The performative moment

Memory performed is at the heart of collective memory. When individuals and groups express or embody or interpret or repeat a script about the past, they galvanize the ties that bind groups together and deposit additional memory traces about the past in their own minds. These renewed and revamped memories frequently vary from and overlay earlier memories, creating a complex palimpsest about the past each of us carries with us.

Thus the performance of memory is both a mnemonic device and a way in which individual memories are relived, revived, and refashioned. Through performance, we move from the individual to the group to the individual, thereby reconfirming the insights of Maurice Halbwachs eighty years ago on the social framework of remembrance.

J.L. Austin developed a celebrated theory of performativity in speech acts. His ideas apply with equal force to remembrance. For our purposes, it is useful to note that the performative act both describes a condition and recreates it. Memories return to past experience but add their traces to the initial story. To say ‘I love you’ is to state an affective fact as well as to breathe renewed life into it by doing so. Initially, Austin's examination of performative utterances was a challenge to logical positivists as to the existence of a class of meaningful statements which were beyond the reach of tests of their truth content, and are therefore ‘not verifiable, because they do not describe an action but perform it – and a deed cannot be either true or false’. There is some dispute among philosophers of language as to whether the performative is to be distinguished from the constative, that is, that the phrase ‘I love you’ is not a statement in the sense that it cannot be proved to be right or wrong. Performative utterances – like many memories – are beyond simple verification. We need not weigh in on this matter, though, since for our purposes the act of remembering occupies both kinds of utterances, both the constative – ‘I remember the moment I met you’ – and the performative – ‘You swept me off my feet’.