PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

The subject, currently so hot, of social memory, leads to the theme of social oblivion. The problem is that forgetting is a difficult and controversial issue. Trying to forget represents a paradox difficult to sneak away, since every effort to do so, inexorably confronts itself. However, for autological systems, colliding with themselves is a habitual phenomenon, which is why forgetting becomes a normal operation, even necessary for the functioning of social memory. The only condition for oblivion to operate, avoiding overloading the memory, is that this operation remains unnoticed. The memory does not remember the past (that would not be useful and would only serve to overload the system) but rebuild it at every opportunity based on a future projected in a new way. Traditionally, it has been thought that the support of social memory lies in the psychic substratum, since social memory is found in the memories that are shared by all members of society, leaving aside only the strictly intimate memories of each one. Systems theory, on the contrary, maintains that the support of social memory cannot be found outside the system which remembers, but in the structures of it. From the invention of writing onward, social memory rests on the means of transmission of communications and, in our time, increasingly on the mass media.