Location in the Intellectual Landscape: The Methodological, Theoretical and Metaphysical Orientation of the Present Study

Abstract

Zygmunt Bauman, that most fastidious and deliberate interpreter of the ways in which we make sociological sense of the present, argues that we must try to get to grips with memory. Memory, as he points out, is, after all, history’s ‘after-life’.

It is through memory that history continues to live in the hopes, the ends, and the expectations of men and women as they seek to make sense of the business of life, to find pattern in chaos, to construe familiar solutions to unfamiliar worries. … Memory is history-in-action. Remembered history is the logic which the actors inject into their strivings and which they employ to invest credibility into their hopes. In its after-life, history re-incarnates as a Utopia which guides, and is guided by, the struggles of the present. (1982: 1)

Bauman wrote these words as the first paragraph of his classic study Memories of Class. ‘Memory is history-in-action’: memory is our existential umbilical cord; it is the past reconfigured, relived in the present. ‘Memory is the after-life of history’: memory is our way of dispensing with the uncertainties of the present and recovering the certainties of the past, or — what amounts to the same thing — a crutch on which we lean. Memory is a form of life after death, reincarnating as Henry James’ Great Good Place.¹ Memory making is a work of art — a way not only of coming to terms with the past but of reliving it in the present. The gap between the past and its reconstruction in the present might be unbreachable, but it is by reliving our memories that we encounter this impossibility.