Memory Studies
2016, Vol. 9(2) 125­–142
© The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/1750698015596014
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Resistant pasts versus mnemonic
hegemony: On the power
relations of collective memory
Berthold Molden
University of Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris 3, France
Abstract
The politics of history and memory in any society are determined by the relations of forces between
hegemonic master narratives, defiant counter-memories, and silent majorities whose historical experience is
rarely articulated in public. Based on Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, Ernesto Laclau, as well as postcolonial
critique, this article explains historico-political processes through a specified reading of hegemony theory.
Two common, though by no means unambiguous, terms are reloaded with specific definitions: politics of
history as the political agency directed at the establishment of specific representations of the past, and
memory cultures as the structural frameworks for these politics. This approach sheds light on the relationship
between official and group-specific politics of history within defined memory cultures: the possibly conflictual
interaction between those who interpret certain events, inscribe them into a historical canon and thus
make them points of historical reference, and those who are the carriers, consumers, reproducers, but also
challengers of this history.
Keywords
Counter-memory, Foucault, Gramsci, hegemony, Laclau, memory culture, politics of history
An introductory example
The intersecting paths of collective memory tend to draw a tricky map. Their triumphant gateways
may be deceiving, their seemingly reliable boulevards treacherous. They are, as William S.
Burroughs (1987) wrote of the roads to those promising Western Lands stretching beyond the logical
terrain of academic history, “devious, unpredictable. Today’s easy passage may be tomorrow’s
death trap” (p. 151). While the canons of grand historical narratives, the monuments to bygone
heroes, and the memorials for the victims of genocidal campaigns claim to provide firm orientation
for strong collective identities, we have often seen such grand histories deconstructed, monuments
toppled, and the most sacred victim groups re-clothed as perpetrators and caught in struggles of
competitive victimhood. Moreover, between these well-marked pathways there exist wide, unchartered
territories of historical experience that are not recorded on these maps of memory at all. Why
Corresponding author:
Berthold Molden, Department of History, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria.
Email: berthold.molden@univie.ac.at
596014MSS0010.1177/1750699915596014Memory StudiesMolden
research-article2015
Article
126	 Memory Studies 9(2)
is this so? I argue that the power relations inherent in collective memory can best be captured by
an adapted theory of hegemony.
In the thinking of Antonio Gramsci, and later Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Ernesto Laclau,
Chantal Mouffe, and others, hegemony is the ability of a dominant group or class to impose their
interpretations of reality—or the interpretations that support their interests—as the only thinkable
way to view the world. The dominated groups come to accept the interests of the dominant ones as
the natural state of the world. Hegemony thus establishes one particular narrative as a quasi-natural
universality and delegitimizes alternative forms of reasoning. It is the successful creation of this
powerful common sense of reality that includes most people in a social group while sapping those
who think—or remember—outside the box. For example, after 1989, it has become all but outrageous
to argue, in mainstream media and discourse, outside the paradigms of market liberalism, as
its alternatives (communism, socialism) have been proclaimed historical errors that failed to survive
the evolutionary competition of ideas. The corresponding memory practice is the delegitimization
of the “Communist experience” within the master narratives of European history.
In fact, few instances of accelerated historical development and memory production illustrate
my case better than the end of the Cold War in Europe and the disappearance of the Iron Curtain.
As I have analyzed elsewhere (Molden, 2010, 2014), these events came along with a pervasive
politics of history and memory that embedded the political change in narratives depicting it as a
historical necessity or at the very least a strong desirability. The various anniversaries of “1989”
saw many solemn and euphoric speeches about the reunification of Europe, but they also gave rise
to a series of evaluations meant to ground the high-flying expectations of a universal “end of history,”
a reconciliation of all antagonisms that the great shifts had provoked. Politicians, academics,
and intellectuals celebrated the East’s “re-Europeanization” and “return to Europe.” In this manner,
Western Europe externalized the history of state socialism and totalitarian regimes and heralded
the victory of its own socio-economic model. Within the formerly communist countries, revamped
historical museums rolled out a similar version of the post-communist past that often did away with
the nuances of historical experience under communism. And on the other side of the Atlantic, the
US Senate congratulated Central Europeans on “the significance and value of […] freedom and the
dignity of citizens” reclaimed in the “history events” of 1989, but it also firmly linked its felicitation
to these countries’“determination to join […] NATO and the European Union” (Congressional
Records—Senate, Senate Concurrent Resolution 69, 3 November 1999, 28116–28117).
Parallel to these triumphant commemorations, however, a cohort of social scientists and historians,
on both sides of the former Iron Curtain, gathered the stories of those who had lived through
the Cold War. Methodologically grounded in oral history, everyday history, or qualitative textual
analysis, this type of research directs our attention toward the peculiarities of historical perception.
The memories these studies collected quite often contradict the dominant narratives endorsed by
school textbooks and in political and media discourses (Dimou et al., 2014). Contrary to prevalent
narratives of the Cold War as a crisis-ridden period during which one half of Europe was held hostage
by totalitarian regimes while the other was free but lived in constant fear of nuclear extermination,
most Europeans recall this part of their lives as peaceful and stable. Life under socialism was
not a prison sentence, but allowed for normality and happiness. In the West, on the other hand,
nuclear threat was not thoroughly determining, and there was indeed discontent with the political
system. The teleological narrations of post-1945 Europe as the eventual unification of two separate
yet internally homogenous blocks have the political function of a salvific history: the history of the
victors, as it were (Molden, 2010). This example allows identifying the large communities of experience
whose memories remain unarticulated and—despite the above-mentioned academic efforts
and eventual political invocations of polyphony—ignored by the grand narrations of European
history.
Molden	 127
Given the constructed and political nature of collective remembrance, hegemony theory offers
an enlightening and, surprisingly, not yet systemized perspective on memory. I propose a concept
of mnemonic hegemony that highlights discursive agency in specific political contexts (interests),
the public adscription of narrative credibility, and access to media and spheres of social knowledge
production and signification; a concept that encompasses not only the competitive relations
between hegemonic and proactively counter-hegemonic agencies often described as memory wars,
but also the coexisting communities of passive remembrance; and that describes the interactions
between these fields. Thus, approaching these conflicts through the concept of mnemonic hegemony
allows for a more encompassing analysis of the dialectics between memory and politics.
Mnemonic hegemony theory: contingency, insurrection,
materiality
Memory as a layering of contingent sediments
I opened this essay with metaphors about mnemonic maps and pathways of memory. Indeed, spatial
metaphors in historiography like “realms of memory” or “sites of memory” often move horizontally
along the geographical surface of the present. In order to redefine memory culture in terms of
hegemony, we quite literally have to dig deeper into the “layers of time” (Koselleck, 2000) where
the deposits of historical experience and discourse can be found. These sedimentations constitute
the discursive strata where the contingent origins of memory and historical narration are hidden. It
is a central feature of mnemonic hegemony that the bases of the always-specific constitution of the
present are depicted as necessities and that they are essentialized as inevitabilities rather than shown
in their contingency. In fact, for theorists of hegemony, the necessary is necessarily and subversively
contingent and the field of the political, as Ernesto Laclau (1990) writes, is constituted through the
rediscovery of these sediments in the “moment of antagonism where the undecidable nature of the
alternatives and their resolution through power relations becomes fully visible” (p. 34–35). The past
as we know it from history is depicted as the only possible one because this serves to justify the
present order, but this arrangement is never entirely stable. Elizabeth Jelin notes that it “is at this
point of complex intersection and convergence, in that present where the past is the space of experience
and the future is the horizon of expectations, where human action is produced.” Conversely,
it is in human agency that the past […] is activated. Memory, then, is produced whenever and wherever
there are subjects who share a culture, social agents who try to ‘materialize’ the meanings of the past in
different cultural products. (Jelin, 2003: 4 and 24–25)
The central component of Gramsci’s theory is the description of power as the ability to impose
the particular interests of the ruling group (for Gramsci, class) as universal values, while the ruled
accept the social distribution of power and the political system as quasi-natural. Power is established
not only by means of coercion, but also by the cultural consensus between ruling and ruled,
which—and this is crucial—conceals the historicity of the present and the contingency of its historical
development. Ruling groups achieve this only by blocking out the fact that historical events
might always have turned out different or by claiming that any different outcome would be a
worse-case scenario. They stabilize power by the successful establishment of a supposedly teleological
and linear historical narration. This constitutes a characteristic of collective remembrance:
“Collective memory can be described as a layered field of sedimentations which’s contingent origin
in the dispute of competing definitions of the past has been forgotten, after a certain version of
the past had imposed itself and become hegemonic” (Marchart, 2005: 25).
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Contingency and undecidability are the two categories of openness that are constitutive of
hegemony. As Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (2001) point out at the very beginning of their
seminal work on post-Marxist hegemony theory, the condition for any form of hegemony is that
one discourse is elevated above others, not because it is superior but because the most powerful
group put it there (p. xii). In terms of memory studies, hegemony is built by prioritizing some
memories over others according to the specific power constellations of a given society. There is no
one history because every historical event can have different meanings, can be ignored, or interpreted
from radically different perspectives.
The insurrectional function of counter-memory
Michel Foucault’s thoughts on counter-memory take a similar interest in the hidden contingency of
historical foundations, calling for “insurrectionary genealogies [that] exploit the openness of our
(indefinitely multiple) pasts” (Medina, 2011: 27). Foucault (2003) looks at the “new history” that
emerged in early modernity and challenged “Roman history,” in which memory had had the function
of upholding power:
In this new historical discourse, the function of memory acquires a whole new meaning. […] Basically,
what the new history is trying to show is that power, the mighty, the kings, and the laws have concealed
the fact that they were born of the contingency and injustice of battles. (p. 72)
Foucault’s (2003) critical genealogies are “insurrection against the centralizing power-effects”
(p. 9)—anti-sciences or, in mnemonic terms, anti-histories, but not yet counter-histories. Counterhistories,
on the other hand, are histories created from this sort of genealogy and directed against
the hegemonic memory canon. They combine the erudition of historiography with the insurrectional
power of memory. José Medina comments on this combination:
Counter-histories are centered around those experiences and memories that have not been heard and
integrated in official histories. [They] are possible because there are people who remember against the
grain, people whose memories do not fit the historical narratives available. Counter-histories feed off such
counter-memories and at the same time transform them, revitalizing practices of counter-memory and
offering them new discursive resources to draw on. (Medina, 2011: 12)
Counter-memory is yet another blend of erudition and memory. “By combining linear history
and orally transmitted popular history, counter-memory combines the best of both modes” (Lipsitz,
1990: 228). According to Foucault (1977) himself counter-memory means “a transformation of
history into a totally different form of time” (p. 160), and therefore, it is completely open for what
will be found in the sediments of historical experience. In a negative sense, it is “the absence of
memory in archeological inquiry, not the consideration of alternative memories” (Hutton, 1993:
203, note 20).
When analyzing the links between counter-memory and the power centers of knowledge production
Foucault—and in his tradition Medina—speaks of power relations, echoing Gramsci’s “rapporti
di forza,” and, like the poststructuralist approach of Laclau and Mouffe, emphasizes the plurality,
polyphony, and heterogeneity among the agencies of both power and resistance. He shows the power
struggles between different knowledge frameworks, that is, epistemic fields that elevate some into
hegemonic positions while “subjugating” others. “Subjugated knowledges” are formerly accepted
yet marginalized “blocks of historical knowledges,” or else they are forms of knowledge deemed
incorrect or underdeveloped by the dominant knowledge system of a respective time. They may rise
in an “insurrection of subjugated knowledges” against hegemonic knowledge/power systems
Molden	 129
(Foucault, 2003: 7). Foucault’s famous example of the race war discourse in England develops the
model of counter-history along a dichotomy of violent repression of one group by another. As I will
argue below, however, the subjugation or repression of large memory cultures is not necessarily
executed along such clear lines of conflict. Rather, it often happens through the silent consent within
hegemonic relations of mnemonic power. Subjugated knowledge may resist its subordinate position
within hegemonic systems or, of course, they may not and remain silent. This second dimension
addresses the unarticulated memories and passive communities of memory that were mentioned in
the introduction and will receive more attention further below.
The material dimensions of memory
Mnemonic power relations determine the (non-)representation of social experience in cultural memory.
Social conditions of life as defined by belonging to certain segments of a given society—be they
class, milieu, strata, or others—are crucial for the development of an individual’s or group’s specific
representations of the past. Accordingly, collective memory has been explained by Marie-Claire
Lavabre as “an interaction between politics of memory—that can be called ‘historical memory’—
and souvenirs— ‘common memory’ of what has been lived in a community” (Lavabre, n.d.). The
material dimension of memory is crucial. It is through personal experience and/or through materially
manifest social relations that such significance comes to exist, in the “dialectic of experience
and discourse,” as Marc Steinberg (1996: 18) puts it, or in the words of Jonathan Joseph (2002):
“Hegemony cannot be understood simply in terms of the struggles between different agents; the
material causes of hegemony must be sought. Agents are involved in relations, both with each other,
and with social structures and practices” (p. 39). There is always a connection between historical
experience, the structural context of power relations, and the history politics of a time. It corresponds
to the relationship between history as the event or process that is experienced, memory cultures
as the given structure, and the concrete agency of those who want to maintain or change this
cultural framework as well as those who just live in it passively.
This material experience is expressed in language and narratives that embody historical memory.
Gramsci (2011) stressed the importance of the politics of history within hegemonic systems at
the very beginning of the emergence of the concept in his writing:
In reality, every political movement creates a language of its own, that is, it participates in the general
development of a distinct language, introducing new terms, enriching existing terms with a new content,
creating metaphors, using historical names to facilitate the comprehension and the assessment of particular
contemporary political situations, etc., etc. (first notebook § 43, 126)
Even though this well-known quote seems to suggest a “purely discursive” reading of historical
discourse in politics, the impact of such discourse is linked to historical experience. Gramsci (2011)
emphasized the inseparability of language and the material world: “Every language is an integral
conception of the world and not just an outer garment that functions indifferently as a form for any
content” (fifth notebook §123, 366). This once again points to the importance of a social history
perspective on the material dimension of memory production. In fact, Laclau and Mouffe (2001)
“affirm the material dimension of every discursive structure” (p. 94) and explain that some “discursive
forms” of experience are in fact the manifestation of “the final impossibility of any stable
difference and, thus, of any ‘objectivity’” (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: 108).
Marc Steinberg, in his study of movements of English weavers in the 19th century, provides a
telling example of the political potential of language, especially in terms of appropriation. The
political and economic situation and the experience of living in a specific social context drove
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marginalized or politically not-yet organized groups to develop a new language. Even as they used
the vocabulary available to them from the dominant social groups, they appropriated these elements
and came up with an essentially new discourse. Steinberg’s argument builds on the notion
from British cultural Marxism that a culture of common or analogous experiences—exploitation,
repression, and the struggle against it—had laid the ground for a political culture of the working
class with its own identity and forms of discourse. And, one could add, with its specific representations
and interpretations of history, particular narrations and other discursive forms to make sense
of the past, employing them for the formation of political agency. Steinberg’s emphasis on the
dialogical process of language is strongly indebted to the Russian semiotician Mikhail Bakhtin:
“While dominant classes limit and channel conceptions of class identity and collective consciousness,
the dialogic nature of discourses always contains the potential for subversion” (Steinberg,
1996: 7, 1997). Steinberg looks at working-class attempts to establish counter-hegemony by appropriation
of the opponents’ discourse, but his observations equally apply to the construction of historical
imaginaries and the ensuing representations of history (mnemonic utterances, one might say
with Bakhtin). They endow meaning, both on subjective and on collective levels, by linking individual
or group-specific experiences with those of others and specifically with well-elaborated and
therefore more-or-less dominant discourse.
But, however important Bakhtin’s dialogical concept of language and of polyphony is for the
understanding of heterogeneous cultures of remembrance, his semiotic definition of culture is limited
when applied to our context.As Jürgen Pieters (2001) observed, this “makes it hard for Bakhtin
to stress both the fact and the manner in which every cultural constellation constitutes a physical
battleground where different groups fight for political and cultural hegemony” (p. 158). Mnemonic
hegemony theory aims to capture precisely this intersection between material structures, social
experience, and discursive practices. It emphasizes that any sign, word, or memory can be multivocal
and can be put to use differently by different speakers, according to their experience, context,
and needs.
Memory cultures and the politics of history
Memory cultures as a field of social agency
Through its focus on the plurality of struggles and plurivectoral relations of forces, hegemony
theory replaces the commonly bipolar perspective with a more open, polyphonic view on mnemonic
agency. The counter-mnemonic groups within this polyphony can build coalitions to destabilize
the hegemonic discourse. Very often, hegemonic power changes are linked to crisis events.
For Alain Badiou, an “event” is a transgression of that which can be said and expressed in the
dominant discourse (the hegemonic order)—something about which the prevailing knowledge system
cannot decide, not even subsequently (Badiou, 2005). Such an event—like the French
Revolution for European modernity or, as Aditya Sarkar pointed out, the Bubonic Plague for labor
relations in Bombay (Sarkar, 2014)—is never integrated into the dominant discourse, but radically
changes it through the recurrent inscription of disturbing voices into the hegemonic discursive
instances. It is interesting to consider the order of causality between political event and discourse.
According to José Medina (2011: 21f), counter-memory emerges when political upheavals allow
for it. I disagree with this causality between counter-memory and political agency, because at times
counter-mnemonic agency actually creates the political conditions for change. Vivid examples can
be found in the memory activists in Guatemala or the famous Madres de la Plaza de Mayo in
Argentina who contributed to toppling the military dictatorships in these countries rather than
emerged in the wake of the regime change. We must also take into account differences between
Molden	 131
dictatorial and democratic societies. What seems to be indispensible for significant changes in
mnemonic power relations, however, is a certain instability of the dominant political order that
imposes memory.
If no structural crisis accelerates the process of change, then these coalitions have to develop
slowly in order to be sufficiently consolidated to replace the dominant discourse. Gramsci would
have thought of this as a mnemonic “war of position.” Once the balance of mnemonic power is
changed, however, no unified counter-discourse is automatically established. At the end of the
counter-hegemonic process, there most likely will not be one common discourse of all the formerly
subaltern memory groups. Much rather, fractions among them will persist and the eventually
formed new hegemonic memory culture will not represent all those involved in the “memory revolution.”
The question is, then, whether a balanced, symmetric polyphony—a truly heterogeneous
memory culture, a memory multiculture so to speak—could ever be maintained for a longer time.
Or, if a new dominant memory is formed, which of its children the “memory revolution” will
devour and which will prevail.
Because the temporary stability created by mnemo-hegemonic shifts is never complete, and
because community is never entirely homogenous—or, as Laclau and Mouffe (2001) somewhat
dramatically put it, society is impossible (p. 108)—tensions between different groups (often with
opposed collective memories) do persist within the collective. These tensions allow changes in
power relations and thereby re-arrange the cultural coordinates of the broader community. The
reactivation of historical openness and the heretical challenge to master narratives originate in
moments of hegemonic instability when marginalized or unheard counter-voices force the renegotiation
of power relations and of their historical causes. Mnemonic hegemonic theory
explains seemingly or temporarily constant social structures and collective identities as intersocial
relations of power that can be altered by active individuals and groups. Gramsci calls the
social medium in which these subjects act “culture” and understands hegemony as a constellation
of consent of dominated groups with the interests of the dominant groups. I suggest to use this
Gramscian concept of culture to arrive at a new definition of “memory culture” as the always
specific and contingent dimension of all social realms in which the meaning of the past is negotiated
(Molden, 2010: 217).
Gramsci’s understanding of culture—employed and adapted by Marxist historians and critics
such as Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson, and the new historicists—escapes the economic
determinism of orthodox Marxism-Leninism. While rooted in the sphere of material production
(base), culture unfolds in the superstructural realm of state and civil society with certain autonomy.
Culture, then, acquires a wide and dynamic definition of an embracing social process that
includes all symbolic and material thinking, acting and negotiating practices within a defined
major group. Projected to remembrance, culture is the sum of all communication processes with
regard to the reflexivity of collective knowledge and memory, as Jan Assmann (2008) put it, “is
knowledge with an identity-index, it is knowledge about oneself, one’s own diachronic identity”
(p. 114). Marc Angenot (2004), borrowing from Gramsci and Bakhtin, conceptualizes culture as
social discourse that
legitimates and publicizes certain views, tastes, opinions, and themes. It represses others into the
chimerical, the extravagant. […] In the social discourse you find in coexistence all the soft forms of social
domination of classes, sexes, privileges, and statutory powers. (p. 105)
These cohabitating elements of societies are in a constant tension and sometimes antagonism
with each other, albeit contained within a “hegemony that mark[s] the boundaries of the ‘thinkable’
[through] the normative imposition of the legitimate language” (Angenot, 2004: 102).
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In its post-structural turn, hegemony theory takes a more radical stance toward antagonism
and replaces Gramsci’s aim of a new hegemony (that of the working class), and the resulting
desirability of complete emancipation, with the ideal of a permanent division and tension—
because, according to Laclau (2000), “full realization of freedom would be equivalent to the
death of freedom, for all possibility of dissent would have been eliminated from it. Social division,
antagonism and its necessary consequence—power—are the true conditions of a freedom”
(p. 208). Angenot (2004) also appreciates the importance of antagonisms: “A culture […]
is thoroughly made out of regulated antagonisms between conflicting images, concepts, cognitive
discrepancies, and incompatibilities that are still relatively stabilized without ever reaching
a state of equilibrium” (p. 102). Within the relative stability of hegemony, Angenot identifies
several constitutive elements, one of which—universal taboos—is particularly interesting in
mnemonic terms:
What we perceive as universal taboos and censorships that mark out the limits of the sayable, the thinkable.
Discursive hegemony does not only provide canonic forms of expression and compelling themes; it also
represses certain “things” into the unthinkable, the absurd, the chimerical. (Angenot, 2004: 108)
The “historical limits of the thinkable and sayable” that Angenot (2010) describes within the
social discourse of culture are quite analog to the limits of the socially ‘memorable’within memory
cultures.
Understood as a dynamic and operational structural term, memory cultures do not represent a
static condition in the sense of classical structuralism but the flexible framing of a field of political
agency. Not unlike Bourdieu’s (1984) concept of habitus—“a structured and structuring structure”
(p. 171)—memory cultures can be changed by political actors, just as these actors’ actions are
essentially determined by the memory cultures, in mutual interdependence or in “interaction
between structures and agents” (Joseph, 2002: 38). In certain analogy to the workings of common
sense in Gramscian hegemony, habitus is created through mimesis, that is, “not an intentional act
of imitation but a spontaneous form of identification” (Medina, 2006: 107).According to Bourdieu,
memory is already inscribed in
the process of reproduction—a practical reactivation which is opposed to both memory and knowledge
[…] The body believes what it plays at […] It does not represent what it performs, it does not memorize
the past, it enacts the past, bringing it back to life. (Bourdieu, 1990: 73)
José Medina (2006) stresses both the fact that “this cultural memory incorporated in the habitus
is not a conscious remembering” (p. 108), and the role that the exclusion of certain experience
(amnesia, forgetting) plays in the construction of cultural memory. For Bourdieu (1977), the social
“unconscious” is always in the process of being produced by “the forgetting of history that history
itself produces by incorporating the objective structures it produces in the second natures of habitus”
(p. 78–79). It is made of the very sedimentations of the forgotten contingencies of history
mentioned above. We can follow Michael Burawoy and Jens Kastner in noting that Bourdieu’s
concept of habitus is, then, an astute description of the incorporation of hegemony into the subject
and yet it is the pessimistic flipside of (neo-)Gramscian optimism concerning the reach of agency
and the subjects’ ability to change the structures and modes of symbolic domination (Burawoy,
2012: 189; Kastner, 2012). Together, these dimensions address the structural conditions in which
specific power relations develop. A memory culture is defined by the frames of historical reference
common to certain communities of experience and/or tradition who share a critical mass of content,
patterns of interpretation, and rituals of collective memory.
Molden	 133
The role of media in memory cultures
This hegemonic notion of culture highlights, in terms of political power, the role played by media
as discursive tools. For Gramsci, all of the realms where memory is being forged into history
belong to the ideological sphere of superstructures, especially the institutions of civil society that
he had partly elevated out of Marx’ basement, so to speak. Civil society is the non-state part of the
superstructure that reproduces hegemony through culture and comprises schools and academic
institutions, media, artistic production, and so on. All these contribute to the consolidation and
stabilization of hegemony insofar as they reproduce and actualize conceptions framed in terms of
common sense and seemingly unquestionable assumptions dressed up as universal truths. The
deconstruction of the interactions between civil society and state in overlapping public spheres and
the role of media within this relation is particularly important for the leading media—both national
media and those with an international impact such as CNN or Al Jazeera—that are instrumental in
the upholding of hegemonic culture.
Understanding media discourse requires a historicized notion of the cultural frames of common
sense. Stuart Hall described this, with reference to Gramsci, as a
network of elements, premises and assumptions drawn from the longstanding and historically-elaborated
discourses which had accreted over the years, into which the whole history of the social formation had
sedimented, and which now constituted a reservoir of themes and premises on which, for example,
broadcasters could draw for the work of signifying new and troubling events. (Hall, 1982: 73)
The analysis of media discourse is indispensible for grasping the omission or manipulation of
memory in the service of a hegemonic discourse about meaningful events (or rather, events to be
endowed with meaning), because social hegemony is being produced through the channels of civil
society. Although today’s omnipresent use of the term differs from that of Gramsci, it is interesting
that after 1989 it has been precisely the structures of civil society (education, media, non-state
organizations) that were targeted by Western actors in order to influence the “common sense” in
Eastern Europe. Examples include George Soros’ multiple initiatives for journalists and civil society
institutions, the creation of the Central European University, international writing competitions
among school children on memory like that of the German Körber Foundation, the creation of
European history schoolbooks, and so on. But some of these initiatives failed or rather backfired.
We can think of ultra-nationalism in Hungary and the Baltic states, combative Catholic conservativism
in Poland and its anti-Communist witch-hunts, or the philo-Stalinist imperial power play in
Russia.
But Hall’s statement is also applicable to more group-specific local media as well as the infinitely
more polycentric new social media that transcend the monovectorality of source–transmitter–receiver
of the Shannon–Weaver model (Erll, 2004). According to some media scholars, the
streamlining of popular memory is mostly a feature of authoritarian regimes. Martin Convoy
argues that, while Bakhtin’s concept of dialogue stresses open-ended discursive interactions,
“within authoritarian systems there are attempts to close this down to an overriding perspective, a
truth” (Conboy, 2002: 19). In terms of modern memory production, the latter may also apply, if in
a more moderate way, to democracies and their “soft” imposition of common frames of thought. In
pluralistic democracies like the European Union (EU) or the United States, the right to, and the
political desirability of, mnemonic polyphony is portrayed as core a value, but adjacent structures
may really guide toward homogeneity. David Simpson made this point regarding the New York
Times coverage of 9/11, deconstructing the “flag-waving” national remembrance of a crisis event
(Simpson, 2006: 39). Roger Simon, in his article on collective memory in the Historical-Critical
134	 Memory Studies 9(2)
Dictionary of Marxism, picks up the same example to illustrate the production of consensus and
identification, that is, assent to the dominant system, through common memory: “[Media memory
practices] also serve to eliminate those memories from social memory that might get in the way of
the prevailing hegemony” (Simon, 2010: 1125). In their introduction to his article, the editors of
the dictionary ask to what degree media discourse plays into the hands of what Althusser (1971)
called the “ideological state apparatus.” Simon follows up to this question in his analysis of patriotic
media events and Debord-esque spectacles, especially the example of 9/11: “The media, which
safeguard the hegemonic narratives about 9/11 and its impacts, function as a state apparatus that
inscribes the ‘event’ ever more into a serial emotional structure of fear” (Simon, 2010: 1126).
Similar dynamics could be observed about the memory of the Cold War in Europe after 1989
(Molden, 2010). Events like these, unlike the game-changing events that Badiou thinks of, serve to
reaffirm the ruling discourse through binding and streamlined memory, although they too may
“alter the ‘inner life’of culture” (Simon, 2007). Counter-memory, then, becomes mnemonic agency
against the culture of spectacle.
Access to and control over the means of communication and diffusion of historical narratives
are of utmost importance for the establishment and maintenance of mnemonic hegemony. The
double-condition that “memory operates under the pressure of challenges and alternatives” (Starn
and Davis, 1989: 2) makes the role of media so crucial. The material foundations and structural
conditions of memory cultures notwithstanding, the representations of the past are produced in a
contingent process in which the decisive factors are the access to material and symbolic capital, to
the public sphere and its media, as well as the public recognition of one’s competence in the interpretation
of history. Like Gramsci and Bourdieu, Elizabeth Jelin speaks of the “power of words”
and their institutional cachet:
Memory as a narrative social construction involves studying the narrator and the institutions that grant
or deny power to the voice of the narrator and authorize him or her to speak, since as Pierre Bourdieu
notes, the effectiveness of performative speech is proportional to the authority of the speaker. (Jelin,
2003: 23)
The distribution of these elements strongly determines who dominates the respective arena of
historical discourse by establishing and, however temporarily, maintaining discursive hegemony in
the politics of memory and collective identity. The politics of history and official discourses of
memory produced by the elite’s ideological apparatus can be—but do not always have to be—cut
off from real experience. Counter-memory on the other hand—while possibly also constructed as
an idealist myth—is more likely to have to rely on a material basis of experience, given its lack of
strong media support and other amplifying and reifying tools. In history politics, as in any process
of political conservation or mobilization, the access to media and other means of public articulation
is essential in determining who is able to maintain a regnant historical perception or persuade a
significant and maybe decisive part of the public into changing it.
Politics of history as agency in a hegemonic field
The specific agency at play within memory cultures can generally be defined as “politics of history.”
They are politics of history, and not of memory, because despite their group-specificity and
grounding in particular interests and experience, they are meant to become “history,” that is,
hegemonic narratives within memory cultures.As agency in the hegemonic field of history production,
politics of history can thus be defined as any social action that is essentially based on historical
references and/or tries to influence the interpretation and representation of history. Hence,
Molden	 135
politics of history is not limited to the field of official state or supranational politics (in most cases,
the power centers of historical knowledge production), which would exclude other powerful groups
of historico-political agency like critical academia or marginalized ethnic groups that operate in the
realms of civil society. Nor does it comprise all forms of memory, as there is no or little mnemopolitical
agency in those communicative memories that do not challenge prevalent historical narrations,
even if these historical narrations are contrary to such experience. To put it in terms of
hegemony theory again, “a hegemony or hegemonic project should […] be seen as an articulated
attempt to preserve or transform [cultural] structures and relations” (Joseph, 2002: 39). Because
the relations of forces are neither permanent nor completely stable, powerful actors may lose
ground and influence in the interpretation of history, while formerly silent communities of experience
may “suddenly” challenge the regnant master narratives. Yet, those who are neither trying to
strengthen nor to defy a dominant interpretation are also still part of the correlation of forces in the
political field of historical representation: as consumers or ignorers of specific history politics, as
potential recruits, and, most importantly, as the carriers of alternative, though not yet articulated
narrations of history.
But this does not mean that the content of their memories cannot be political, as Tanya Petrović
has shown in her analysis of the nostalgic historical discourse of textile factory workers in postYugoslav
Slovenia. Petrović objects to the widespread dismissal of such nostalgic narratives as
“losers’ discourse” and in contrast points out their function as a specific cultural practice of creating
meaning. Nevertheless, it is not a historical narrative deliberately composed to challenge a
dominant discourse (Petrović, 2010). Such representations, like the positive memories of life under
Communism in Eastern Europe, do not necessarily seek empowerment vis-à-vis an official history
by which they do not feel represented. These are not mnemonic rebellions, but the communicative
memories of different experiences of the same events, different from those woven into the sensemaking
epos of the respective nation or other collective. They coexist—sometimes peacefully,
sometimes uneasily—with the master narratives of their time.
Under certain circumstances, such a non-competitive, that is, not counter-hegemonic, collective
memory held by a certain group during a particular period could well be transformed into a counter-discourse
defying prevalent historical perceptions. Elizabeth Jelin (2003) notes that in opposition
to (national) master narratives “there will be others who–whether in form of private oral
stories or as practices of resistance to power—will offer alternative narratives and meanings of the
past, threatening the national consensus that is being imposed” (p. 29). But what if the passive
“third sector” in the field of mnemonic hegemony does not rise to mnemonic agency? The dominant
historical narrative may just tell a story that differs from the communicative memory of the
majority, but without hurting their interests. Or contact with the dominant narratives may be uneasy,
yet complementary—sometimes converging, sometimes conflicting, but devoid of open clashes.
Or the memory of many may literally be outside the hegemonic culture because the order of discourse
is built on their silence. Theirs is a “knowledge that is local, regional, or differential”
(Foucault, 2003: 8), “knowledges that are not articulated or voiced in the proper way, knowledges
without accepted credentials,” and “the locally scattered memories that were never allowed to
amount to more than unqualified and dismissible experiences” (Medina, 2011: 17, 19). The speechlessness
or silence of subaltern groups, even if historically they have acted as important political
subjects, is related to the inarticulate communities of memory that, in the dominant understanding,
do not exist unless they are articulated by oral historians or others. Is there a necessity, a “historical
interest” in the articulation of their memory? And where does the possibility for their discursive
empowerment reside? Is it the duty of memory scholars to recover these memories? Or will this
just instrumentalize these silent memory cultures to the benefit of academic careers or political
tactics?
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Resistant pasts? History and the articulation of subaltern memory
What Foucault was searching for in his genealogies were histories of struggle and thus pasts that
are resistant in a twofold way: On the one hand, they are histories of resistance against hegemonic
domination; on the other, they contain historical perceptions that resist their incorporation into the
grand narratives of the ruling classes. In Foucaultian terms, hegemonic memory can be defined as
experiences and memories transformed into a knowledge system, as a filtered and normalized
canon. If this is so, then a memory that is not yet part of a refined history/knowledge system is a
subaltern memory in the sense of Spivak, an unarticulated system of communicative and cultural
references to the past and common experiences. Despite the recovery of “ordinary people’s” everyday
experience through oral history projects and testimonial or memorial literature, the functional
position of this group of “ordinary people” within the power system of memory has not been
convincingly captured: the silent majority that, by (Gramscian) consent, remains subjugated to a
hegemonic discourse and does not articulate the heterogeneity produced by Foucault’s counterhistory.
Foucault declares that the agency of unmasking hegemonic structures lies in the hand of
intellectual critique and calls upon scholarship to empower these forms of knowledge, to revive
them. This, however, is precisely the point that Gayatri Spivak took issue with in her famous essay
“Can the Subaltern Speak?”: the grand gesture of the (Western) intellectual, academia, the critic,
and so on, to assume the act of articulation on behalf of the subaltern.
Spivak’s (1999) analysis of “the surreptitious subject of power and desire marked by the transparency
of the intellectual” (p. 265) is clearly directed against the barely camouflaged complicity
of Western progressive intellectuals with postcolonial hegemonic structures, and “resistant pasts”
as defined above can clearly be found in the history of anticolonial struggle (Molden, 2011). But
her warning is also relevant for memory scholars in general. Subaltern studies have been among
the most prominent employers of Gramscian theory. As a matter of fact, they were crucial in
Gramsci’s resurrection as a major theoretician of social power relations (Hall, 1986; Modonesi,
2013). We are therefore well advised to keep Spivak’s argument in mind while developing a
hegemony theory of memory, and all the more so because history is so central in their analysis of
subalternity and hegemony. Before intervening on behalf of dispossessed and unarticulated communities
of experience, the explorers of the power relations of memory should heed the advice of
postcolonial criticism.
Dipesh Chakrabarty located Marxist historiography of thinkers like Eric Hobsbawm (and earlier,
Lenin, Trotsky, Bloch, or Althusser) within the tradition of “historicism”—an Enlightenmentinspired
progressive historical thinking in which “Western” societies are more advanced than those
of the Global South. These latter, notwithstanding their contributions to global modernity, still had
to develop into modern subjects as exemplified by the post-1945 European citizen. “That was,”
Chakrabarty (2000) asserts, “what historicist consciousness was: a recommendation to the colonized
to wait” (p. 8). Historicism, then, is seen as an inescapably western means of domination.
Ranajit Guha (1989), who also pointed out the complicity of even critical historians with a
“dominance without hegemony,” nevertheless argued in favor of counter-memory using the
Gramscian terminology of common sense. The authority who selects, according to its own values,
certain historic events and deeds over others, is the ideology of the state. Guha (1996) calls this
(European) ideology “statism.” “This is why the common sense of history may be said generally to
be guided by a sort of statism which thematizes and evaluates the past for it” (p. 1). However,
according to him, this colonial practice failed because education was limited to first feudal and
then bourgeois elites and lacked the connection with the masses to establish a true hegemony: “Yet
the narratives which constitute the discourse of history are dependent precisely on such choice”
(Guha, 1996: 3). Guha (1996) draws on examples of “small voices” that are not referenced in the
Molden	 137
big histories of dominant ideologies, because either they do not fit into the narrative and are
“drowned in the noise of statist commands” (p. 3) or they are reduced to elements in the logic of
principal contradictions: that between colonizers and colonized just as much as that between
nationalist and Marxist historical discourse, with the difference that in the latter cases hegemonic
power does not belong to an existing regime but is “yet to actualize, a dream of power” (Guha,
1996: 7). Nonetheless, “in either case historiography is dominated by the hypothesis of a principal
contradiction which once resolved would convert the vision of power into its substance” (Guha,
1996: 7). Guha (1996) claims that a re-writing of hegemonic histories would “challenge the univocity
of statist discourse. […] a re-writing that heeds the small voice of history will put the question
of agency and instrumentality back into the narrative” (p. 11). In a Foucaultian sense, it will
be “interrupting the telling in the dominant version, breaking up its storyline and making a mess of
its plot” (Guha, 1996: 12).
In the tradition of Foucault (2003), the deconstruction of historical narratives strives “‘to desubjugate
historical knowledges, to set them free’,[Foucault, 2003: 10] so that insurrectionary struggles
against coercive epistemic closures are revived” (Medina, 2011: 12). The historic memory of
past struggle is to be converted into a new struggle by the
coupling together of scholarly erudition and local memories […], the meticulous rediscovery of struggles
and the raw memory of fights. […] This coupling […] allows us to constitute a historical knowledge of
struggles and to make use of that knowledge in contemporary tactics. (Foucault, 2003: 8)
Mnemonic hegemony theory, as presented here, does not call to arms for the articulation of passive
memory cultures through activist research projects taking sides in the standoff or confrontation
between different historical narrations. It is not about the “right to be heard” of these groups,
because why should academia determine this right? It is not about assuming normative positions
that involve essentialization and the assumption that a specific group holds such a right in terms of
“historical interests,” of which Laclau and Mouffe (2001) say they “hegemonize certain demands”
(p. 107). In order to avoid the simplifying pitfalls of Guha’s principal contradictions, it is crucial to
entwine hegemony theory with a Bakhtinian sense of polyphony. This will allow us to understand
that the power relations of memory are more complex than binary “clashes of memory.” Aspects of
gender, class, language, political and religious identities, and common experience—all mentioned
by Halbwachs as constitutive categories for collective memory—must come into focus.
The pitfalls of bipolar reductionism
Hegemony theory shifts our attention away from exclusive logics of open conflict and competition
and toward the multilateral and plurivectoral relations of forces that are, however, constructed
precisely by the logic of hegemony. Deviating from Gramsci’s insistence on a single struggle
between a hegemonic center and its opposition, Laclau, Mouffe, and others try to overcome in
historical theory the simplistic dichotomies of late 19th century orthodox Marxist analysts like
Karl Kautsky. Much current social science analysis and public discourse seems to envision cultural
memory as a competition along more or less clear-cut lines between national or international players
on roughly the same level of agency. The concept of simple binary relations between the powerful
and the marginal tends to blind out interactions with those communicative memories that are
not politically articulate, and therefore ignores the old question whether the dominant historical
accounts of a period do reflect the popular experience of the time itself.
One of the most recurrent metaphors in memory studies has been that of conflict and even of
“history or memory wars” (to cite but a few examples: Blanchard et al., 2008; East European
138	 Memory Studies 9(2)
Memory Studies, 2010; Leggewie, 2008; Linenthal and Engelhardt, 1996; Macintyre and Clark,
2003; Stora, 2007). Accordingly, memory has also been analyzed as a field of international peace
building (Wang, 2009), and of negotiating historical guilt between different groups within one state
(Barkan, 2000). And, consequentially, one of the best-received mediating proposals in this debate
has been a model of “dialogical memory” that reflects the negotiatory situation in the wake of
memory battles. Aleida Assmann (2011) defines dialogical memory as
politics of memory between two or more states that are connected with each other through a common
history of violence, recognize their own part in the traumatized history of the other and empathically
include the suffering of the other in their own memory. (p. 22; this and all following translations B.M.)
In this conflictual logic—Assmann’s title invokes the ubiquitous notion of a “divided European
memory”—her model rightly addresses the conflicting master narratives of nation states, narratives
that have already established public dominance within their own society. It is these master
narratives that are imagined at war, featuring the occasional insurrection of a particularly articulate
marginalized group memory. Alas, such a mnemonic map falls short of the multilayered and multidirectional
complexity of history politics.
While some of this martial phrasing may not go beyond more or less skillful branding in a
defined market of cultural memory discourse, this rhetoric is indeed characterized by an idea of
memory as, to paraphrase Foucault’s (2003) take on Clausewitz, yet another “continuation of war by
other means” (p. 15). As a matter of fact, Foucault also speaks of “battles” between knowledge systems
and analyzes the power relations between actors of unarticulated and articulated memory,
between master narratives of hegemonic history and counter-memory. Not unlike the revolutionary
Gramsci, Foucault agitates his readers to undermine and overthrow the prevailing power grid of
knowledge and history and, like Gramsci, he identifies the bourgeoisie as the universalizing hegemon
of historical master narratives: “History was a discipline by means of which the bourgeoisie showed
[…] that its reign was […] perfectly justified” (Foucault, 1998: 423)—just as Guha (1989) and others
do in postcolonial theory: “A bourgeois discourse par excellence, [liberal historiography] helped
the bourgeoisie to change […] the world according to its class interests in the period of its ascendancy,
and since then to consolidate and perpetuate its dominance” (p. 215). What sets both Foucault
and postcolonial critique apart from Gramsci is their poststructuralist approach to insurrection.
While Gramsci wants to replace one hegemony by another, Foucault and postcolonial critique insist
on the continuous plurality of insurrections, of knowlegdes, of struggles “in order to resist new
hegemonic unifications and hierarchizations of knowledges” (Medina, 2011: 20).
Hence, the martial metaphors of Foucaultian counter-memory evoke more than the opposition
between two versions of history. They aim at the very foundations of power in history:
The central means of destabilization is the return to the origin, that is changing the discursive practice (the
power of hegemonic historical narratives) by critically studying its foundational texts and its omissions,
silences, and constructions of socio-political unity by means of subjugation of some. (Medina, 2011: 16f)
A Foucaultian reading targets the asymmetry of power created through language, history, and
knowledge. However, a hegemony theory of memory requires the analysis of underlying power
relations, including the full complexity of the social forces involved, and goes beyond the controversies
between nation states or between the incompatible mnemonic legacies of competing
ideologies.
Admittedly, Gramsci is interested in culture primarily in terms of political change and he thinks
hegemonic relations within a class paradigm. However, Kate Crehan has pointed out that one central
misreading of Gramsci’s thoughts is the equalization of hegemony and ideology (Crehan,
Molden	 139
2002: 172ff and 199ff). Hegemony is not limited to the field of ideas and conscious worldviews,
but comprises the whole of culture—in fact, as I showed above, it emphasizes the level of lived
experience that is not reflected on a cognitive, let alone meta-cognitive level. Transposed to
Halbwachsian terminology, these non-idealist elements of hegemony constitute central frames of
memory and, more importantly, possible points of departure for counter-memory. If we define the
groups of agency as “collective historico-political actors,” we can explain the workings of the politics
of history and memory. The issue at stake are the relations of discursive power—who exercises
it and who doesn’t, and why?—not the bipolarity of class struggle. As James Clifford said about
Stuart Hall’s articulation theory, it is a question of
updating […] Gramsci. It involves a sense of politics, which does not depict good and bad guys neatly
lined up on one side or another of a line. Rather, one sees a continuous struggle over a terrain, portions of
which are captured by different alliances, hooking up different elements in different ways. There is a lot of
middle ground and a lot of political and cultural positions, which are not firmly anchored on one side or
the other but, instead, are up for grabs. (Borofsky, 2000: 97)
Concerning cultures of remembrance, the reductive tendency toward a bipolar understanding of
hegemonic relations—or even of one that imagines multiple counter-hegemonic forces reveling
against a single ruling elite or class—is not unlike that of victims and perpetrators. During the last
decades, the focus on this relationship has been dominant in the analysis of history politics. More
so, the academic interest in these matters to a large part derived from critical political agencies that
challenged dominant narrations (anti-Fascism, anti-Stalinism, anticolonialism, etc.). It is not surprising
that the notion of “politics of history” had to be freed from its political connotation before
it became an analytic concept. Apart from the fact that the terms of societal reconciliation are often
forced by one group upon another, and despite the importance of these relations in post-conflict
societies, to focus on the clash of their historical interpretations blocks out other important subcultures
of remembrance. Michael Schuldson and Barry Schwartz point out the simplistic version
of Gramscian theory expressed in those presentist approaches that ignore the fact that the past is
often resistant and cannot always be subordinated to political interests of the present (Schuldson,
1993; Schwartz, 2012). One must pay close attention to this critique because it emphasizes the very
importance of the materiality of the past that has been highlighted above. Like Lacan’s “real”—the
part of the psyche that is not a signifier and therefore does not dissolve into the imaginary and the
symbolic—this indissoluble “rest” of the past, which is not constructed, keeps stirring and changing
the production of cultural memory; unlike Lacan’s real, however, the past is not entirely beyond
our reach. We must look for the concrete traces and sources of past events in order to understand
their nachleben in contemporaries and later generations. Only if we are able to assess this material
impact on different social classes and groups will we be able to interpret the relations of forces
between the different agents of history and memory production.
Conclusion
So what is the specificity of hegemony theory when employed in the context of memory cultures?
When any collective, regardless of its hierarchical organization or regime, defines its own cultural,
institutional, or geographical boundaries, it uses a set of positive and negative references to the
past. To represent the past, then, quite literarily means to keep or make it relevant for the present at
the service of contemporary interests within the group. We therefore speak of the politics of history,
and these politics do not only engage the members of a given collective in communicative processes:
the group itself interacts with other groups in order to establish the validity of historical
accounts. These interactions may be between equals, such as controversies about historical
140	 Memory Studies 9(2)
responsibilities for past crises between nations or political parties, or their vectors of agency are
top-down or bottom-up, be it by disseminating a predominant interpretation of history or by challenging
such a master narrative with a defiant version of the past.
In either case, politics of history are defined by relations between political actors who articulate
their specific historical accounts more or less effectively within relevant communication arenas,
using channels of political influence, media, and other institutions of civil society. They are best
conceived of as a specific form of social agency within the dynamic structural framework of memory
cultures. The success of any narrative greatly depends on the social audibility and power of the
voices that promote it so as to penetrate and determine the hegemonic set of specific memories that
form memory cultures and their historical canons. These efforts create the inertia of the mnemonic
common sense of what is historically thinkable and acceptable, and what not.
Gramsci was cautious of the hegemonic belief systems and the unquestioned, universalized, and
essentializing assumptions of common sense. He was both wary of the embeddedness of common
sense in the ruling paradigms of its time and conscious of its importance as a basis of any culture.
In any case, its hegemonic saturation makes it unlikely to reflect the entirety of alternatives, the
polyphony of actors, and the contingent reservoir of available pasts. This lets us come full circle
with our introductory quote of William S. Burroughs (1987) who went on to write about the roads
to the metahistoric Western Lands, “The obvious road is almost always the fool’s road. And beware
of the Middle Roads, the roads of moderation, common sense and careful planning” (p. 151).
Mnemonic hegemony theory keeps us alert of the fact that the most dominant tale is never the only
one and may not even represent the most relevant experience. And it can serve as a compass
through the maze-like discursive processes of memory, a disorienting terrain where the production
of historical sense is a function of political power.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
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Author biography
Berthold Molden is a Historian based at the University of Vienna. He was visiting Professor at the Institute
des Hautes Études de l’Amérique latine at Sorbonne III, Paris (Chaire Alfonso Reyes 2014–2015), at the
Institut Pluridisciplinaire pour les Études sur les Amériques at Université Jean Jaurès Toulouse (Chaire
Amérique latine 2015), at the University of New Orleans (Marshall Plan Chair 2012–2014), the University of
Chicago (2011), and at the University of Vienna (2010), where he also earned his doctoral degree. From 2005
to 2010, he was Research Director for Cold War memory studies at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for
European History and Public Spheres (Vienna). Before that, he was research associate at the Asociación para
el Avance de las Ciencias Sociales, Guatemala. He is the author of one and co-author of two monographs,
Co-Editor of three collective volumes, and author of 20 articles on the politics of history and memory from a
global history perspective, the history of the Cold War, and decolonization.