Citations & References:"A man said to his boss, whom was his close friend, 'I think I deserve a raise. You know, there are three other companies after me.''Is that right?" asked the boss. 'What other companies are after you?'So the man looked up, as if he tried to remember something. 'As I recall,' he replied, 'the electric company, the phone company, and online loan company,' said the Moon when she arrived, after greeting with Basmalah and Salaam."We are all born into natural and cultural environments that shape what we become, individually and collectively. From our 'mother tongue' to 'our father's faith,' from medical risks to natural hazards, where we start our journey has much to do with our destiny, and thus with our chances of overcoming the obstacles in our way," the Moon carried on."In our journey as a nation, we go through the sweet and bitterness of a journey. Some are flattering and some are unflattering. Now, should the unflattering part of a nations history be erased? The answer is absolutely not. The good needs to be there with the bad. If we obscure the bad, we get the impression that a nation is only good which it never is. The good exists because there is a comparison, the bad; vice versa.History was ‘a social form of knowledge; the work in any given instance, of a thousand different hands. The idea of history as an organic form of knowledge, and one whose sources are promiscuous, drawing not only on real-life experience but also on memory and myth, fantasy and desire; not only on the chronological past of the documentary record but also the timeless one of ‘tradition’.The past and the present were brought together in an analysis of the ways in which people made the past part of their everyday routines and turned to the past ‘as a way of grappling with profound questions about how to live’. People used their pasts, their findings suggested, to address questions about ‘relationships, identity, immortality, and agency’. The past was not a distant or abstract, insignificant entity but a key feature of their present lives.We may say that our experiences of the present, largely depend upon our knowledge of the past, and that our images of the past commonly serve to legitimate a present social order.We generally think of memory as an individual faculty. None the less, there are a number of thinkers who concur in believing that there is some such thing as a collective or social memory. We may note that images of the past, commonly legitimate a present social order. It is an implicit rule that participants in any social order must presuppose a shared memory. To the extent that their memories of a society's past diverge that extent, its members can share neither experiences nor assumptions.In seeking to show how this is the case, let's begin by considering a paradoxical example:that of the French Revolution. Whenever one begins the story, it can be argued that it would have been better to have started earlier.In political terms pre-revolutionary, France was an absolute monarchy. The king shared his power with nobody, and was answerable for its exercise to nobody but God. Affairs of state, including the finances, were his private domain; and in all things he was sovereign in the sense that his decisions were final. On the other hand, no king was, or sought to be, a completely free agent. Even Louis XIV was careful to take advice on all important decisions, and men born to be king (for queens regnant were prohibited by French law) were carefully taught that counsel was of the essence of their sovereign authority. Louis XVI believed this implicitly; but unlike his grandfather Louis XV (his own father had died before inheriting the throne) he did not invariably do what a majority of his ministers recommended. He particularly thought he understood finance–a fateful delusion as it proved.The crisis was triggered by King Louis XVI’s attempts to avoid bankruptcy. Over the eighteenth century, France had fought three great wars on a worldwide scale. Accustomed by the pride, ambition, and achievements of Louis XIV (1643–1715) to regarding herself as the greatest European power, France found her pretensions challenged over the three generations following the great king’s death by the rise of new powers–Russia, Prussia, and above all Great Britain. Rivalry with the British was fought out on the oceans of the world. At stake was dominance of the sources and supply of the tropical and oriental luxuries for which Europe was developing an insatiable appetite.Nor was the king unfettered in his choice of advisers. Although he could sack them without explanation, his practical choice was limited to career administrators, magistrates, and courtiers. They, in turn, could only be brought to his notice by the intrigues of other ministers and familiars of both sexes drawn from the ranks or clienteles of the few hundred families rich enough to live in the gilded splendour of the Court. Imprisoned in scarcely changing routines of etiquette established in the previous century by Louis XIV, his two successors passed their lives peripatetically, following the hunting around forest palaces outside Paris–Fontainebleau, Compiègne, and of course Versailles, that spectacular seat of power imitated by rulers throughout Europe. When they visited the capital, it was briefly. Louis XIV had established this royal lifestyle deliberately to distance himself from a turbulent and volatile city whose people had defied royal authority during his minority in the uprising of the Fronde (1648–53).The king’s absolute authority over the country at large was embodied in a handful of omnicompetent executive agents, the intendants. One of these was assigned to each of 36 generalities into which Louis XVI’s kingdom was divided. The king thought them the showcase of his government, and there was no doubt about their high level of professionalism. But they were increasingly unpopular for their authoritarian ways, and their shortcomings and mistakes were mercilessly denounced by bodies whose authority they had largely supplanted since the seventeenth century. Taxation in some large provinces, for instance, still required the consent of estates–representative, though seldom elected, assemblies with no ultimate powers to resist, but whose semblance of independence enabled them to borrow relatively cheaply on the king’s behalf. Above all, the fiscal and administrative work of the intendants was constantly impeded by the courts of law, most of which had administrative as well as judicial functions.Yet it was hard to see how a French king could keep up his international pretensions without some modification in his subjects’ time-honoured privileges and inequalities. Nowhere was the kingdom’s lack of uniformity more glaring than in the structure of privilege and exemption which gave each and every institution, group, or area a status not quite like any other.So the crisis of 1787 was not just financial. Calonne, the finance minister appointed in 1783 to manage a return to peacetime conditions, began with lavish expenditures in the hope of sustaining confidence.It was a political disaster. Few of the Notables accepted Calonne’s version of the crisis confronting the state. Even those who did tended to hold him responsible, and therefore not the right person to resolve it.A month before monarchical authority collapsed into bankruptcy, a colossal hailstorm swept across northern France and destroyed most of the ripening harvest. With reserves already low after Calonne had authorized free export of grain in 1787, the inevitable result was that the months before the harvest of 1789 would bring severe economic difficulties. Bread prices would rise, and as consumers spent more of their incomes on food, demand for other goods would fall. Manufactures, hit by cheaper British competition under the commercial treaty of 1786, were already slumping; and there were widespread layoffs at the very time when bread prices began to soar.On top of all this came an unusually cold winter, when rivers froze, immobilizing mills and bulk transport and producing widespread flooding when a thaw finally came. So the political storm that was about to break would take place against a background of economic crisis, and would be profoundly affected by it. Then the 14 July was not the beginning of the French Revolution. It was the end of the beginning.This piece of history, is a paradoxical case, because if there is anywhere you would not expect to find social memory at work, it must surely be in times of great revolutions. But one thing that tends to get forgotten about the French Revolution is that like all beginnings, it involved recollection. Another is that it involved the severing of a head and a change in the clothes people wore. It can be believed that there is a connection between these two things, and that what we can say about that connection is generalisable beyond the particular instance.""And finally," said the Moon, "let's try to ponder about Ernst Bloch's writing entitled the 'Mark!' as follows,'More and more appears among us to the side. One should observe precisely the little things, go after them.What is slight and odd often leads the furthest. One hears a story-say, about the soldier who arrives too late for muster. He doesn't insert himself into the ranks but rather stands next to the officer, who 'thereby' notices nothing. Apart from the amusement that this story provides, an impression is still working: What was that? Something moved! And it moved in its own way. An impression that will not let us come to rest over what we heard. An impression on the surface of life, so that it tears, perhaps.In short, its good to think in stories too. So much just isn't done with itself when it happens, even where its beautifully told.. Instead, very strangely, theres more going on there. The case has something about it; this is what it shows or suggests. Stories of this kind are not just recounted; instead we also count what something struck there—or we listen up: What was that?Out of incidents comes a 'Mark!' that would otherwise not be thus; or a 'Mark!' that already is, that takes little incidents as traces and examples.They point out a 'less' or 'more' that will have to be thought in the telling, retold in the thinking; that isnt right in these stories, because things aren’t right with us, or with anything. Some things can be grasped only in such stories, not in a more expansive, elevated style, or then not in the same way. How some such things came to notice will be retold here, and tentatively marked; lovingly marking in the retelling; by marking, intending the retelling. It’s little strokes and such from life that haven’t been forgotten; our refuse is worth a lot these days. But an older impulse was also there: to hear stories, good ones, poor ones, stories in different tones, from different years, remarkable ones that, when they come to an end, only really come to an end in the stirring. Its a reading of traces every which way, in sections that only divide up the frame. In the end, everything one meets and notices is the same.'""And Allah knows best."It's time to go, the Moon took her leave and sang,Terus melangkah melupakanmu, lelah hati perhatikan sikapmu[Keep walking to forget you, my heart was tired to pay attention to your attitude]Jalan pikiranmu buatku ragu, tak mungkin ini tetap bertahan[Your way of thinking makes me doubt, there's no way this can last]Perlahan mimpi terasa mengganggu, kucoba untuk terus menjauh[Slowly the dream is disturbing, I'm trying to keep away]Perlahan hatiku terbelenggu, kucoba untuk lanjutkan hidup[Slowly my heart shackled, I'm trying to move on]Engkau bukanlah segalaku, bukan tempat tuk hentikan langkahku[You are not my everything, not a place to stop my steps]Usai sudah, semua berlalu, biar hujan menghapus jejakmu *)[It's over, it's all gone, let the rain wash away your traces]
- Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember, 1996, Cambridge University Press
- William Doyle, The French Revolution: A Very Short Introduction, 2001, Oxford University Press
- Ernst Bloch, Traces, 2006, Stanford University Press
*) "Mengapus Jejakmu" written by Nazriel Irham
