Social memory as a way of mastering time

The theme of social memory is one of the most popular among modern researchers. This cannot be explained solely by changes in society or by features of the Humanities, thus we associate the growth of interest in the memorial issue with modern temporal transformation. Psychological (J. Locke, K. Jung, and others) and sociological (M. Halbwachs, I. Irwin-Zarecka and others) interpretations are still the most authoritative among memory researchers. They have heuristic potential; however, they do not correspond to the needs of the philosophical understanding of social memory because fundamental ontological categories that define both social processes and psychological characteristics of the individual remain outside researchers. Therefore, in this paper social memory is seen as human understanding of time. Many researchers, starting with Aristotle, mentioned the connection between time and memory. However, in the Antiquity time was part of the global space-to-order, in the Middle Ages it belonged to God and, therefore, could not enter into the circle of research interests. When linearity was lost because of the lack of faith in the future and loss of connection with the past, philosophers (V.N. Muravyov, M. Halbwachs) began to comprehend the temporal aspects of genesis. The past slipping away in the twentieth century required commemoration practices, so memory became an existential category. However, existence is not possible without comprehension of the temporality of human existence. E. Husserl and M. Heidegger insist that only memory returns the genesis of people in time as the true being. Now, the past devoid of ontological status is not a foundation on which the massive buildings of identities of the New time was built. Temporal transformation happened. It was a change of the paradigm in the perception of time by man and society. The world has already experienced it, when the cyclic time of the oral tradition gave way to the linear one. Now, when the probability and randomness become fundamental categories, the future is not determined by the present. Instability leads to irreversibility, and, instead of a linear sequence, the past, the present and the future become fractal, influencing each other depending on the immediate needs of the subject. The probability, which can be neither certain nor uncertain, becoming a part of the fundamental laws of physics, went beyond the determinism of Newton. The discrediting of personal and public history resulted in memory (though it is absolutely biased) is perceived by the subject as a reliable source. In these conditions the "Memory Boom" is one of the aspects of mastering time in terms of temporal transformation. Thus, social memory is perceived as one of the variants of mastering time and a method of its construction.

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