional analysis of memory in movements thus invites narrative theorists (and those

working on discourse and framing) to explore the contradictions between different stories and

frames, the silences, incompletions, and absences, in relation to conflict in the past.

How may encrypted stories shape movements’ success, failure, and interrelationships

between different movement groups? Below, I will present examples to illustrate that, because

of their intergenerational dimension (della Porta 2005b), current waves of transnational social

movements provide an exciting field to explore the conflicting transmission of memory.

Before, I want to note how psychoanalytical, historical, and literary approaches empirically

assess conflicting memories being transmitted across time and across groups, which are hard

to get at empirically. While scholars have explored the silent transmission of memories of

trauma (Hirsch 1997) and of violent political exclusion (Assmann 2005), less is known about

how ways of storytelling that help to mediate memories of exclusion get processed and

included in such a way as to encourage social repair (Alexander 2006). Therefore, Aleida

Assmann has recently proposed looking at processes of remediation as a communicative

practice that facilitates the processing of conflicting events and violent histories in which

group members were involved (Assmann 2008:55).<xen>2</xen>

Students of conflicting memories within social movements may use this approach that

also proposes ways to understand the failure of such remediation processes, using the concept

of “premediation” (Assmann 2005:3). Premediation describes the (negative) impact of violent

and traumatic events which can neither be remembered and remediated nor forgotten, and

which are stored in stories foreclosing the future: “the future, which until recently, was

considered a resource for innovation, change, hope and regeneration, has become a source of

deep collective anxiety and impending trauma” (Assmann 2005:3). In other words,
premediation means that narratives about violent exclusion tend to “prefigure” the future in

constructing “cultural schemata or templates” for condensed remembering blocking dialogical

interaction across conflicting group identities (Assmann 2005:4).

I assume that this interdisciplinary work has further implications for understanding

memory’s conflicting trans-generational impact on social movements. For narrative scholars,

for example, who have focused on narratives and stories in interaction between movement

groups and a wider public, the new conceptual focus on encryptment, remediation, and

premediation will enable a novel focus on dominant and conflicting stories inside movements.

Also in other fields, for example, when it comes to explaining the frequent and repetitive

internal crises of democracy within different generations of social movements, the conflicting

potential of memory may be an explanatory category that offers itself for further analysis.

While numerous activists and scholars have tried to explain the frequent internal

crisis<xen>3</xen> of democracy, they have not problematized memory as a potentially

conflicting dimension of culture that triggered conflicts within and between different

movement groups trying to cooperate with each other. However, Donatella della Porta urges

us to study movements as public spaces and internally conflicting arenas (della Porta 2005),

which means that different groups may compete about the one legitimate story that represents

the movement (see also Polletta 2006). In this respect Francesca Polletta’s work, while not

explicitly focusing on memory, reveals the connection between conflicting stories of the past

and democratic crises in present generations of activists: First, Polletta argues that radical

democracy in American social movements meant very different things in different periods

depending on who (was seen to) use it, whether religious or non-religious groups, male or

female organizers, black or white, Southern or Northern, working-class or middle-class

people (Polletta 2002, 2005). Second, because of the exclusion of some groups, the future of

new movements was always going to be shaped by prevailing negative memories of failed
movement-democracies in preceding ones. For example, women’s liberation groups built their

radical, consensus-based model for democracy in a way to overcome the perceived male-

dominated, exclusive model of democracy within the New Left (Polletta 2002:150). Or, also,

young American activists today may want to ensure that their democracies do not look white-

dominated, avoiding the exclusionary image of past ones (Polletta 2005). This means that

memory is an independent category of culture that influences the stories activists tell within

meetings and the resulting conflicts present movement-democracies experience. By working

with a multidimensional perspective of memory, we can empirically get at those images,

stories, identity constructions or symbols that powerfully recreate conflicts inside present

movements.

An example: Studying encrypted stories in trans-generational

movement groups
Let me briefly provide an example drawing on my own research on memory and conflict in

the European Social Forum. Created in 2002, the European Social Forum was Europe’s

largest transnational discursive public space for debating alternatives to neoliberal

globalization in the global justice movement (della Porta 2005). While the students’ and ‘68

movements had a negative relation to the past (Polletta 2002:80), today’s global justice

groups in the European Social Forum positively stress their trans-generational lineage

including leftist parties, unions as well as feminist, anarchist, and autonomous groups who

had been fighting each other since the sixties (della Porta 2005). However, ethnographers and

anthropologists have shown the repeated democratic crises in the transnational and European

Social Forum process, interpreting them as a consequence of different organizing cultures

(Juris 2005) and of power asymmetries (Maeckelbergh 2009). My specific focus on the

conflicting role of memory made me interested in whether and how encrypted stories (a

concept I discuss above) and old conflicts structured such democratic crises. My cross-

national comparison of the Italian and British Social Forums illustrates that depending on the
context, memories of violent symbolic exclusion in past movements account for the intensity,

and timing of democratic crises in the national Social Forums I studied. In using Schwab’s

approach for my analysis of discourse and public storytelling, I found that the attempt to build

dialogue and radical democracy in the Social Forums “clashed” at the very moment in which

carrier groups publicized their “encrypted stories” of long-past symbolic exclusion (Doerr

2012).

Carrier groups were experienced activists who remembered violent symbolic

exclusion in previous decades’ movements. If, for example, as it happened in one place,

anarchists participating in past social movements had felt excluded by socialists, then exactly

this memory of conflict would come up again. “Encrypted” stories were oral stories that

predicted the conflict with other ideological groups, before the beginning of meetings that

aimed at potential dialogue. For example, a participant said: “The problem with consensus in

the UK is not that it means endless decisions, but that it allows people like the Socialist

Workers Party since 25 years to appropriate the process in the UK, in the way that they stand

in the centre and take the process over and manipulate.”<xen>4</xen> Interestingly, young

participants who had never been part of these old conflicts perceived a “poisoned” or

“deathly” atmosphere once such a story was told. However, in the end, even these newcomers

also themselves became entangled in the logic of conflict, which led to new conflict,

frustration, and the death of national Social Forums. By extending the perspective to memory,

we start to understand the far-reaching but nuanced impact of stories about conflicts long past.

If I had not considered the conflicting power of encrypted stories and traumatized storytellers,

I would have had difficulties in understanding why some people’s stories told before meetings

had such a tremendous impact.

How then do activists succeed in mobilizing the past as a resource in order to mobilize

support for social change and against dominant opinions? An open question that needs further
exploration is whether and how heterogeneously social movement groups can digest and

remediate memories of exclusion so as to facilitate cooperation in the future. Interestingly,

memories of exclusion can have stimulating impacts in fostering the construction of new

identities. For example, feminist theorists, critical discourse analysts, and historical

sociologists outside the field of social movement studies have made it their task to study how

memory enables collective action. Taking a critical, discursive perspective interested in

assessing practices of the “silencing” of women’s and/or workers’ stories (Wodak 2004),

feminists documented the exclusionary dynamics of mainstream participatory democracy

inside social movements, feminist groups, and in the New Left (Phillips 1993; Mohanty

2003). A point that is particularly important for a multidimensional perspective of memory is

the role of those resisting memories that make for newly emerging movements within broader

streams of social movements. In problematizing the internal reproduction of racial injustice as

well as claims for change within the civil rights movement, memory scholar Kathleen

McElroy (2011) explores how memories resist dominant narratives on the movements by

officials. In focusing on written discourse rather than on oral narrative, for example, she

shows how obituaries in the New York Times remember the civil rights movement. However,

as the case of the remembering of Rosa Parks illustrates, in the process of constructing

memory, collective stories of resistance risk being mainstreamed by benevolent movement

supporters or strategists into individualist hero-narratives (Schudson 2012).

Visual memory: Comparative historical approaches

and performance

Another interdisciplinary field of analysis that illustrates the potential of a multidimensional

perspective on memory is visual memory. Defining collective memories as “images of the

past”, memory scholars have made images and visual symbols a key object of their analysis,
assuming that discourse and images are fluid, interrelated categories (Olick and Robbins

1998:106). In other fields, such as historical comparative sociology, scholars like Eiko

Ikegami have also shown for the case of Japan that non-verbal and visual forms of memory in

objects served movements as an alternative public space where the spoken word was strictly

prohibited (Ikegami 2002). To assure continuous mobilization in periods of repression and

extremely violent “silencing” of movements’ discourse by officials, activists could

exclusively use tacit and visual forms, which determined the future shape of modern

“Japanese” political culture (Ikegami 2002). In addressing the incomplete notion of

movement publics as merely discursive publics in Habermas’ sense, she suggests that visual

culture, condensed in visual and tacit forms of memory, in fact enabled mutual understanding

and political communication and collective action in non-Western contexts.

This suggests that a multidimensional perspective on memory should compare how

different mnemonic forms such as visual and verbal forms of memory empirically interact, as

complementary, contradicting, and potentially conflicting factors. Let me give a first example

for what this can contribute to theories of culture and memory in movements. I have shown

that movement scholars who focused on narrative and framing were able to demonstrate how

selective strategies of storytelling or traumatic events made for a rupture with past

movements. In comparison, movement scholars who traced memory in visual and

performative forms came to different results – showing sources of resistance under very hard

circumstances. For example, performance theorists such as Ron Eyerman (2004) find

continuity in the transmission of the shared experiences of collective resistance by African

American slaves who were unable to frame, debate or tell their stories in political or

discursive arenas (Eyerman 2004:159). Eyerman combined psychoanalytical and literary

approaches with the analysis of visual art and music in order to understand the transmission of

memory across huge ruptures. This multidimensional approach allows him to demonstrate
how members of marginalized groups transmit common knowledge across time, losing their

language but not their memory.

Inspired by the visual turn in performance and cultural studies, an increasing number

of social movement students have started to perform visual analysis – combining it with

various theoretical traditions such as framing (Mattoni 2007), cultural studies and semiotics

(Daphi, Ullrich, and Lê 2013) or discourse analysis (Doerr 2010). Let me give another

example of how a multidimensional analysis of visual memory helps to deepen and

complement conventional discursive and text-based approaches and methods.

My colleague Alice Mattoni and I tried to compare and interpret the posters by young

“EuroMayday” protesters in different European countries including Italy, Germany, Spain,

France, and the UK (Mattoni and Doerr 2007). Across the cases we studied, protesters were

inspired by anarchist and autonomous movements, and they also mobilized on the same issues

such as precarious labor conditions and migrants’ rights. However, despite these similarities,

we were puzzled that we did not find shared national poster frames among protesters in

individual countries, but instead similarities among local groups across different countries.

Contrary to what we had expected, a few local posters – one created by a small, provincial

group in a north eastern Italian city – spread across Western Europe, and, surprisingly, even to

Japan and Canada. One particularly widespread visual protest character was San Precario, an

invented “saint” of precarious workers, also invented in Italy. Other “successful” visual

characters invented by activists drew heavily on globally popular cultural icons such as

precarious “Super heroic” figures that imitated flashy manga and comic styles (Mattoni and

Doerr 2007). How could we prove that the broad cross-national diffusion of these distinct few

visual figures came from their ironic play with collective memory? Since the transmission of

memory was implicit and visual rather than discursive, activists themselves had been

surprised that some of their images “worked well” in different places, some which they had
never expected to do so, such as the local San Precario figure. Our conventional text-based

methods of discourse and media analysis, interviews, and framing were insufficient.

In reading the literature on visual memory I started to understand that activists’

mimesis of religious saints was probably politically efficient because it tapped into a stock of

well-known images (Assmann 2005), addressing a particular age group (Doerr 2010). But for

what reasons did protesters’ superhero characters attract a transnational audience of

sympathizers in many countries? Interestingly, we noted that while the “SuperHeroic” images

that were being created in different countries looked similar, each super Heroic/Heroine’s

slogan, story, and also gender characteristics changed, sometimes reversing previous

meanings. With respect to transnational publics, the tricky thing is to understand why an

image creates contention or “works” in a particular national context, or, why the meaning

associated with it changes in a different context of visual memory. Students of visual memory

in media studies have been able to explain how single political images without a clear textual

message trigger contention or understanding among different cultural or political groups by

recalling the condensed energy of preceding works of art and religious iconography (Olick

and Robbins 1997; Müller and Öczan 2007). By including these insights into a

multidimensional analysis of superhero symbols, stories and slogans, we started to understand

how active forgetting happened, as the most “cutting edge” hero figures “lost” their radical

slogans, or got entirely lost as symbols of resistance if filtered through group ideologies in

specific local settings (see also Doerr and Milman 2014).

Indeed, students of visual memory, trying to understand how memory is “lost in

translation”, have worked with Freud’s concept of the screen and the images behind it, which

also provides some relevant insights for visual analysts of social movements. For example,

where political posters seem to reveal an immediate “déjà vu” effect of well-known historical

political contexts, sociologists of memory have instead pointed to hidden images behind the
screen of official collective memory (Olick and Robbins 1997). Moreover, visual images and

photographs used by officials (or by activists) may be the surviving of memories of violence

and conflict that no can longer be seen, or, in other words, a kind of “encrypted” set of images

behind the screen. For a multidimensional analysis of visual memory this suggests that it

would be interesting to compare how activists construct and use encrypted images as well as

encrypted stories, and how stories may hide other stories or images behind them, images that

can no longer be seen and that have been “lost” in the process of conflictual translation

(Schwab 2010).

Take again the example of the EuroMayday protests against social precarity. Another

puzzle that popped up in comparing representations of migrants in activists’ posters was the

following: Unlike activists in other European countries, German EuroMayday activists

combined portraits of undocumented migrants with border fortifications and barbed wire

fences. In comparison, protesters in other countries such as Italy and Spain used photo collage

portraits of migrants in everyday life showing them as a totally integrated part of society, and

not in the position of marginalized outsiders (Doerr 2010). Visual memory scholars have

developed cross-national and cross-historical comparison in order to understand such

differences in political imagination. For example, the historian Gerhard Paul compared the

stock of images constituting the European Union’s contemporary official visual memory with

that of media images and activist groups. He finds that “the images of barbed wire fences,

border fortifications and watchtowers” are part of “image clusters” reflecting experiences of a

“century of violence” in the German and European context (Paul 2011:46). Paul

problematizes that the experiential visual memory of Europe cannot be found in pictures

constructed or used by pro-European movements or officials but in the virtual images in

people’s minds. His cross-national comparison of Europe’s visual political history documents

that these unofficial “image clusters” popularized through art, literature and popular culture
constitute a virtual type of “visual sites of memory” of Europe’s – and Germany’s – violent

past, a term derived from Pierre Nora’s notion of Lieu De Mémoire (ibid.). In the empirical

example of the EuroMayday, however, only in Germany did activists’ posters connect the

theme of migration referring to symbols of the national history of violence (Doerr 2010), a

result that finds parallels in a discourse analysis of German parliamentary debates (Olick and

Levy 1997) and in a most recently conducted study on the anti-surveillance movements

(Daphi, Ullrich, and Lê 2013). Beyond the official discourse of a shared European memory,

this suggests the prevailing impact of differentiated, localized and place specific national

memory cultures. These examples illustrate how the conflicting making of memory in

multiple visual, discursive, and narrative forms, helps to deepen our comparative analysis and

understanding of movements mobilizing in place-specific historical contexts.

Discussion: Towards a multidimensional perspective

of memory in movements

In this contribution I have developed a multidimensional understanding of memory; that is, a

conceptual approach that helps us explore memory in multiple, connected and conflicting

mnemonic practices such as narrative and discourse, framing, visual, and performance.

Sociologists of culture disagree on whether movements necessarily require a shared collective

memory or not (Polletta et al. 2011). Based on my discussion above, I propose to think of

movements as a result of multiple, conflicting processes of remembering and forgetting.

Movement scholars have done important work on particular aspects of memory such as

narrative, discourse, and performance, but they have not yet seen these forms together as

multiple forms and media transmitting conflicting memories. To fill this gap, I have read

theories and empirical studies of memory in sociology, history, literature, psychoanalysis,

media, and feminism to show how we can understand memory systematically as an

independent category of culture that underlies all other practices of cultural expression in

movements, also including “silences” or “silencing” practices. While movement scholars

addressed memory with a focus on its strategic mobilization in interactions between

movements and their opponents or target groups, I have proposed a focus on the complicated

making of memory inside movements as well. For example, one interesting empirical insight

from memory studies regards the role of violence and conflict, and of traumatic experiences: I

have shown that conflicts within present movements become silenced memories which will

predictably pop up within future storytelling practices, limiting potential interaction, and/or

foster images or identities. This means that activists construct memory and try to change it,

but my point is that they are constrained by context-specific mnemonic repertoires.

The proposed multidimensional approach is distinct from previous work on narrative

or on framing that has focused on how movements mobilize memory without taking into

consideration conflicts about memory inside movements. By extending the focus from

narrative to memory I introduced the concept of “encrypted” stories and asked whether the

images activists use also result from “encrypted” images filtering a conflicting past. While

previous work focused on strategies of storytelling from movements towards other groups, I

argued that a focus on “encrypted stories” and conflicting memories inside movements helps

to better understand major internal democratic crises. Similarly, in focusing on visual

memory, I have shown that “conflicting” memories in the form of political characters or of

unofficial “visual sites of memory” in popular memory are an important resource and point of

inspiration for social movements, but they are also a source of internal conflict or contentious

mobilization. This ambiguous role of “conflicting memories” and conflicts about memory

may inspire future research on the multiple methods of cross-generational transmission. The

two dimensions of analysis (the focus on conflict and the focus on multiple forms of

memory), beyond the field of memory as such, helps movement scholars to explore and
compare interactions between different dimensions of cultural analysis such as narrative and

visual analysis, discourse, and performance.

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<en-group type=“endnotes”>
 <en><label>1</label> I define the notion of dialogue broadly: Beyond the notion of dialogue

as deliberative democracy, I mean dialogue across historical lines of conflict.</en>

<en><label>2</label> Following Grusin’s media theory, Assmann conceives of memory as a

“mediated memory” (Assmann 2005:4).</en>

<en><label>3</label> By the notion of crisis, I mean a breakdown, frequently the end of

participation by grassroots activists (Polletta 2002).</en>

<en><label>4</label> My fieldnotes.</en>

</en-group>

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