Topic 8 — Seven Types of Forgetting

Cultural Memory and Photographs · Topic 8 — Paul Connerton, Memory Studies (2008)

Core Argument: The common assumption that remembering is a virtue and forgetting is necessarily a failure is not self-evidently true. Paul Connerton identifies at least seven distinct types of forgetting — some harmful, others neutral, some even necessary and beneficial.

Key Quotation (Kundera, via Connerton): "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." — But Connerton's argument pushes back: not all forgetting is a surrender to power; some forgetting is how life, identity, and society become possible at all.

Overview: The Seven Types at a Glance

#	Type	Initiated by	Moral Status
1	Repressive Erasure	State / power	Usually harmful
2	Prescriptive Forgetting	State / mutual agreement	Ambiguous — can be legitimate
3	Constitutive of New Identity	Collective social process	Necessary / often productive
4	Structural Amnesia	Social structure	Neutral — systemic
5	Annulment	Information overload	Complex — sometimes necessary
6	Planned Obsolescence	Capitalist consumption	Structural — market-driven
7	Humiliated Silence	Collective shame	Painful — covert

1 Repressive Erasure

Forgetting as repressive erasure appears in its most brutal form in totalitarian regimes: images destroyed, statues razed, names removed from inscriptions. Its aim is to cast all memory of a person or event into oblivion.

Roman Law — Damnatio Memoriae: Applied as a punishment to rulers and powerful persons who were declared "enemies of the state" after their death or after a revolution. Every physical trace of their existence was to be eliminated.

Historical Examples

French Revolution: abolished monarchical titles and nobility; eliminated "Monsieur," "Madame," "Mademoiselle"; erased regional province names (Burgundy, Provence)
English parliamentary debates (17th c.): repressive erasure used to deny a historical rupture — denying the Norman Conquest ever established new law

Covert Erasure: Museums

Art museums enact a subtle repressive erasure through their spatial script. The Metropolitan Museum of Art places Greek/Roman and Egyptian collections in the main hall; non-western and medieval collections are invisible from the entrance. The spatial arrangement is "overt in celebratory remembrance, covert in erasure."

The Futurists' Museumophobia: The Italian Futurists wanted to "free Italy from its infinite number of museums, which covered the country like an infinite number of cemeteries." Their anti-museum stance was itself a fantasy of repressive erasure — destroying every institution that preserved the past.

2 Prescriptive Forgetting

Prescriptive forgetting is also precipitated by an act of state, but it differs from repressive erasure because it is believed to be in the interests of all parties to the previous dispute — and can therefore be acknowledged publicly.

Ancient Athens — 403 BCE

After civil war, Athenian democrats re-entered Athens and proclaimed a general reconciliation. They issued an explicit interdiction: it was forbidden to remember all crimes committed during the preceding civil strife. They erected an altar to Lethe (forgetting) on the Acropolis — the injunction to forget was the very foundation of the life of the polis.

Modern Parallels

Treaty of Westphalia (1648): both sides shall "forgive and forget forever all the violence, injuries and damage" of the Thirty Years' War
Charles II (1660): declared "an act of full and general pardon, indemnity and oblivion"
Post-WWII West Germany: by the early 1950s, prosecution of active Nazis became a forgotten issue — restoring minimum social cohesion required it

3 Forgetting Constitutive of a New Identity

Could forgetting be a gain rather than a loss? This type argues yes. Forgetting becomes part of the active process by which newly shared memories are constructed. A new identity requires a set of tacitly shared silences.

Key Insight: Pieces of knowledge that are not passed on have a "negative significance" — by being forgotten, they allow other images of identity to come to the fore. They are "like pieces of an old jigsaw puzzle that if retained would prevent a new jigsaw puzzle from fitting together properly."

SE Asian Cognatic Societies

In Borneo, Bali, the Philippines, and rural Java, knowledge about ancestors is remarkably absent. Kinship stretches horizontally (outward to siblings) rather than vertically (backward to predecessors). With high demographic mobility between islands, remembering ancestors from a left-behind island becomes irrelevant. Forgetting is an active part of creating kinship through new ties.

Modernity as Discarding

The narrative of modernity requires forgetting. Two interlinked processes: (1) objective transformation of social fabric by capitalism — certain words and concepts must be discarded; (2) subjective emancipation from fixed social hierarchies — details of prior religious/political affiliations must be forgotten. New vocabulary enters (History, Revolution, Liberalism, Modernity); old words vanish (memorious, memorist, mnemonize).

4 Structural Amnesia

Structural amnesia was identified by anthropologist John Barnes (1947) in his study of genealogies. A person tends to remember only those links in his or her pedigree that are socially important.

Genealogies

In the strongly patrilineal British peerage, ascending male lines are far more memorable than associated female lines. Among the matrilineal Lamba, conversely, ascending female lines could be traced for three to five generations while male lines could only be traced back one or two. Social structure determines what is remembered and what is forgotten.

Recipes and Cooking

Structural amnesia operates in culinary history: the availability of printing systematically affects which recipes are transmitted and which are forgotten. Written recipes are unlimited in number; oral memory has a fixed capacity. Country recipes acquired by observation from grandmothers are systematically forgotten; those in cookbooks survive. The attraction of regional cooking is tied to what cannot be printed.

5 Forgetting as Annulment

Where structural amnesia results from a deficit of information, forgetting as annulment flows from a surfeit of information. Nietzsche gave famous expression to this in The Use and Abuse of History.

Nietzsche's Critique: Antiquarian historical scholarship crushes the "elementary ability to live and act" under "the repugnant spectacle of a blind lust for collecting, of a restless gathering up of everything that once was." In Gargantua and Pantagruel, Rabelais prescribes hellebore — a drug of forgetfulness — to purge Gargantua of scholastic overload.

The Great Archivalization

The formation of the modern state required massive documentation. Habsburg Spain's archive at Simancas (16th–17th c.) was the first and most voluminous in Europe. The British Empire built its administrative core around knowledge-producing institutions (British Museum, Royal Geographical Society, India Survey). These became "a fantasy of knowledge collected in the service of state and empire."

Digital Information Overload

New information technologies (mid-1970s to mid-1990s) created a global cultural surfeit. "To say that something has been stored — in an archive, in a computer — is tantamount to saying that we can afford to forget it." The concept of discarding may come to occupy a central role in the 21st century as production did in the 19th. In physics (1963), 75% of citations were from writings less than 10 years old — scientists must learn to forget.

Kuhn's Paradigm Shifts: Kuhn sees the development of science as one in which every shift in scientific evolution unburdens scientific memory. Every collapse of a paradigm is an act of forgetting of great importance for the economy of scientific effort. A surpassed paradigm is one that can — and must — be forgotten.

6 Forgetting as Planned Obsolescence

This type flows from the planned obsolescence built into the capitalist system of consumption. Given limits on the turnover time of material goods, capitalism shifted attention from goods to services — accelerating the "product life cycle."

Consumer Capitalism

Consumer durables (knives, cars, washing machines) have a substantial lifetime; services (concerts, films) have a far shorter one
Time control focuses more on consumer desire than work discipline
Distinction via consumption: acquiring a new item before others matters more than the item itself
"The past is a foreign country but now the present is becoming one too" — Alexander Kluge

Forgetting as Market Mechanism

Andreas Huyssen: consumer culture trains the child in "a fascination with the new which includes the foreknowledge of its own obsolescence in its very moment of appearance." Ever-increasing acceleration of innovation generates ever-larger quantities of soon-to-be-obsolete objects — and therefore ever more acts of discarding. Forgetting is an essential ingredient in the operation of the market.

7 Forgetting as Humiliated Silence

The seventh type is not primarily a matter of overt state action. It is manifest in a widespread pattern of behaviour in civil society: covert, unmarked, and unacknowledged. Its most salient feature is a humiliated silence.

The Paradox: Humiliation is notoriously difficult to forget — "it is often easier to forget physical pain than to forget humiliation." Yet in the collusive silence brought on by a particular kind of collective shame, there is detectable both a desire to forget and sometimes the actual effect of forgetting.

German Cities After WWII Bombing

The destruction of German cities left some 130 cities and towns in ruins; about 600,000 civilians killed; 3.5 million homes destroyed; 7.5 million homeless. Members of occupying powers reported seeing millions of homeless and utterly lethargic people wandering amid ruins. From the war years there survive very few accounts from within the experience of those bombed — because those who endured it fell silent. This is forgetting as humiliated silence: the experience was too shameful, too complex, too entangled with guilt about Nazi crimes to articulate.

Why This Taxonomy Matters

For Cultural Memory

Photography and visual culture participate in all seven types. Museums enact repressive erasure (type 1); post-conflict societies prescribe forgetting (type 2); new national identities require selective silence (type 3).

For Ethics

Not all forgetting is morally equal. Repressive erasure by a state differs profoundly from structural amnesia in genealogies. Connerton asks us to resist the reflex that always equates forgetting with failure and remembering with virtue.

For Identity

Identity is constructed as much through what is not remembered as through what is. "What is allowed to be forgotten provides living space for present projects." Forgetting is not merely the absence of memory — it is an active, constitutive force.

Exam-Style Questions

Question 1 — Repressive vs. Prescriptive

Q: How does Connerton distinguish between repressive erasure and prescriptive forgetting? Illustrate each with a historical example.

Model Answer: Both types are initiated by state power, but they differ in whose interests they serve and whether they can be openly acknowledged.

Repressive erasure destroys memory in the interest of those in power, against the interests of those whose memory is erased. Roman damnatio memoriae — erasing the names and images of "enemies of the state" — is the paradigm case. The French Revolution's elimination of noble titles and provincial names is another: the aim was to cast all memory of the ancien régime into oblivion.

Prescriptive forgetting is different because it is believed to serve the interests of all parties, including those who suffered under the previous regime. The Athenian amnesty of 403 BCE is the classic example: after civil war, both democrats and oligarchs agreed that it was forbidden to remember past crimes — an altar to Lethe (forgetting) was even erected on the Acropolis. The Treaty of Westphalia (1648) similarly enjoined both sides to "forgive and forget forever." The key difference is acknowledgment: prescriptive forgetting is declared publicly, whereas repressive erasure works by denial.

Question 2 — Forgetting and Identity Formation

Q: Using Connerton's third type and the example of South East Asian cognatic societies, explain how forgetting can be constitutive of identity rather than a failure of memory.

Model Answer: Connerton argues that forgetting can be an active process of identity-construction rather than a passive lapse. In cognatic societies of South East Asia (Borneo, Bali, the Philippines, rural Java), knowledge of ancestors is strikingly absent. Rather than tracing kinship vertically back through generations, these societies extend kinship horizontally — outward to siblings and new communities. This pattern is not accidental; it is driven by high demographic mobility between islands. When newcomers arrive on a new island, the detailed identity of their previous home becomes irrelevant. Forgetting the ancestors of the island left behind is what makes it possible to form new kinship ties through hospitality, marriage, and children. The forgetting is gradual, implicit, and unacknowledged — but it is nonetheless necessary. As Connerton puts it, "what is allowed to be forgotten provides living space for present projects." Forgetting does not destroy identity; it creates the conditions for a new one.

Key Concept to Remember: Connerton's most provocative claim is that "forgetting is not always, and not always in the same way, something about which we should feel culpable." Reading a photograph, a museum, or a national archive requires asking not only what is remembered but which type of forgetting governs what has been left out — and whether that forgetting is repressive, pragmatic, structural, or something else entirely.