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Ludmila Isurin “Memory, Identity and Imagination” by Serguey Ehrlich Ludmila Isurin, Ph.D., Professor, The Ohio State University, USA At the time when Western academic thought is mostly guided by strict disciplinary divides and predominantly operates in the English language mode, with the latter often separating the Western academia from other schools of thought existing in the world, a recent work by Serguey Ehrlich “Memory, Identity, and Imagination: The structure of behavior from the perspective of Memory Studies” offers a rare insight into the mind of a Russian intellectual. I found this work fascinating: it is deeply interdisciplinary, it challenges the existent presuppositions in memory studies, and it is thought-provoking. In my reflection on this work, I will try to elaborate on all three points underlined above. First, in his essay, Ehrlich explores the interconnection between memory of the past and collective future thinking from the perspective of human behavior. By doing so, he grounds his argument in multiple disciplines, such as history, psychology, psychoanalysis, sociology, anthropology, folklore, literary studies, politics, and theology. Such broad approach not only provides much depth to his intellectual exploration, but also it takes the reader across disciplinary boundaries in an almost effortless way. Although the superficial reading of his suggestion that memory is a component of the guidance and control subsystems of behavior may not sound as a new one, if one thinks about multiple studies in Psychology (e.g., Proactive Memory or Memory and Evolution), the idea behind his approach would not fit one specific academic field. Rather, by outlining the four major points where memory becomes a component of the subsystem of behavior, such as 1) memory, identity, and imagination acting as a “molecule;” 2) triple-layered narratives as “atoms’ nucleus;” 3) three base mythic narratives as the core of the “nucleus” and 3) “fundamental particles” of base mythic narratives he proceeds to the in-depth discussion of each component of the proposed framework showing overarching connections between those components. Multiple examples from academic sources as well as from our knowledge of the world where we live makes his argument convincing and highly engaging. Moreover, the interdisciplinary approach undertaken by Ehrlich in his essay is not limited to the study of the phenomenon in question from multiple angles. He calls not only for stepping outside of one’s discipline, but he also calls for the intellectual exchange that transcends national borders. In his own words, “[t]here is a fundamental difference between material and spiritual production. The first one is a zero-sum game from the perspective of the limited natural resources of our planet; the second one is as unlimited as our imagination. We must share material products amongst us, spiritual ones are able to multiply in the minds of each and every one of us: ‘If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.’ It is impossible to alienate ideas and hence, by their own nature, they cannot be the property of either a person or a group.” Through this metaphorical presentation of the intellectual exchange Ehrlich voices the need for scholars to unite their efforts to better understand memory of the past and imagination of the future in the world that becomes increasingly divided by politics and ideology. Second, in his discussion of the proposed framework, Ehrlich often challenges the well-established conceptions, such as a definition of history. In his view, “history has a double framework: experience-past and expectation-future” and that historians should act as prophets of the future. He takes a step further by offering imagination as the “reliable ‘asymmetric counter concept’ of memory” of the past. Moreover, he challenges some old-fashioned terminology, such as “the stubborn devotion of intellectuals to the outdated” concept of modernity, “which is a derivation from the Latin adverb modo ‘presently, just now.’ For sure that name plays the deceptive role, because first of all we reflect the world existing ‘just now’ around us.” According to him, “that terminological pitfall is an important reason why we have not realized clearly how deep is the rupture between industrial and information stages. Therefore, we are not able to elaborate effectively the new forms of memory, identity, and imagination suitable to our global mode of existence.” Although the question, what makes collective memory different from history, is widely discussed in literature on collective memory and there seems to be a consensus that history is more objective than collective memory, Ehrlich undermines the latter by suggesting that “many historians are members of a ‘dishonest legion’ of scholars from different disciplines both in the humanities and natural science, who betray truth guided by such non-rational factors as rhetoric, propaganda, and personal prejudice.” It is hard to disagree with his reasoning. In my recent study on Russian collective memory (Isurin, 2017), I raised a similar concern by giving an example of Soviet historians, who were not free of ideological pressure and censorship. He proceeds further by saying that “ [i]t is true that all scholars as members of their mnemonic communities are affected by powerful narratives, which are based on national, class, religious, and other interests. Therefore, a historian must permanently make a choice between the universal narratives of science and the group memory narratives. When, for example, he/she is seriously engaging with his/her nation-state memory narratives he/she turns out to be an agent of national memory regardless to his/her investment in historical studies.” He concludes his statement with a witty comment that “some alchemists made a contribution to the early stages of chemistry development, but that does not allow them to be called ‘chemists,’” which is just another illustration of Ehrlich’s engaging writing. Third, I found a few lines of thinking offered in this paper thought-provoking. According to Ehrlich, a trauma of early humankind, such as cannibalism or bringing one’s own children as sacrifice to gods, becomes a “collective primal trauma” that leads to certain behavioral patterns in modern times and in modern democratic societies. He cites examples of American soldiers involved in mass torture in Vietnam and Iraq, hazing rituals in American college fraternities, or the “efforts of German elites to cure their society from venomous Nazi heritage…., which is now under a threat from the growing popularity of far-right.” Thus, Ehrlich believes that “the one of important duties of academia should be working through the ‘metaphysical guilt’ (Karl Jaspers) of the Stone Age, the collective primal trauma inherited of cannibalistic practice of hunter-gatherers, which unfortunately still not discussed in current memory studies.” Indeed, through my extensive reading of literature in the field of collective memory, this is the first time I came across such a proposition, and it made me stop for a moment and think more about it. Such violent behaviors are later discussed within the opposition of “we vs. others,” a common theme in national memory construction, where one group pushes against the “other,” a group that is viewed as inferior to the values of another group. Here he looks at such behaviors on a national scale. Ehrlich brings up a very important – albeit not comfortable to many Westerners – idea, cited from Benda (2011), that “the citizens of democratic nation-states are more prone to wage wars than the subjects of medieval monarchs,” and reminds the reader of the slogan of French monarchists: “Democracy is war.” The discussion of the US external interests that are dominant over the moral values and that shaped the US foreign policy in the last few decades adds a valuable angle to the discussion of violence and aggression in modern times. Ehrlich further elaborates on the idea of the “other” that “must be presented as non-human monsters to whom the human treatment is unacceptable and instead deserve torture and humiliation” in order “to motivate ‘our people’ for such a ‘mortal combat’ for surviving.” This thought-provoking statement, although metaphorically expressed, makes one think about recent and current atrocities committed by one nation against another. All in all, this deeply intellectual – and somewhat philosophical work – presents an interesting take on memory studies, which may not be supported by some scholars, but it will certainly keep them engaged. Intellectual “food” is not always easy to digest but it does not mean that it should be excluded from our “diet.”

Henry L. Roediger, III and Olivia L. Jäggi Washington University in St. Louis 17.07.2023 Correspondence to: Henry L. Roediger, III Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences Washington University in St. Louis – Box 1125 One Brookings Drive St. Louis, MO 63130-4899 Fax: 314-035-7588 e-mail: roediger@wustl.edu In “Memory, Identity, and Imagination: The Structure of Behaviour from the Perspective of Memory Studies," Serguey Ehrlich provides a comprehensive summary on his view of the three topics in the title. Memory is of the past, identity is of the present, and imagination is of the future. Of course, the three topics are intertwined, because when we retrieve the autobiographical past, we do so using our current identity and, as many studies have shown, imagination fills in the gaps of memory and can lead to false memories (e.g., Goff & Roediger, 1998). Correspondingly, when we imagine the personal future, we use our current identity and project our memories from the past into the future (e.g., Szpunar et al., 2007; Schacter, 2012). Nonetheless, the tripartite separation of memory, identity, and imagination is useful, even if the categories can blend into one another in practice.              Another interesting metaphor Ehrlich advances is the understanding of memory, and especially collective memory, by using analogies from chemistry and physics. According to Ehrlich, memories are a subsystem of the guidance and control subsystem of behavior, and they are composed of molecules. In turn, these molecules are composed of three atoms (memory, identity, and imagination) and, in turn, each atom contains a nucleus that has three layers of schema (specific narratives, schematic narrative templates, and base mythic narratives). As if this were not enough to digest, the core of the nucleus has three fundamental particles representing three myths (the fairy tale, the heroic myth, and the myth of self-sacrifice). This framework provides much food for thought; we will leave it to other writers to address whether it will provide a fruitful avenue for understanding memory in general and collective memory in particular. One overarching goal of Ehrlich’s article is to advocate the creation of a global identity for all people in the world. An individual’s identity should be, by this view, that “I am a person of this world” – a member of the broader collective. In this sense, collective memory should become globalized and transnational. However, humans have many identities – they may identify with their family, their schools, their religions, their sports teams, their towns or cities, their states or provinces, or their countries, to name but a few. We carry all these identities simultaneously, adopting one or the other as the need and context arises (e.g., attending a church service or a sporting event). However, in the quest for a global identity, one competing identity stands out as a roadblock: national identity. The modern nation state, commonly referred to as a country, is only 200-300 years old, yet it has become a powerful source of identity for people all over the world. People are proud to be French or Russian, or Argentinian, or Chinese, and so forth. When countries’ teams are introduced at the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games, they proudly wave their flags and the corresponding segment of the crowd erupts with cheers, exemplifying a moment of pure (if benign) nationalism. Americans, for one, often chant “USA, USA, USA …” as their team arrives or competes. Of course, nationalism can be pernicious, and often is. Russia (or at least Putin) regards Ukraine as part of their/his nation and invades in a ruthless attack; China regards Taiwan as a part of China and may invade someday to force a return (and an international crisis). Yet people of both the Ukraine and Taiwan regard themselves as belonging to an independent, democratic country, with no desire to be overrun and incorporated into their totalitarian neighbor. How strong is nationalism as a force, and can it be overcome to form the global identity that Ehrlich envisions? He remarks that we must imagine our identity as a global citizen in the future, saying that we must “systematically work on reshaping obsolete national identity into [a] global one: ‘I am a human being’ must be the prevailing identification of everyone” (Ehrlich, pg. 8). That statement is easy to write, but much harder to achieve. Our research indicates that overcoming nationalism is likely to be a difficult and enduring problem, and one that is greater in some countries than others. We have developed a technique that provides an indirect indicator of nationalism. This technique relies on the phenomenon of collective overclaiming, first identified in small groups by Ross and Sicoly (1979). They studied groups such as married couples and basketball teams. They would interview married couples separately and ask questions about personal effort, such as how often each would take out the trash or change the baby’s diapers. In the case of basketball teams, they would ask the active players on the winning team soon after a game how much of the effort to the victory was due to their personal performance. In both cases, people were asked to rate their effort in terms of percentage, on a scale from 0 to 100. In both cases, when the individual percentages were totaled, they exceeded 100%; hence, people generally overclaim their own effort in any joint performance. One reason for this pattern is the availability effect, as it was called by Tversky and Kahneman (1973): when some information comes easily to mind, it is over-represented in our judgments. In this context, a person (say, a husband) may have recollections of how often he changed the baby’s diapers but might not be aware of how often his wife changed the diapers, and vice versa. Later research on collective overclaiming showed that the larger the group, the greater the amount of overclaiming (Schroeder et al., 2016). We used this prior research as a springboard to ask about collective overclaiming in much larger groups: nation states. In our first study, we piggybacked a single question into a survey of university students in 35 countries. The survey, conducted by James Liu and many others (Liu et al., 2009) was about world history, with questions about many places, events and people ranging over the past 1000 years. Near the end of the survey, we (Zaromb et al., 2018) inserted the question “what contribution do you think the country you are living in has made to world history?” The 6,831 students representing 35 countries in the sample provided an estimate on a scale from 0 to 100, with 0 indicating that no contributions were made from the students’ country and 100 indicating that all contributions were made from their country. With the critical question appearing near the end of the survey, we thought students’ ratings might be moderated by the fact that most of the questions preceding the critical one almost entirely reflected contributions from countries besides their own. That did not seem to happen. The senior author of that paper (and first author of this one) had predicted that we would find massive overclaiming, but he also believed that people from the United States would stand out in collective overclaiming due to the trope that permeates his country representing “a city on a hill” (Van Engen, 2020), or a beacon to democracy to which other countries may admire and emulate. James Wertsch, our colleague, predicted that Russia would stand out. He was right and we were wrong. Presented in Table 1 is the mean percentage estimate from each country, the number of participants who filled out the survey, as well as the 95% confidence interval surrounding the mean. Students of ten countries claimed over 40% responsibility for their country’s contribution to world history, led by Russia at 61% and the United Kingdom at 55%. The students from the United States claimed, on average, 30% responsibility for world history, which is ridiculously high considering that the American continent was “discovered” by Europeans only a few hundred years ago. University students probably know more about world history than the general population, so estimates from a random sample of people in each country may produce even greater estimates of responsibility. The total responsibility claimed by students of just 35 countries was not less than100%, as it should be with so many countries missing, but 1,156%! Keep in mind that the United Nations includes 193 nations, with a few others missing (North Korea, Palestine), so with estimates from all countries, the total would be orders of magnitude higher. These results show great levels of what we have called national egocentrism or even national narcissism (Roediger et al., 2022; Zaromb et al., 2018). Such results show great national pride, and this pride may inhibit any attempt to have people identify with the entire world. Because of the availability heuristic and the fact that people are steeped in the history of their own country in every educational system, information about their own country will be much more available to them relative to considerations of the entire world. How might such collective overclaiming or national narcissism be moderated? Prior research that has asked people to explicitly consider the contribution of other entities (people for small groups), they will moderate their own claims of responsibility and elevate others. We tried this tactic in another large-scale study that asked people about their memories of World War II (Roediger et al., 2019). Of course, we mean “memory” in the sense of collective memories, because few if any of our participants had personal memories of the war. We asked people in 11 countries (8 Allied, 3 Axis countries) to fill out a questionnaire that asked a number of questions, only some of which are relevant here. The Allied countries included in the survey were Australia, Canada, China, France, News Zealand, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We asked participants from these 8 Allied countries, on a scale from 0 to 100%, to rate their country’s responsibility to the victory of World War II. We also asked participants from three Axis powers (Italy, Japan, and Germany) about their influence on the losing side, but we will not discuss those data here. In Figure 1, we show the data from people in the 8 Allied countries to the question described above. The leftmost bars in the graph indicate the average percent contribution to the victory of the war when participants rated their own country in an isolated context. Three countries – the Soviet Union, the United States, and the United Kingdom – all claimed more than 50% credit for the victory in World War II, at (respectively) 75%, 54%, and 51%. As in the data shown in Table 1, the Soviet Union (represented here by people from Russia) stands out as claiming great responsibility for the victory. Certainly, that claim can be justified in terms of the European theater of the war, if not in Asia and the Pacific theater. Still, people in just these three countries claimed 180% of victory in the war, and people in all 8 countries claimed 309%. Considering how many people from other countries fought in the war on the Allied side besides the ones included in our study, this is certainly another example of massive collective overclaiming.              Since prior evidence has shown that overclaiming can be reduced if people consider and estimate others’ contributions to the same event or task, we also asked our participants to assess their own country’s contribution in relation to others’ contributions. Participants were given the names of the 8 Allied countries included in the survey, as well as an “other” category, meaning other countries’ contributions. Each option had a box next to it where participants could enter a percentage; they could only proceed to the next question once the total added up to 100%. The center bars in Figure 1 show that every country moderated their claimed amount of responsibility when required to consider other countries’ contributions. Australia, Canada, China, and New Zealand reduced their share of responsibility by more than half when the question required participants to consider the other countries’ contributions, and France and the United Kingdom came close to dropping by half as well. Russia and the United States represented the exceptions, with the United States dropping from 51% to 29%, and the Soviet Union dropping from 75% to 64%, a mere 11% adjustment. Once again, Russia stands out in collective overclaiming relative to other countries, despite being forced to explicitly consider other countries’ contributions. Even in this condition, the total of the 8 Allied countries added up to 191%, so overclaiming was – although moderated – not fully eliminated.            The last bars in Figure 1 show the contribution to the victory of the war for each country based on the average ratings from participants from the other countries. That is, using the U.K. for example, the average in the third column is that of people of the other ten countries other than people of the U.K. Now the total of the 8 Allied countries adds up to only 86%, indicating that the previously observed collective overclaiming did not really extend beyond the nation. See Roediger et al. (2019; 2022) for a more detailed discussion of the studies described here.              The point for present purposes is to demonstrate how powerful collective overclaiming can be in a national context. Russians, in particular, seem particularly prone to such overclaiming in our studies (see Abel et al., 2019). Thus, ironically, Ehrlich’s native country may present one of the greatest examples of nationalism and possibly one of the greatest impediments to taking a global perspective, although we think that it will be difficult for people in all countries to take on a global perspective. After all, leaders of most countries are trying to increase national pride and nationalism rather than reduce it, and it is difficult to mobilize people about global threats such as climate change or nuclear war. We agree with Ehrlich that encouraging people all over the world to take a global perspective and to see humanity as unified is a critical goal. As he writes, “Industrial Modernity, an identity ‘container’ of which is the nation-state, has led to the emergence of nuclear threat, growing environmental degradation, social inequality, and other global challenges, which cannot be resolved within the national framework” (Ehrlich, pg. 6). The critical question is how we get from where we are – rampant nationalism – to where we should be –a global identity. Our hope is that the global identity would be most individuals’ primary identity, taking precedence over the nation, the region, or the city they live in. Yet, given where we are, this is a difficult task. It is true that people have become identified with their nations in a relatively short time period, mere hundreds of years since nations were invented, but such identity has taken hold of people. As Ehrlich and previously Benedict Anderson (2006) have noted, nations are “imagined communities.” So, perhaps we can use imagination, which Ehrlich advocates as part of future thinking, to imagine ourselves as part of the global community. One mechanism, as we have pointed out in this chapter, is to get people to think about their countries in a broader, global context. That form of imagining at least has been shown to tamp down collective overclaiming. Another method, a trope of fiction perhaps, is to perceive an outside threat such as an asteroid or meteor coming at the earth that would affect our existence, as in the American movies “Don’t Look Up” and “Meteor: First Impact.” Of course, climate change already presents a global existential threat, and it has been exceptionally difficult to mobilize people to address this challenge even on a national scale. How might we address climate change in a globalized context? It seems daunting, to say the least, but it is not a lost cause just yet: during the height of the pandemic, the European Commission approved a set of policies that aim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Europe, with the goal of making it a climate-neutral continent by the year 2050 ( A European Green Deal , n.d.). This is a great example of collaboration beyond national borders and – if successful – will be an important step towards the preservation of our planet (and, consequently, the members of our global community). While most people do not identify as global citizens just yet, this type of cooperation between countries could be a promising first step towards a more globalized focus in our nations’ policies and imagined futures. References Abel, M., Umanath, S., Fairfield, B., Takahashi, M., Roediger, H. L., & Wertsch, J. V. (2019). Collective memories across 11 nations for World War II: Similarities and differences regarding the most important events. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition , 8 (2), 178–188. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jarmac.2019.02.001 A European Green Deal . European Commission. (n.d.). https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/european-green-deal_en Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism . Verso books. Goff, L. M., & Roediger, H. L. (1998). Imagination inflation for action events: Repeated imaginings lead to illusory recollections. Memory & Cognition, 26 , 20-33. Liu, J. H., Paez, D., Slawuta, P., Cabecinhas, R., Techio, E., Kokdemir, D., Sen, R., Vincze, O., Muluk, H., Feixue Wang, & Zlobina, A. (2009). Representing World History in the 21st Century: The Impact of 9/11, the Iraq War, and the Nation-State on Dynamics of Collective Remembering. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 40(4), 667–692. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022022109335557 Roediger, H. L., Abel, M., Umanath, S., Shaffer, R. A., Fairfield, B., Takahashi, M., & Wertsch, J. V. (2019). Competing National Memories of World War II. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , 116 (34), 16678–16686. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1907992116 Roediger, H. L., Putnam, A. L., & Yamashiro, J. K. (2022). National and state narcissism as reflected in overclaiming of responsibility. National Memories , 209–235. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197568675.003.0011 Ross, M., & Sicoly, F. (1979). Egocentric biases in availability and attribution. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37 (3), 322–336. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.37.3.322 Schacter, D. L., Addis, D. R., Hassabis, D., Martin, V. C., Spreng, R. N., & Szpunar, K. K. (2012). The future of memory: remembering, imagining, and the brain. Neuron, 76(4), 677–694. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2012.11.001 Schroeder, J., Caruso, E. M., & Epley, N. (2016). Many hands make overlooked work: Over- claiming of responsibility increases with group size. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 22 (2), 238–246. https://doi.org/10.1037/xap0000080 Szpunar, K. K., Watson, J. M., & McDermott, K. B. (2007). Neural substrates of envisioning the future. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , 104 (2), 642–647. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0610082104 Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1973). Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Cognitive Psychology , 5 (2), 207–232. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(73)90033-9 Van Engen, A. C. (2020). City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism . Yale University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvwcjf0t Zaromb, F. M., Liu, J. H., Páez, D., Hanke, K., Putnam, A. L., & Roediger, H. L. III. (2018). We made history: Citizens of 35 countries overestimate their nation's role in world history. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 7 (4), 521–528. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0101827 Table 1 - Estimated Contribution of Each Country to World Historya

James V. Wertsch – David R. Francis Distinguished University Professor Director Emeritus , McDonnell International Scholars Academy Washington University in St. Louis St. Louis, MO 63130, USA In “Memory, Identity, and Imagination: The Structure of Behaviour from the Perspective of Memory Studies,” Serguey Ehrlich extends memory studies into important new territory. Of special note is how he harnesses ideas from memory studies to address a range of today’s conceptual and practical issues that are high on the world’s agenda. For example, his account of national memory and identity points to impediments of human reasoning when it comes to dealing with global climate change and the threat of nuclear war. Ehrlich lays the foundation for his argument with the observation that “memory is an important component of the guidance and control subsystem  of behaviour.” This means that memory is not something to be studied in isolation. Instead, its interest stems from the role it plays in an integrated system where an active agent (“identity”) is constantly drawing on information about the past (“memory”) to imagine the future (“imagination”). This system of interacting subparts is the key to understanding whether it might be possible  “to diminish the control that the [national] past exercises upon the [global] future.” Ehrlich covers a wide range of research and intellectual traditions to explore how national memory works, but I shall focus on just a couple of key points: the role of future thinking as part of “mental time travel” (MTT) and his use of notions of “narrative templates.” Future thinking has become a topic of rapidly growing interest in memory studies, and Ehrlich draws on several of the leading scholars to develop his ideas. One of the founders of modern memory studies, Endel Tulving (1985), broached the issue of MTT almost four decades ago, but lately, it has received new attention in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. This can be seen in the writings of figures such as Karl Szpunar and Kathleen McDermott (2007). They were some of the first to use clinical and imaging data to examine how remembering past events involves the same regions of the brain as are engaged in imaging future ones. The cognitive psychologist Martin Conway similarly noted that “it seems that both memories and  episodic simulations of the future are mediated in large part by the same neural networks” (2016: 256-257). For Conway, this leads to the claim that “we should be using the term remembering-imagining system  (RIS) rather than simply memory system,” which in several respects echoes Ehrlich’s argument that memory is part of a guidance-control system of behavior.  Studies of  individual psychological functioning have encouraged other scholars of MTT to take on issues of collective, and especially national memory and mental time travel (see Topcu and Hirst, 2022, for a review), and in this connection the role of narratives in human evolution becomes a major topic. In his 2015 bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind , Yuval Harari poses the big question: Why is it that humans, who were at one point were just “unexceptional apes,” have turned out to dominate the earth in a fairly short time span? After discounting explanations based on developments in brain size and individual cognitive abilities, Harari turns to a crucial transformation of social life that flourishes with the use of language, including narrative. He emphasizes that it is not just language as a lexical or grammatical system that can explain the rapid rise of Homo sapiens to a position of dominance—and often destruction and extinction—of other species. Instead, it is the way language facilitates the social organization of groups that can grow beyond a few dozen individuals. In contrast, Harari points to limits in the size of social communities of chimpanzees, communities that rely on personal recognition and relationships. Chimpanzees are social animals who use basic forms of communication and form groups, but the groups extend only to about 50 individuals. Beyond that, rather than expanding further, the tendency is for a few individuals to break off to form another group. In contrast to the natural upper limit on how big such groups become, modern humans are capable or forming much larger communities with much larger capability to dominate other species and the natural world. These communities can extend up to over a billion individuals as in the case of China or India. Harari sees language, including narratives to be a key facilitator of this. He does not go into great detail about the forms of language that are central to his argument, but at several points he suggests that narratives play a crucial role. Narratives, or stories [1] , are ideal instruments for forming large groups such as nations. This so first of all because they are extremely powerful cognitive instruments that grasp together information in an efficient manner, making them easy to communicate and share. In addition, when used to tell the story of a community such as a nation, they are usually part of an identity project that encourages members to see themselves as part of a big narrative of a big group. In discussing the mutual influence of culture and the individual, Ehrlich draws on A trid Erll’s comments about “a permanent exchange between cultural schemata and their ‘individual actualization’” (2011). Cultural schemata are generalized patterns of action, including narrativizing the past. They come in the form of general, reusable tools such as those harnessed to tell and retell stories about a group, and in the process, they can become sacred and resistant to change for members of the group. Paraphrasing William James in Principles of Psychology , memory is not just about the past, but about our  past. The notion of “schemata” in Ehrlich’s formulation plays a key role. Instead, of thinking of narratives as being isolated specific stories about concrete actors, events, times, and places, he emphasizes that they have their impact on us largely in the form of narrative schemata that are more general story lines that can be used again and again. In pursuing these claims, Ehrlich builds on the notion of narrative templates (Wertsch, 2021), which are generalized underlying plots instantiated in multiple specific narratives. Rather than having surface form, these are plots posited by analysts in order to make sense of patterns of discourse and thinking in a collective. Ehrlich extends these claims further by positing additional levels of abstract narrative forms. The result is a “triple-layered narrative ‘nucleus’” that includes the notions of specific narratives and narrative templates and goes on to include “base mythic narratives.” This analytic move takes Ehrlich into territory beyond the narrative templates that guide modern nations and into issues concerned with generic narrative forms used by to humans in general. In his account, three “base mythic narratives” are the fairy tale, the heroic myth, and the myth of self-sacrifice. In reflecting on such issues, he is delving into topics examined by scholars such as Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) in The Myth of the Eternal Return  and Vladimir Propp (1895-1970) in The Morphology of the Folktale . These are profound works still being mined for new insights today, and Ehrlich might have something to add. Ehrlich’s elaboration of the notion of narrative template can be put to work when trying to understand some of the world’s most vexing and dangerous problems. In particular, the collective memory and collective future thought that have emerged with “ transition from the industrial society of nation-states to the information society of global humanity” have a sobering downside. The imagination and thought required to deal with today’s existential threat are “hampered by inertia of Durkheimian ‘collective representations’” that arose as part of the nation-state, which may be the apotheosis of human aspiration, but also end up being a “necessary evil.” This has led to the paradox that the “identity ‘container’” of the nation-state has given rise to the threat of nuclear war, environmental degradation, social inequality, and other global challenges, while at the same time depriving us of the means to deal with these existential threats. The result has been short-term thinking that leaves little room for imagining a global community capable of addressing global problems. This state of affairs poses fascinating challenges for studies of future thinking and Mental Time Travel. The study of MTT is just getting going, so it is unfair to burden it with too many tasks, but Ehrlich’s line of reasoning will eventually encourage scholars from various disciplines in the social sciences and humanities to take on some very big issues indeed. Potentially, his formulation will encourage us to go beyond identifying symmetries between how we understand the past and future and focus on what appear to be major a symmetries. What I have in mind stems from the observation that collectives often have powerful representations of the past that are so emotion-laden and visceral that they can be mobilized into political action, even violence. Consider the unending, heated disputes between India and Pakistan over the 1947 Partition, or between Palestinians and Israeli Jews over the formation of modern Israel in 1948. These disputes seem to be open wounds that won’t go away. In contrast, when it comes to future thinking, it is hard to identify any issue that generates the sort of public debate and dispute that allows us to mobilize us to deal with it. Some of this failure stems from the fact that the collective involved in future thinking about climate change or nuclear warfare must go beyond the familiar “identity container” of the nation-state. But Ehrlich’s line of reasoning challenges us to think about whether there is something more at work. For example, is there something fundamentally different about collective, or even individual MTT that limits our ability to imagine the kind of visceral events that we are all too prone to do when it comes to remembering the past? It is unfair to charge Ehrlich with the responsibility for addressing all these issues. But he does add a fascinating item to the tool kit of memory studies. It comes in the form of a conceptual framework that could have real use as we try to be more successful in the future than we have been in the past in coping with some of the globe’s most pressing issues. James V. Wertsch is David R. Francis distinguished professor and director emeritus of the McDonnell International Scholars Academy at Washington University in St Louis, where he teaches courses in anthropology and global studies. He is a consulting professor at Fudan University, an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Education and a fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His latest book is How Nations Remember: A Narrative Approach. [1]  I use these terms interchangeably.

06.04.2023 Anyone reading Ehrlich’s long essay on the relationship between memory, identity and imagination will be deeply impressed by the wide range of reading that went into it and the deep thinking that is emerging from it. He is attempting to relate memory to the guidance of behavior and argues that memory is tightly related to questions of identity and the role of imagination. All three together, memory, identity and imagination rely on a range of narrative templates (here he draws strongly on James Wertsch’s ‘schematic narrative templates’), of which Ehrlich picks out three in particular, the fairy tale narrative, which he sees most closely associated with family, kinship and clan identities, the heroic myth narrative, prominent in national identities, and the myth of self-sacrifice narrative that he associates with a vision of global humanity. He sees those narratives as primal phenomena which help to understand the history of human evolution. His is certainly an ambitious argument, and I am not really in a position to comment fully on all aspects of his intricate argument but draw from it a long list of interesting things that I will have read to engage more fully with what he presents here. The emphasis on storytelling and narrativity in the construction of memory and identity and the formation of imagination is one that is emphasized by Ehrlich, and here I concur entirely with his argument. [1]  Yet, I would add that it is not enough to look at narrations but also to take into account practices. Practice theory has for some time now pointed to the weaknesses of just looking at discourses. [2]  Hence I would urge everyone analyzing memory, identity and imagination not just to examine discourses but also the practices that are aligned to these discourses. Drawing on Reinhart Koselleck’s conceptual ideas around ‘the space of experience’ and ‘the horizon of expectation’, Ehrlich is, like Koselleck, connecting the former with memory (although Koselleck connected it to history, something also acknowledged by Ehrlich), but whereas Koselleck is linking the latter to hope, Ehrlich finds imagination better suited as a concept. Memory and imagination, he goes on to argue, are tightly interlinked in the way they both work together and impact on identities in any given present. Memory, identity and imagination are set up by Ehrlich as a triangle where each end of the triangle influences the other ends. I believe that at the bottom of his intriguing argument lies a normative desire that derives from strongly contemporary concerns. These include fear of the future in relation to either a nuclear or an environmental Armageddon, a deep skepticism about the values of industrial modernity, a dislike of nationalism and its terrible side effects, like wars, genocides and forms of ethnic cleansing, as well as a dislike of capitalism and its logic of utter greed. He follows Alvin Toffler in declaring that industrial modernity came to end with the late twentieth century and that instead we are now in an ‘information society’. What is largely ignored in this argument is, however, that we are still living in a capitalist society which connects industrial modernity and ‘information society’. The break therefore might not be as substantial as posited by Ehrlich. I believe that Ehrlich and I share a broadly left-wing normative political agenda. We are both looking for an ecologically and socially responsible world order, and he sees hope, in this respect, in what he describes as ‘narodniks of the global scale’ towards the end of his long essay. What he means is ‘the fast growing volunteer movement, which has crossed national borders’ and seeks to build a better world. I share his support and enthusiasm for these new ‘narodniks’ and I applaud them wholeheartedly. If Ehrlich and I share a common political vision, what about the epistemological basis of such a vision? Here I fear I am little more skeptical of the framework which Ehrlich constructs in his extremely learned and cogently argued essay. He wants to inspire the intellectuals of the twenty-first century to return to the age of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and find there inspiration for a universal vision of humanity that will be able to overcome the nationalism that in Russia and Ukraine is currently fueling a cruel war that has pushed Ehrlich into exile. Whilst I have certainly been a strong critic of historiographical nationalism in my own work, [3]  I am skeptical about universalism and humanism being able to serve as the guiding lights out of the darkness of both industrial modernity and nationalism. We should not forget the fundamental insight of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno about the ‘dialectic of the Enlightenment’ gave birth to its own monsters. [4]  Not only do we know now that the historical humanists could also be nationalists, racists and religious zealots, the language of humanism has often been used in order to postulate a set of values and ideals that were very culturally specific and yet, by saying that they were universal and related to what it was to be a human, they in fact had a totalizing dimension that served various forms of liberal colonialism and imperialism. The ideology of humanism and universalism thus needs to be deconstructed just as much as the languages of nationalism, progress and modernity. Humanism and universalism served as vehicles for the construction of essentialized collective forms of identity as did the other grand narratives of which Ehrlich is so justly skeptical. As I have tried to argue in my recent book on History and Identity , the close link between historical writing and the construction of essentialized forms of identity, be it national, class, gender, ethnic or other forms of identity, has led to the construction of illiberal, totalizing and exclusionary forms of identity. [5]  Instead, I follow Stuart Hall’s writings on identity in arguing that we should replace identity with identification, as such identification on the one hand recognizes the need for collective forms of identity whilst on the other hand avoids their essentialization and points to the changing and constructed nature of such identities. [6]  They are constructed for a political purpose and become an argument in political contests, but they are invariably fluid and fuzzy. Such a reconceptualization of identity as identification allows forms of historical writing that are far more self-reflexive about the construction of collective identities and shun the essentialisms that previous generations of historians have employed - keen to write for the establishment of essentialist collective identities. Working with ‘identification’ rather than ‘identity’ draws us to a range of thinkers that have been problematizing essentialized collective identities from the 1960s onwards. These include Hayden White’s denial of the scientificity of historical writing, Michel de Certeau’s interest in the re-appropriation of cultural meanings, Michel de Foucault’s attention to power imbalances in knowledge formation, Jean-François Lyotard’s critique of ‘grand narratives’, Peter L. Berger’s and Thomas Luckmann’s theory of social constructivism, Pierre Bourdieus thinking around ‘cultural reproduction’ and ‘social habitus’, Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony, Jacques Lacan’s skepticism of ‘fixed identities’, Jacques Derrida’s reading of texts as sites of contestation, Edward Said’s hostility towards binary oppositions when it comes to the construction of collective identities, Homi Bhaba’s notions of ‘hybridity’, and Frederick Coopers’ and Rogers Brubaker’s critique of reified collective identities. Whilst this is by no means an exhaustive list, I mention these examples, as they have all had major impact on the way historians today write history in relation to forms of identification – which I try to show in relation to different sub-fields of historical writing in History and Identity . [7] Ehrlich also refers to my own work next to that of Wulf Kansteiner and others to point out that many historians have now argued that the border between history and memory is a porous one. But what he concludes from that is, if I understand him correctly, that we need to create a firm line of division between those scholars adhering to what he calls ‘group memory narratives’ and those adhering to the ‘universal narratives of science’. For me this sounds like resurrecting ‘scientificity’ [8]  through the back door and losing the insights about the relativity and normativity of all historical knowledge. The point about all historical narratives is that they can pretend to be as ‘scientific’ as they want, they will invariably carry messages that are inflected by normative values and identifications. Adhering to universally valid scientific methods is no protection against the link between narratives of the past and identifications. Hence, in my view, Ehrlich’s attempt to recreate a firmer border between history and memory is bound to fail, but what might indeed be useful is a sustained reflection on what we are actually comparing. As Wulf Kansteiner has recently pointed out there is, on the one hand, the past and the memory of the past, and then there is, on the other, memory studies that studies how the past was remembered through different media (one of which has been historical writing), and historical studies which studies the past in itself. I would argue with Kansteiner that memory studies has the far easier task, namely to make statements about how (mostly differently) a past was remembered by different memory actors. Historians have a far more difficult task, because how the past actually was is impossible to infer from what is left to us from the past and because each and every author approaches these remnants with a set of normative ideas and choices that invariably colour their readings of those remnants. [9]  Unbiased history is therefore as impossible as objective scientific history. There is then, in my opinion, no ‘universal and objective perspective of the historical discipline’ that can be juxtaposed neatly to biased historical writing. The emotiveness with which Ehrlich seeks to resurrect objectivity and scientificity in historical writing carries much of the apocalyptic and eschatological power that also informed other doctrines of salvation in the past, from Christianity to Communism. Their close links to oppression should be a warning sign not to search for new truthful utopias. If Ehrlich writes: ‘By searching for truth, he/she [the historian] fearlessly destroys the nation-state memory, identity, and imagination and creates instead the global ones. Therefore, he/she brings the triumph of the global information civilization closer.’, it is indeed reminiscent of earlier constructions of historians as prophets – prophets of nationalism, of liberalism, of progress, of the classless society. The fact that they are now supposed to be prophets of a universal humanity does not bode well for the future of those prophecies, I fear. The proximity of Ehrlich’s argument to another form of scientificity is underlined by his use of metaphors from physics, the key precise natural science. Thus he calls memory, identity and imagination ‘atoms’ of a larger ‘molecule’ and describes these ‘atoms’ in terms of having a ‘triple-layered narrative “nucleus”’. ‘The core of “nucleus”’, according to him ‘consists of three base mythic narratives’ which themselves contain ‘”quarks” or “fundamental particles”, which he identifies as ‘self-sacrifice, others-sacrifice, and booty’. Yet memory studies and the historical discipline are not ‘sciences’, and, of course, the exactness of objectivity of the natural sciences has also long been in doubt, thanks to Albert Einstein and Werner Heisenberg and their successors. There is then, I would argue, no way of going back to the scientificity of the past. We are firmly in the realm of anthropological knowledge production, when Ehrlich argues that these ‘”fundamental particles” represent condensed experience of millions of years of humankind evolution’ – a long line of continuity which I eye with huge skepticism. I find it even more dubious to claim that ‘they still powerfully govern our behavior even in situations when we are not able to realize that’. He draws on Sigmund Freud for this argument, but if this is the case, who then can realize that they govern our behavior, i.e. who stands outside the process of non-recognition and why? If I have to admit skepticism towards his scientifistic metaphors, I am also wary of his use of organic metaphors when it comes to describing his ‘structure of behaviour’ as ‘a process of temporal changes’. Self-sacrifice, others-sacrifice and booty are to Ehrlich the ‘seeds’ from which ‘societal plants’ grow. Here he draws on Oswald Spengler. There is of course, in the history of nationalism, a massive tradition of using organicist metaphors to describe the growth, flowering and death of nations. Critics of this organicist understanding of nation have pointed out that it is naturalizing processes that are socially constructed. The combination of scientificity and organicity in Ehrlich’s argument multiplies this tendency to naturalize things that are always situational, contingent and changeable and usually the result of power contests of different social groups in society. There is no unavoidable primalism in history, only change, contestation and diverse constructions of space, time and identity. By calling something primal we are again naturalizing it and making it an anthropological universal and constant, which, in my estimation, do not exist outside the construction of an increasingly smaller group of anthropologists today. By referring to ‘booty’ as ‘primal trauma’, Ehrlich is making a historically dubious (because hard to evidence) link between ‘the consequences of a trauma of early humankind’ and ‘the omnipresent atrocities of Modernity’. According to him ‘the cannibalistic complex of our Paleolithic ancestors is the primal trauma of humankind, which is still not realized and hence is not worked through.’ I find it hard to believe that we have to go back all of the way to the Paleolithic to understand historically specific atrocities in the modern world. Close attention to the specificities of historical situations, actors, events and to interests, power constellations and contingencies are in my view better able to explain those atrocities than any vague reference to ‘primal trauma’ and ‘cannibalism’ in the Paleolithic. Overall then, I find in Ehrlich’s argument too much universalizing psychology and anthropology and too little specific history and sociology. I doubt whether we as academics have to work ‘through the “metaphysical guilt” (Karl Jaspers) of the Stone Age’ in order to understand modern-day atrocities. It would lead us into a cul-de-sac and might well draw attention away from those often very specific individuals who have been guilty of committing atrocities. To Ehrlich, ‘others-sacrifice’ is a ‘primal religion’ – once again he refers to Freud’s speculations about religion and mixes those ideas with insights from anthropology on cannibalism and sacrificing rituals. Like with the ‘primal trauma’ of ‘booty, ‘others sacrifice’ thus becomes something that is naturalized in human evolution and allegedly has universal qualities rooted in a kind of deep history. Ehrlich draws again on Spengler to describe ‘self sacrifice as “the prime phenomenon of all past and future world-history”’. It is another totalizing statement that, when applied, eradicates diversity, plurality and contestation which stand at the heart of historical debates on identity, and inform both memory and imagination. He constructs ‘self-sacrifice’ as binary other to ‘others-sacrifice’. Self-sacrifice, he contends, is present in the ‘construction of every human community’, and ‘the starting point of all three basic myth narratives: the fairy tale, the heroic myth, and the myths of self-sacrifice’. I am not an expert in comparative religious history, but I find his claim hard to believe that Christianity is the only religion exhibiting forms of self-sacrifice. But it is this claim which allows Ehrlich to argue that Christian values were at the heart of the rise of Western civilization to the dominant position in the world. Without referencing Max Weber’s protestant ethic, [10]  there is, like in Weber, an attempt to ascribe some kind of superiority to (in Weber’s case Protestant) Christianity over other religions, and, by implications, superiority of Western civilizations over other. Hence it is no surprise that he argues that the current decline of the west and western values is due to the ‘process of “dewesternization” of the West itself’, which includes the abandonment of the former willingness to live according to the ‘spirit of self-sacrifice’. Whilst this seems to be directed at well-established, and in my view, well-argued postcolonial attacks on the west, [11]  there is nowhere in his piece an in-depth engagement with postcolonialism which might indeed be necessary if Ehrlich intends to defend the west against its many critics. Ehrlich’s seems to be a very linear understanding of history, where we move from a ‘limited identity-solidarity’of kin, clan and tribe from pre-history to the medieval world, based on the ‘myth of booty’ to nationalism, based on ‘others-sacrifice’ to the future of universalism, based on ‘self-sacrifice’ that has the quality of saving mankind from nationalism, wars, environmental disasters, capitalism and whatever else threatens humanity in the present. Whilst this is undoubtedly an attempt to create a positive utopia, it might very well be wishful thinking and, at worst, a dangerous way of constituting new essentialisms and totalizing thoughts. Ehrlich is looking for a pathway from ‘savagery’ to ‘civilization’, but I am not sure whether he has found it, or indeed, whether it is at all findable, or whether we can only try, in every historical situation, to stand on the side of those stemming themselves against ‘savagery’ without ever being entirely sure whether we are standing on the right side of history. This doubt also acts as an important reminder that we need to accept other positions than our own in a democratic forum where those positions can be exchanged, as long as our adversaries also accept the democratic forum itself. The self-sacrifice that Ehrlich sees as the foundation for a future better society, is not a collective one, but an individual one. He sees the ‘global world of information civilization’ as a ‘concert of billions of sovereign individuals’, ‘unique persons’ who create universality through the rejection of universal collective identities. Whilst acceptance of unique personalities and sovereign individuals is no doubt a good thing, we may, of course, ask, how unique personalities actually are in the highly commodified and commercialized worlds of late capitalism, and we also may ask how sovereign the individual actually is in a world in which forms of identification seem to be of high continued importance to many of these individuals. Furthermore, is not the vision of sovereign individuals quite close to the neoliberal utopia so famously formulated by Margaret Thatcher in the words: ‘There is no such thing as society.’ [12]  Is the solution to all of the problems of our contemporary world really individualism? Or is it rather a more playful form of identification with particular collectives leading to political engagement on behalf of those collectives in a liberal-democratic forum of decision making that reflects on the power inequalities within such fora and seeks to implement mechanisms countering such power inequalities? Ehrlich’s individualistic universalism is critical of Chantal Mouffe’s notion of the need of collective identities that will always work on an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ mechanism. Instead he posits that the individualized universal identities of the future would not have an ‘outside’ as they no longer have an ‘inside’. I have to admit that I find that perspective rather frightening, as it resembles to me a new totalizing framework where there are no legitimate conflicts of interest anymore. Such a global identity to me is a dangerous fiction which may well hide very specific interests, as does the liberal-democratic universalist and cosmopolitan ethos that we find in many cosmopolitan thinkers. [13]  They have a very clear ‘other’, of course – something they call totalitarianism. Anyone not subscribing to the cosmopolitan ideology of human rights and victimhood-centred memory will quickly find themselves as ‘other’ with whom no communication is possible any more. The consensus-oriented nature of a cosmopolitan deliberative democracy is as willing to exclude as antagonistic Schmidtian or Lucacsian notions of the political, even if they are arguably far less deadly. Ehrlich’s ‘dream for an optimistic future’ might work in the same direction as Francisco Goya’s idea that ‘the sleep of reason produces monsters’, but don’t we know that reason itself is very capable of producing monsters of its own? In line with his own universalist ambitions, Ehrlich is very much in favour of the transnational and transcultural turn in memory studies and with their championing of diverse forms of cosmopolitanism, which is, of course, also rooted in universalist aspirations. He thus hails the transnational turn in memory studies as being ‘grounded in the recognition that the phenomenon of national memory … less and less corresponds to the “globalizing’ reality. Present-day memory does not fit into the container of the nation state.’ I wonder whether the rise of deadly nationalisms around the world over the last two decades has not shown this to be an illusion. Of course, there is a globalizing reality, but there is also a nationalizing one. There is not just one reality, but several temporal and spatial frames working alongside each other. Hence there are different forms of memory, national and transnational among them, which relate to different forms of constructed ‘reality’. We need to take all of them seriously, analytically and normatively. This is also where Aleida Assmann’s recent critique of the transnational turn in nationalism studies is important, for it takes seriously the national memory and its huge implications in the present. [14]  Where I would contradict her is that the left has to present a national countermemory to the right. In other words, analytically it remains important to understand national memory, but normatively we should continue to deconstruct it and instead construct a plurality of possible national memories and transnational memories that have the power to counter the nationalist memoryscapes of the right an empower visions on the left for greater social justice and a more equal distribution of wealth in the world. Ehrlich’s plea to create ‘an effective pantheon of global culture’s creators’ (using Shakespeare as an example) is highly reminiscent of Friedrich Meinecke’s call at the end of the Second World war to found Goethe societies in Germany. [15]  The universalist genius of literary greats was to guide his compatriots after the ‘German catastrophe’ of National Socialism. We may indeed ask if this is not a rather helpless form of humanism seeing in high culture a panacea for the ills of the world. Without wanting to denigrate cultural interventions in the world past and present, it is not enough to appeal to idealistic values and beliefs in order to find the pathway to a better world. We need to contest political power in an attempt to frame a politics in line with our beliefs in a better future and we have to face resistance of those who envision the future world differently from us. This is the basis of an agonistic politics, championed by Mouffe, and it is also the basis of agonistic memory work, championed by Cento Bull and Hansen and those who have adopted and adapted their initial theoretical frame. [16]   I find very interesting in this respect Ehrlich’s engagement with Mouffe’s agonism and his use of the example of Winston Churchill and how he is a hero to his ‘own’ British people (or at least most of them, for in the South Wales valleys, they might also think differently about him), and a villain to many in Greece, Kenia and India. A very interesting project would be one that looks in detail at the aggressor in history and memory. Such a project would invariably find that many aggressors are at the same time heroes, depending on which (national) perspective one takes on the person in question. The aggressor is a typically transnational figure in history and memory, yet he is also a strongly national memory resource for those promoting nationalist forms of history and memory. The image of the aggressor can thus not be fixed to that of perpetrator or hero. He is in fact always both, in different memory contexts, spatially and temporally. [17]  However, agonistic perspectives would show the political contest in the uses of heroes/ villains and the political interests behind the diverse constructions of heroes/ villains in historical aggressors. It does not aim, as Ehrlich seems to believe, at a ‘conflictual consensus’ for it is skeptical of any consensus that would bring political contestation to an end. Of course, Ehrlich is quite right in pointing out with reference to contemporary Russia that from the political perspective of the left, political contests may indeed be lost to the political right. That is the nature of political contests and has to be accepted in liberal democratic fora for political debate. However, Russia does not present such a forum, for it is a strongly authoritarian state. For agonism to work, the liberal democratic state frame is an absolute precondition. And within that frame everyone has to accept the other as adversary, worthy of debating with, and not as political enemy to be destroyed. This is the only form of binary or ‘us’ versus ‘them’ construction that also agonism needs to uphold. Overall, anyone reading Ehrlich’s long essay will come away from it deeply inspired to engage with a range of theoretical and philosophical issues that are extremely relevant to our present condition. I am in deep sympathy with many of the ideas and thoughts put forward by him, I still have to engage more fully with several of the arguments he makes on the basis of reading what he has already read, but I have also indicated above, where I beg to differ from his arguments and line of reasoning. I hope that this might be the beginning of a fruitful dialogue on issues that should concern every practicing historian and memory studies scholar today. [1]  On the importance of narrative theory for diverse forms of historiography compare Stefan Berger, Nicola Brauch and Chris Lorenz (eds), Analyzing Historical Narratives. On Academic, Popular and Educational Framings of the Past, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2021. [2]  Gerd Spaargaren, Don Weenink, and Machiel Lamers (eds), Practice Theory and Research. Exploring the Dynamics of Social Life, London: Routledge, 2016. [3]  Stefan Berger (with Christoph Conrad), The Past as History. National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Modern Europe, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015. [4]  Max Horheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of the Enlightenment. Philosophical Fragments, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. The work was first published in German in Amsterdam in 1947. [5]  Stefan Berger, History and Identity. How Historical Theory has Shaped Historical Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. [6]  Stuart Hall, ‚Introduction: Who Needs Identity?’, in: Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (eds), Questions of Cultural Identity, London: Sage, 1996, pp. 1 – 17; also: Stuart Hall, ‘The Question of Cultural Identity’, in: Stuart Hall, David Held and Anthony McGrew (eds), Modernity and its Futures, Cambridge: Polity, 1992, pp. 274 – 316. [7]  See footnote 5 above; I treat all of these thinkers at greater depth in chapter one of my book. [8]  Heiko Feldner, ‚The New Scientificity in Historical Writing around 1800’, in: Stefan Berger, Heiko Feldner and Kevin Passmore (eds), Writing History: Theory and Practice, 3rd edn, London; Bloomsbury, 2020, pp. 7 – 24. [9]  Wulf Kansteiner has been developing these ideas in the context of the Oxford Handbook of Memory Studies that he is currently preparing for publication together with Tina Morina. I am grateful that he allowed me to draw on those ideas in Stefan Berger, ‘History Making and Ethics – an Integral Relationship?’, in: History and Theory 62:1 (2023), pp. ?? - ??. [add when it has been published]. [10]  Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, London: Routledge, 2012. Weber published this much-quoted work first in German in two subsequent journal articles in 1904 and 1905, from which they were later put together as a book. [11]  In my view still unsurpassed is Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Since then, of course, a whole library of books has appeared that has followed Chakarabarty’s call in decentering the west. [12]  Thatcher’s words are often quoted, but in the same text she goes on to refer to family, and neighbours as concrete examples of how people care for other people. So even an alleged dyed-in-the-wool neoliberal like Thatchter was not denying the need of individuals to form relationships with others. [13]  Whilst I find Chantal Mouffe‘s critique of Habermas and other thinkers of a deliberative democracy and their universalism quite inspiring, I recognize that there are also intriguing ideas about the development of cosmopolitanism that includes notions of open-ended debate and radical plurality. For Chantal Mouffe, see idem, Agonistics. Thinking the World Politically, Cambridge: Polity, 2013. Very inspiring on a different kind of cosmopolitanism is Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia, New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.i [14]  Aleida Assmann, Die Wiedererfindung der Nation: warum wir sie fürchten und warum wir sie brauchen, Munich: C.H. Beck, 2020. [15]  Friedrich Meinecke, The German Catastrophe: Reflections and Recollections, New York: Beacon Press, 1963. The text was first published in German shortly after the end of the Second World War in 1946. [16]  Anna Cento Bull and Hans Lauge Hansen, ‘On Agonistic Memory’, in: Memory Studies 9:4 (2016), pp. 390 – 404. [17]  I am drawing here on an exchange of ideas about historical aggressors with Thomas Maissen, Ilaria Porciani, Balazs Trencsenyi, Diana Mishkova and Macjej Gorny, with whom I am applying for a project on historical aggressors to the Mercedes Benz Foundation.

Abstract : The author responds to Serguey Ehrlich’s essay, “Memory, Identity, and Imagination: The Structure of Behaviour from the Perspective of Memory Studies,” and explores how imagination is an integral but often overlooked facet of memory studies. The author is particularly interested in how imagination is invoked to restructure collective memory of the past into predictions for the future that are rooted in remembering, and how this process is carried out in popular video games. The author closes with some reflections on Ehrlich’s assertions on the challenge nation-states pose to self-sacrifice and collective action int eh face of unprecedented global concerns such as climate change. Keywords : Memory Collective Memory, Imagination, Future Thinking, Video Games, Nationalism, Synthetic Memory, American Memory, Cold War, War on Terror, Call of Duty Author Biography:  Tyler Wertsch is a PhD candidate in the American Culture Studies program at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, USA. After living and working in Japan, Korea, Mongolia, and Azerbaijan, he pursued his MA and PhD in order to explore the complex relationships between nationalism, identity, memory, and media. Serguey Ehrlich’s “Memory, Identity, and Imagination: The Structure of Behaviour from the Perspective of Memory Studies” is a creative, expansive application of memory theory that grapples with the challenge of national memory as a primary lens of remembering and explores why we must break free from this pattern. Drawing upon structuralist and Russian formalist patterns of analysis in the vein of Claude Levi-Strauss and Vladimir Propp, Ehrlich identifies patterns of narrativization (“self-sacrifice,” “other-sacrifice,” and “booty”). His meditations on the limits of nation-based remembering are timely and important, as humanity faces a number of unprecedented existential threats that are somewhat novel, climate change being chief among them. The capacity for us to remember as a species rather than as tribes or nations is a skill we must develop quickly, and while Ehrlich’s vision is utopian on this point, he no less correct for stating it.              The true power of memory is, paradoxically, located in the present and future rather than the past. The nature of human existence is, by definition, perpetually located in the liminal space between the past and the future, and it is by reshaping our pasts with advanced technologies of memory (narratives in general fulfill this function, but more specifically the “schematic narrative templates” Ehrlich mentions) that we may craft useable, workable present and future realities. Yet, how does on “remember” the future? Ehrlich cites several scholars like Reinhart Koselleck, Emily Keightly, and Michael Pickering who engage with this very question in theoretical mnemonic spaces, though other disciplines may provide excellent insight as well. Media and communication scholars like Richard Grusin and Jay Bolter have explored how these concepts function in consumable narrative formats, while memory scholars like Astrid Erll have deftly adapted literary theory from giants such as Paul Ricoeur to better work within discussions of memory and narrative, citing how “prefigure,” “configure,” and “refigure” narratives in the context of cultural memory (Erll, 2011). These thinkers explore the more literal application of the imaginary when it comes to using memory to craft identity. Ehrlich’s argument that mythic narratives are at work in these processes is extremely well crafted, as patterns of remembering are often as powerful or more powerful than narratives involving specific characters or actors. I would add that the social theory often cited in cultural studies can add to this approach, particularly the arguments of Gramsci regarding hegemony and the Frankfurt School’s Horkheimer and Adorno’s concept of the culture industry. Ehrlich’s vision of futures enabled by narratives of self-sacrifice that extend beyond the tyrannical limits of the nation-state is beautiful and desperately needed, though the current technologies of memory seem to be stuck in more regressive patterns of memory. One of the most popular (but under-studied) formats of this memory is blockbuster video games. The Call of Duty  series, for example, is deeply rooted in nationalist and right-wing patterns of remembering. Call of Duty  games alone have accounted for $21 billion in sales over the last 20 years, roughly equal to all the Marvel films combined, and more than twice the box office of all Star Wars  films combined (Radic, 2020). It stands to reason that these games can have no less impact than the aforementioned film franchises, and if anything the games more directly access and redirect memory to stay firmly within the limits of nation-state identities. Furthermore, the Call of Duty  games are sites of what I call “synthetic memory,” or rhetorically weaving together memories of entirely separate events in a fictional space in order to generate high affect in the target consumer base. Synthetic memory is especially active in invoking WWII, the Cold War, and 9/11 with more recent memory in texts designed to be consumed by American and western audiences. Earlier titles in the Call of Duty  franchise set in defined past conflicts, mostly WWII, are examples of a process Grusin and Bolter call remediation [1] , or attempts to access, explore, recast, and reconcile the past through reinscribing it in new and adapted media texts. This process is somewhat similar to Erll’s concept of inter-mediality, or the process of adapting cultural memories of the past into new textual forms that are created in dialogue with previous iterations of the memory in question. Remediation is an important process that analyzes the ways in which artists and mnemonic communities actively shape usable pasts, though how might one redirect this process to “remember” a usable future? Grusin addresses this phenomenon with the concept of premediation, or channeling and reapplying the past to predict futures.           The concept of premediation is a useful theoretical tool when considering the games of the Modern Warfare  series, which takes Call of Duty ’s action from the second world war to theaters and times more closely reflective of modern American existential and sociopolitical concerns. Grusin’s work focuses on 9/11, the attendant anxieties of which also somewhat define military shooters in near future scenarios, though his theory of premediation extends to the cultural conditions that both cause and are caused by this process. He goes on to explain the utility of premediation as an extension of media markets and collective anxiety, stating it “is not about getting the future right, but about proliferating multiple remediations of the future both to maintain a low level of fear in the present and to prevent a recurrence of the kind of tremendous media shock that the United States and much of the networked world experienced on 9/11” (Grusin, 2004, p.1). It is crucial to note that the quality and type of remediation being performed here is both powerful and political. Military shooters only allow a narrow range of actions to the player, mostly limited to movement, gunplay, and the use of various tools (these are typically in the form of grenades, mines, flares, or other items used in combat). While these types of games often have an all-purpose” interact” command used to perform tasks like opening doors or entering vehicles, there are typically no options given to the player to ask for and accept the surrender of opponents, direct tactical decisions to encourage enemy forces to retreat, or have access to any policy decisions that could result in diplomacy and detente. In other words, military shooters are laden with gamic designs and decisions that only allow interaction and progression through violence, a phenomenon that Ian Bogost calls “procedural rhetoric” in his book Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames . By crafting strict procedural boundaries for gamic interaction that center on violence and pairing these designs with narratives that remediate American anxieties in a premediated setting, these texts become potent sites of signification and memory while still allowing the player to feel some agency over the situation through simulated use of force and participation in an ideologically directed war machine. Functionally, these games work as a way to access anxieties and collective traumas in ways that often do not directly replicate the event in question, thus eliding the task of reproducing authenticity and detail. Rather, these games create fictional spaces of synthetic memory in which multiple traumas can be accessed, thus allowing for the affective power of memory without the burden of historicity. The affective dimensions of these games are well documented, as seen in Matthew Thomas Payne’s book Playing War: Military Video Games after 9/11 . Payne argues that games that premediate future conflicts in the context of America’s so-called “War on Terror” do so in a specific cultural and rhetorical contexts, stating “Military shooters reinscribe 9/11’s cultural memory into their ludic wars not for the sake of predictive accuracy, but to give players hope that these reimagined 9/11s can have different outcomes than their horrific ur-text. This explains why so many shooters possess fearful narratives that take place immediately before or directly after attacks on the United States,” (Payne, 2016, loc. 640). As Payne goes on to explain, these texts are designed to give some small measure of agency to the player and enable a revenge of sorts. Importantly, however, these games do not go so far as to create worlds in which a 9/11-like tragedy is wholly prevented and lives are saved. After all, a situation in which situations are averted or erased neither serves hegemonic military-industrial-entertainment interests of perpetual remediation and consumption nor does it align with living memory. Instead, the game worlds are steeped in the violence and death of a deeply disturbing event that allows and demands synthetic memory and gives players the ability to interact with this world in a very narrow band of highly mediated action. This is especially clear in the Call of Duty  franchise’s Modern Warfare  games, which take place in a near-future setting in which US and UK military forces battle against Russian Federation and/or Arab enemies that are mounting anti-democracy coups or engaging in a military invasion of the United States or western Europe. In the terms of Erll’s treatment of Ricoeur, the Modern Warfare games are prefigured by past, albeit powerful, anxieties that still bear tremendous cultural meaning. As the games are configured, these past anxieties are strategically accessed and incorporated in matrices narrative that compress time and construct connections and causality, resulting in texts that tap into the maximum amount of mnemonic salience while producing the maximum amount of mnemonic capital. In the quest to make these games the most consumable version of shared usable pasts, the narratives are configured in ways that make use of narrative filters as explored in work by Holger Pötzsch as well as the political and historical conventions identified by game scholars Kevin Schut and Peter Mantello. Even as these narratives are configured with practiced cultural and storytelling tools common to games, the signs that construct them function within the semiosphere, carrying second order signification and topoi laden with attached meanings across temporal spaces and into new contexts, accessing both mnemonic anxiety and becoming sites of synthetic memory. Figure SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 1 Frost looks at Manhattan from a helicopter after capturing a Russian submarine and using it to attack other Russian forces. Taken from iampanax YouTube channel, screenshot by author.The dominant narrative thread of the Modern Warfare  trilogy is centered on British and American interventions, covert violence, and invasions in foreign territories in an attempt to defend against Russian incursions. These sites of premediated violence cover a number of physical locations and simulate a truly global World War conflict, though some of the most powerful moments of the game narratives center on warfare as a spectacle in high recognizable and mnemonically powerful places, including Russian invasions of Washington D.C. and New York. While there is no historical precedent for Russia or the Soviet Union invading the United States, the premediation seen in Modern Warfare 2 and 3  does build on American Cold War-era fears of Soviet aggression and remediate collective memory of real trauma. Of particular note is the “Black Tuesday” and “Hunter Killer” levels towards the beginning Modern Warfare 3  in which the player, acting as the American soldier Frost, works as part of a Delta Force team to drive Russians out of Manhattan in tense, street to street combat taking the player from the floor of the stock exchange to a Russian nuclear submarine in the bay. Manhattan is particularly powerful site of memory, both in its assigned role as a center of cultural production in the United States and for being the site of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. By positioning the player in a situation where Figure 1. Frost looks at Manhattan from a helicopter after capturing a Russian submarine and using it to attack other Russian forces. Taken from iampanax YouTube channel, screenshot by author. they witness a foreign enemy wreak destruction on New York civilians and buildings, the game manages to perform three important functions of remembering. First, this gameplay indirectly accesses the collective trauma of 9/11, and allows the memory (and all its attendant complexity) to lend itself to the mediated text. Second, Modern Warfare 3  presents the situation as a site of synthetic memory by combining the memory of 9/11 with the historically and socially distinct generative memories and anxieties of Cold War. The game thus creates a scenario in which Russians commit an attack uncannily similar to 9/11 while also acting within the context of Russophobic patterns of memory. Third, the narrative of the game, and the cultivated positionality of the player, allow for retributive violence against the Russian aggressors, meeting both the needs of a defensive narrative structure as well as symbolically avenging both 9/11 and the generative threat of Russian rapaciousness in the Cold War. Interestingly, the Modern Warfare  trilogy presents still other synthetic memory sites premediated in 9/11, albeit with additional layers of highly salient remembering. In the Modern Warfare 3 level “Iron Lady,” WWIII is fully engaged, and Russian forces expand their invasion through western Europe to Paris. NATO forces fight the Russian advance back, eventually reclaiming Paris for the allied nations, though in the process the Eiffel Tower is struck by various artillery and aircraft rounds, resulting in its dramatic collapse at the end of the level. In the American semiosphere, this moment functionally accesses multiple, layered signifiers. The sight of a tall, collapsing monument, though distinctly European, is still evocative of 9/11 and the disintegrating of the World trade Center towers. This moment is certainly primed for the player since it occurs only about an hour or so of gameplay after the “Black Tuesday” and “Hunter Killer” discussed above. There is another, deeper layer of synthetic memory present in this scene, however. The sight of Paris being overrun by an enemy force is also highly evocative of the Nazi occupation of the city in WWII. In fact, the Liberation of Paris is a playable historical moment in two earlier Call of Duty  games: 2006’s Call of Duty 3  and 2017’s Call of Duty: WWII . The Call of Duty series has featured a long history of American (and later, NATO-allied) forces driving invaders out of France, thus meta-textually prefiguring players of Modern Warfare 3  to draw connections between the premediated WWIII seen in the Modern Warfare trilogy and remediations of America’s military engagements in Europe. These narratives mutually reinforce one another and foreground a common theme of just intervention, thus allowing the Modern Warfare trilogy to access the mnemonic capital of “Greatest Generation” narratives. Figure 2. Frost observes the Eiffel Tower collapse after NATO forces drive out Russian troops from a position on a bridge. Taken from iampanax YouTube channel, screenshot by author              Throughout these episodes in the Modern Warfare  trilogy, powerful signs are recast within the semiosphere, effectively accessing mnemonic anxiety by dredging up traumas beyond the generational horizon for most players. These generative memories are given new meaning in a new cultural context of premediation, thus allowing use to engage with a configured worldspace that is evocative of both past and present trauma and the attendant collective memory. In resurrecting mnemonic anxiety and presenting events with potential, if very unlikely, applicability to modern geopolitics and histories, the games effectively induce anxiety in the player. However, as the game narratives and design allow the players, as per Payne’s observations, to cathartically solve the problem through violence, a feedback loop is formed. The games become both the source of and answer to mnemonic anxiety. By strategically framing near-future conflict in settings that evoke modern concerns of terrorism, Cold War fears of invasion (particularly with calculated application of topoi), and even WWII memory, a master narrative emerges that reifies Orientalist and nationalist ideologies. This central narrative pattern occurs in spite of the mildly complicating characters and choices that are coded to show war as a complex event that should be thought of in shades of gray. The end result is a narrative that, despite its moderate complexity, still adheres to conservative American cultural values of militarism and triumphalism.            Certainly these games revel in the “other-sacrifice” narratives Ehrlich outlines in his paper, and we see national memory on full, guileless display in conflicts clearly designed to access and mimic latent American anxieties dating back to the Cold War. As Viet Thanh Nguyen argues in Nothing Ever Dies, Vietnam and the Memory of War , “Memories are not only collected or collective, they are also corporate and capitalist. Memories are signs and products of power, and in turn, they service power” (loc. 240). In order to outsmart a military-industrial-entertainment complex that has quite literally made an art form of commodifying memory, we must interrogate the use (and abuse) of narrative and imagination in the powerful processes of cultural memory. For all the possible dangers to memory and identity present in these games, they are simply too popular—and too fun [2] —to dismiss. It would be easy to discount these gamic texts as puerile and unimportant, but they are fully engaging, exciting, and technically masterful experiences with complex rhetorical strategies that help to make them very fun. There are few films or novels that can match the level of stimulation found in Modern Warfare  games. However, it is here that we may also find hope. If we can redirect memory to lean past national memory and into species-wide memory, we may have a technology of memory that can counter the factional, tribal impulses to which we are currently beholden. Unfortunately I do not have a plan to take us from the feedback loop of games that elicit memory-based anxieties only to assuage them with aesthetically nationalist violence, but the strategic, intentional use of memory Ehrlich explores in his essay is a future we should (and can) active work to realize.              Citations : Bogost, I. (2010). Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames . MIT Press. Erll, A. (2011). Memory in Culture . (S. B. Young, Trans.). Palgrave Macmillan. Grusin, R. (2004). Premediation. Criticism , 46 (1). https://doi.org/www.jstor.org/stable/23127337 Accessed 23 Jan. 2021 Grusin, R., & Bolter, J. (1999). Remediation: Understanding New Media . MIT Press. Mantello, P. (2012). Playing Discreet War in the US: Negotiating Subjecthood and Sovereignty through Special Forces Video Games. Media, War & Conflict , 5 (3), 269–283. Payne, M. T. (2016). Playing War: Military Video Games after 9/11 . New york University press. Pötzsch, H. (2017). Selective Realism: Filtering Experiences of War and Violence in First- and Third-Person Shooters. Games and Culture , 12 (2), 156–178. https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412015587802 Radic, V. (2020, December 4). The Highest-Selling Call Of Duty Games, Ranked (& How Much They Sold) . Game rant. Retrieved September 10, 2022, from gamerant.com/highest-selling-call-of-duty-games-ranked-by-amount-sold-world-at-war-modern-warfare-black-ops/ Schut, K. (2007). Strategic Simulations and Our Past: The Bias of Computer Games in the Presentation of History. Games and Culture , 2 (3), 213–235. YouTube. (2015). Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 Game Movie . Retrieved August 10, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-i8bRS17F7Y&pbjreload=101&ab_channel=iampanax [1]  Bolter and Grusin’s original use of this term is in the context of media studies and exploring the presence of the medium itself int eh content provided. The use of the term in this project is closer to the memory studies usage, as seen in Astrid Erll’s work. The primary difference is that in memory studies, the focus in on how mnemonic content appears across multiple sites, tracking the changes in the content over time, whereas in media and communications, remediation is a means by which to explore how mediums are both designed to simultaneously feel invisible as well as extremely present—what Bolter and Grusin call the “double logic” of “immediacy” and “hypermediacy.” [2]  It is important to note that I, as a cultural studies scholar highly critical of nationalism in all its forms, deeply enjoy these games. They hit on so many critical markers of engagement and identity for me (and many others) that we can and should acknowledge the visceral pleasure of simulated, sanitized violence, even in a highly ethnonationalistic narrative setting.

06.04.2023 Visionary as well as based on solid scholarship, “Memory, Identity, Imagination” is far more than a contribution to memory studies and to the relation between the three concepts of its title—it is above all a diagnosis of what plagues the world: conceptions of identity, whether individual or collective (the nation-state) based on an opposition “us vs. them,” which leads to wars, inequality, and the destruction of the environment. But whereas one may be tempted ascribe the sorry state of the world to an unchanging “human nature” that is bound to repeat the same patterns of behavior over and over again, Ehrlich provides a ground for optimism by stressing the creative nature of the imagination. Dare to imagine, he tells us, a world where citizenship in a nation-state is replaced with citizenship in a global community, where self-sacrifice to a common good replaces the other-sacrifice of war, where the “other” necessary to the definition of identity is no longer located in space but in time—in the memory of the Holocaust as the epitome of that which should never happen again. One important thing I learned reading the article is how outdated political discourse in the U.S. and elsewhere is with respect to the digital revolution. Politicians keep talking about jobs being lost by being shipped away to some foreign countries where labor is cheaper. This presupposes the zero-sum, “us vs. them” mentality that Ehrlich so eloquently denounces. The main reason for job losses is automation, and we are moving toward a situation where most workers will be replaced by machines. The most urgent problem is not how to keep manufacturing jobs at all cost in a given part of the world, but how to deal with a society where jobs and working hours are severely reduced, either by creating new kinds of jobs, by sharing the jobs that remain, or by removing the stigma (and economic hardship) of living without a job. It will take imagination to deal with this new situation. Ehrlich’s article is an eloquent plea to begin to grasp the consequences of the digital revolution. As a narratologist I am particularly interested in the distinction between three types of mythic narratives, corresponding to three stages in the development of humanity. It reminds me of previous efforts by literary theorists such as Georg Lukács and Northrop Frye to identify basic archetypal kinds of narrative and—in the case of Lukács-- to connect them to different types of society. For Lukács, the epic was the manifestation of a harmonious relation between the individual and the group he belongs to, while the novel was the manifestation of a struggle between the aspirations of the individual and those of society. Ehrlich’s narrative typology offers an intriguing alternative to Lukács. He presents the fairy tale as a fundamentally individualistic quest by which the hero strives to acquire that which he is lacking—the princess of Proppian fairy tales or the magic object given by the donor standing in this case for the goods that enable the individual to survive. It could be objected that humanity never existed without the support of a group, and that the individualistic nature of the fairy tale hero’s quest does not correspond to a stage in the development of humanity that precedes the emergence of the nation-state. Before there were large groups, there were small groups, but there was always some kind of group. Moreover there is no evidence that the fairy tale preceded historically the epic tales that represent what Ehrlich calls “the heroic myth.” In fact, Ehrlich’s interpretation of the fairy tale makes it a fitting representation of capitalism. I prefer to regard the three basic types of narrative—fairy tale, heroic myth, myth of self-sacrifice—as forms that coexist within a given culture rather than as forms corresponding to various historical states of civilization. Ehrlich envisions a stage of humanity when the individual will identify with a global community that overcomes the “us vs. them” and zero-sum-game mentality of the nation-state system, and he describes the narrative of self-sacrifice as representative of this stage, but what this narrative will be like is open to question. Can there still be narratives without antagonism and competition, that is, without conflict? If we look at the total literary production of contemporary society, we find a lot of individualistic narratives where the characters act on behalf of their own private interests; we also find lots of ambiguous narratives where “the good” and “the bad” are ill-defined. The heroic myth survives mainly in popular entertainment, especially in fantastic stories like Star Wars , whose world differs significantly from the real world, but heroic tales seem to have died out in realistic narratives. Does this mean that, even though we still live in a world dominated by the “us vs. them” ideology, we no longer believe in the heroic myth, and we can only accept it in supernatural worlds? As for self-sacrifice, it will be an essential gesture in real life if we are ever going to do something about climate change, for we cannot continue with our present materialistic pursuits and conspicuous consumerism without destroying our natural environment, but self-sacrifice cannot be more than a theme among many others in the literature of a culture. Rather than thinking of the three “basic mythic narratives” as the dominant narrative genres of three stages in the development of humanity, we should regard them as abstract patterns that capture the spirit of the three cultural forms defined by Ehrlich. They are not so much real stories as “Grand Narratives” (Grands Récits) in the sense of Jean-François Lyotard: a global explanatory scheme that legitimates institutions or forms of political organization, but does not correspond to any existing concrete text.

Response to Serguey Ehrlich’s Memory, Identity, and Imagination: The Structure of Behavior from the Perspective of Memory Studies. 11.08.2023 Serguey Ehrlich’s ambitious account of the entanglement of memory, identity, and imagination offers lots of food for thought. It brings together a dazzling array of thinkers from different disciplinary traditions, including Freud, Marx, and Halbwachs, in order to formulate an alternative and more forward-looking model of identity-formation. It is focused on the present but draws on anthropological theories about the long-term development of human societies, positing that today’s concerns have deep historical roots. Driving Ehrlich’s account is an outspoken desire to find an alternative both to nationalism as a framework for identity and to global capitalism as a social-economic structure. At a time when the imminent exhaustion of the planet is amplifying global inequality and forced migrations, this is a welcome and necessary move. As Ehrlich puts it: “We need a dream for an optimistic future” (p.55). Indeed, we do. The dream that Ehrlich offers is of a form of global citizenship in which people would be less concerned about defending their own group’s interest and more ready to recognize the interdependence of all peoples, and of humans and the environment. He considers this to be a necessary condition for peace, justice, and ultimately, the future of the planet itself. The key question of course is how these vital aims are to be achieved. More than just an idea, he posits that a new form of global citizenship is already emerging, facilitated by electronic communication systems, and based on the “concert of billions of sovereign individuals” (p.49) who are willing to engage in “different volunteer activities for the benefit of global humanity (p.64) and hence give up their sovereignty. He supports this argument by deploying a complex matrix, inspired by long-standing traditions in narratology and anthropology, in order to map different social structures onto different deep-seated narrative templates. This leads him to conclude that we are entering a new phase in human history in which individuals commit themselves to humankind rather than to their own national tribe. In doing so, they make sense of their world using the ‘myth of self-sacrifice’. The term ‘self-sacrifice’, which Ehrlich uses throughout his essay in opposition to value accorded to the sacrifice of others in imperialistic nationalism, has heavy overtones of self-destruction as Marianne Hirsch has already pointed out. But luckily there are other terms available. Altruism, solidarity, sharing, caring, connectivity, and relationality help articulate more positive and constructive ways of engaging with the world that are still compatible with Ehrlich’s overall vision. The crux in responding to Ehrlich’s thesis, then, is to know the basis of his optimism at this moment of danger. Does ‘global citizenship’ or altruism already exist at scale, or is it rather an ideal which we should try to realize? And if the latter, how do we get from ‘here’ to ‘there’? What role could memory and memory studies play in this transition? This is not the place to engage with the specifics of Ehrlich’s complex evolutionary model, which like all such universalizing models, are very difficult either to prove or disprove. Instead, I would like to build further on the valuable point that Ehrlich makes about giving narrative a more central place in memory studies (p.16). In line with the work of James Wertsch (2021), [1]  and more generally of structuralist narratology, Ehrlich distinguishes between specific narratives, schematic narrative templates, and base mythic narrative, moving in the process from unique stories, which figure recognizable characters in particular places at particular times, to more abstract configurations that occur in more instances. The capacity to distinguish between specific stories and underlying templates makes it possible to compare, contrast, and aggregate unique narratives at differing degrees of abstraction. Accordingly, thinking in terms of templates is very useful in explaining how unique stories resonate with each other, thereby creating narrative schemata in the long term that come to be used as hermeneutic tools in shaping the understanding of new events. More than communication technologies as such, this capacity to compare and contrast, to move between the singular and the communal, is arguably the core of interpersonal and transcultural communication. It is also the source of its power to build connections and create affective relations between individuals which is the precondition for making collective identities, memories, and shared visions of the future. Narrative schemata have long been recognized in memory studies as one of the structuring principles in the transmission of experience, although as Ehrlich posits, the role of narrative is often more assumed than explored. Narrative schemata are the foundation of our understanding of culture as memory (Erll 2011) in that they provide a repository for understanding or premediating new events. [2]  However, schemata too are always work in progress. So, in applying the concept or any narrative model we need also to keep asking how schemata become transformed. After all, the very idea of cultural evolution supposes they do. Frederick Bartlett, the inspiration behind the concept of schemata already noted this: "An organism has somehow to acquire the capacity to turn around its own 'schemata' and to construct them afresh.” [3]  So how are ‘schemata’ turned around? Structuralist narratology came aground on this issue. Its highly abstract models helped to explain how certain ways of world-making replicate themselves across time. But it took post-structuralism to explain how ‘difference’ is produced as the inevitable by-product of repetition, showing that the application of a model produces deviations in the long-term. What Bartlett called ‘the capacity to turn around its own schemata’. Thanks to these insights, we no longer think of cultural history in terms of the total replacement of one system by another (or one dominant narrative by another). Instead, storytelling is a site of continuous repetition but also of minor adjustments which, as they aggregate, can help to reframe, or ‘reinvent’ the world. As the tenacity of toxic nationalism in a patently interdependent world shows, the transformation of schemata meets the resistance of habit and of deeply rooted affects. So is change effected? It is worth considering here the key role played by the creative arts and aesthetics. Following the influential theories of the Russian Formalists, the role of art is to undermine habit through ‘defamiliarization’, that is, by presenting new perspectives on the world or by presenting familiar things in a surprising form. [4]  As Ehrlich rightly emphasizes this is where imagination and creativity can help counter habit. In light of this, it would be good to build into his model an understanding of how ‘singular’ narratives told creatively by imaginative persons can help to shift in however minor a way, the ‘same old story.’ The operative word here is ‘minor’, since as Marianne Hirsch and others have shown, the arts operate in the micropolitics of viewing and reading, and thus bring about ‘small acts of resistance’ in the hearts and minds of individuals. [5]  Being small does not make them insignificant, however. On the contrary: the power of singular stories to move individuals by deviating from familiar schemata is the core of cultural change, which is always going to be slow. This power also helps explain how memory can move across local, regional, and national borders. Ehrlich expresses a confidence in the power of electronic media to create global citizenship, which by now seems overly optimistic in view of the ongoing fragmentation of the public sphere thanks to social media. But he is right in claiming that communication and storytelling will be key to the creation of new identities since it is through the sharing of experience that connections are forged between people who do not live in the same circumstances. However, as cultural memory studies has shown, communication is not just about the spread of common views among likeminded people. Instead, it is about articulating and recognising differences in a world that is diverse while entangled. Memory studies has provided insight into the production of stories articulating past, present, and future and, increasingly, into the circulation, reception, and uptake of those stories. Crucially, it does not presuppose that the world is a level playing field, or that it can ever become one, but examines the ways in which specific memory narratives – relating to individuals, groups, cities, countries, regions – are shaped and made legible both to members of a group and to outsiders. This will always be work in progress and, ideally, this work should not be a matter of merely replicating Western hegemony. If memory is to continue to offer a resource for making sense of the present and future it will not be because consensus has been reached on some common story that defines ‘mankind’ once and for all. Memory stays meaningful (and hence will continue to be disputed) as long as cultural acts of remembrance open up new perspectives on the history of the planet through specific narratives. In the process, it can create new conditions for building affective and cognitive relations across borders which recognise both differences and common concerns. Ehrlich’s comments on the different views of Churchill (p.61) offer a case in point: a hero in one context, he is a perpetrator in another. The example serves as a reminder that collective remembering is never a matter of transmitting a single body of knowledge; instead, it offers a site for recognizing and negotiating differences between perspectives and relations to power. Crucially, these negotiations take place at different scales, meaning that changes occur at different sites and only in a slow manner. [6] Thinking in terms of slow ‘mnemonic transitions’ [7] , rather than positing a one-off systemic shift into a new world, could be a fruitful way of combining a focus on narrative with a more fit-for-purpose understanding of change. [1]  James V. Wertsch, How  Nations Remember: A Narrative Approach . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. [2]  For a summary, see Astrid Erll, Memory in Culture . London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. [3]  Frederic C. Bartlett, Remembering: An Experimental and Social Study . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932, p.206. [4]  Viktor Shklovsky, "Art as Technique” [1917]. In Russian Formalist Critics: Four Essays , edited by L.T. Lemon and M.J. Reis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965: 3-24. [5]  Marianne Hirsch in Altınay, Ayşe Gül, et al, eds. Women Mobilizing Memory . New York: Columbia University Press, 2019, p.3; for a more detailed version of this argument, see A. Rigney, "Remaking Memory and the Agency of the Aesthetic." Memory Studies  14.1 (2021):10-23. [6]  On the importance of multiscalarity in post-national approaches to memory, see Chiara De Cesari and Ann Rigney, eds., Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulation, Scales  (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014). [7]  Miguel Cardina and Inês Nascimento Rodrigues. "The Mnemonic Transition: The Rise of an Anti-Colonial Memoryscape in Cape Verde." Memory Studies  14,2 (2020):380-394.

Serguey Ehrlich’s essay raises important questions on the role of memory studies in the contemporary world, and the accountability and responsibility of scholars, and presents another ambitious and important contribution to theorization of memory studies. Ehrlich’s text on its own, with the multitude of responses obtained by renowned memory scholars across the world, is countering its claim of “atheoretical trend” in Memory Studies. Providing us with a rich outlook on the structures of human behavior and the role of memory in both individual behavior and societal structures, Ehrlich indeed opens new avenues for reflection. As previous colleagues noted, it makes it impossible to give a thorough response to all the observations, theoretical proposals, and programmatic invites Ehrlich’s text puts in front of us. Also, previous reflections have successfully underlined and elaborated many of the original observations of Ehrlich’s essay and the importance of the dialogue Ehrlich has opened. Ehrlich presents the “holy triad” of memory, identity, and imagination as the core structures of narratives as “programs of behavior”; and presents three base mythic narratives: fairy tale, heroic and self-sacrifice. In the author’s view self-sacrifice is the only one adequate for global humanity - the contemporary society which we live in. Calling for the accountability of researchers to involve with changing the world, rather than simply observing it, and most importantly, to leave behind the modernistic lenses of understanding the new Global Age, as he names it, Ehrlich finds himself in a couple of paradoxes that I wish to underline. While asking to leave Modernity behind, Modernity itself and the classical authors are at the core of Ehrlich’s attempt at a theorization of memory studies, just as Marianne Hirsch (2023) has rightly noted. Standing on the shoulders of the giants – the Rennaissance and the Enlightenment, Ehrlich’s essay misses the opportunity to present a truly global essay founded in the diversity of global knowledge. Starting early with a position that: “it is not surprising that Western civilization based on Christian values achieved the leading position in the world” (p. 31) and criticizing harshly what he calls “the ideology of decolonization” (p. 27), the essay openly proclaims Christianity as the only religion “which exhibits self-sacrifice" (p. 31). Thus, while criticizing nationalism and even displaying the multiplicity of memory cultures and “spaces of experience” on the case of Winston Churchill later in the essay (p.56), Ehrlich, however, himself remains enclosed in his Western-centric gaze. This is further confirmed by the choice of the religious language of “self-sacrifice” instead of progressive theorizations of solidarity and hope, as has been previously raised in both Marianne Hirsch’s and Ann Rigney’s responses. The latest call for papers  of the journal Memory Studies for a special issue on “Decolonizing the Study of Memory” will certainly bear fruit to further enrich the literature which has already been vastly produced and which would be of crucial importance to Ehrlich’s work. Engaging further with brilliant work of Ruramisai Charumbira, for example, and her article on “The Historian as Memory Practitioner” (2022) where Charumbira reminds us that “The historian who practices a history focused on the conqueror, even when telling stories of the vanquished, unwittingly practices the memory for the powerful” - all would help Ehrlich embrace the importance of positionalities in his quest for global identity. For a world to be global, one must leave the Whiteness and Westerness of Christianity and open the thought to the indigenous ways of knowing as well as practices of epistemic disobedience (Mignolo 2011). And the decolonizing agenda encompasses the peripheral positionality of Eastern Europe (Wawrzyniak and Pakier 2013), the positionality of author himself. Understanding Michael Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory (2009) we can see the global citizen, that Ehrlich is so passionately looking for, emanated in the examples Rothberg offers - like W.E.B. Du Bois discourse on Warsaw Ghetto. A decolonizing approach is the only one which can even pretend to offer a truly humanistic and universal approach to memory cultures, while producing an outlook into the future. Rejecting to acknowledge the privileges of the authors invoked in his essay, Ehrlich finally surrenders, as an implicated subject (Rothberg 2019), to the reproduction of totalizing and colonizing identities. Another, and complementary, paradox the essay opens is found in its understanding of a certain singularity of identity, focusing on national identity. A global citizen exists only within the nuances and multiplicity of (post/modern global) identities (see further the works of Stuart Hall, for example). Without taking into account the development of identity politics, which in the contemporary world goes well past ethno-national identities, it is difficult to imagine a finer understanding of the interconnectedness of identity and memory, tensions which also Barbara A. Misztal has elaborated on discussing “sacralization of memory” (2004). The delicate interwovenness of contemporary identities could further help illuminate author’s search for a (primal) trauma besides “murderous cannibalism”. Opening the wealth of knowledge outside of the “usual suspects” would enhance the analytical capacities of the essay, for example when discussing “witch hunts” explained as “confusion over challenges posed by the transition to Modernity” (p. 54), and seemingly without taking into account the crucial gender perspective and thoughtful reflections elaborated by many, including Silvia Federici (2021) on the intricate relationship between patriarchy and the development of capitalism. If we wish to follow the invitation Ehrlich sends us to work through our primal traumas in the attempts of creation of new mythologizations adequate for the Global Age, it is impossible to continue through the same monopolizing lenses of the theories of the 20th century. It is impossible to continue without opening the space for vast diverse knowledge created beyond the realms of Western theory. The mere substitution of the idea of hope with the term of imagination, in this context, does not seem so innocent anymore – if theory ever is. Imagination can continue to reproduce the traumas of the past centuries, demanding the structural inequalities to remain in a status quo. The promise of self-sacrifice does not bring hope nor does it sounds as a promise of life in its full multitude of identities. And thus, as the biggest paradox indeed, it can even prevent solidarity on a global level - contrary to Ehrlich’s gracious plea. References Charumbira, Ruramisai. 2022. “The Historian as Memory Practitioner.” In The Politics of Historical Memory and Commemoration in Africa.  Mark-Thiesen, Cassandra, Moritz Mihatsch, and Michelle Sikes (Eds.)   Pp. 195–216. Oldenbourg: De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110655315-009 . Federici, Silvia. 2021.  Caliban and the Witch . London: Penguin Classics. Hall, Stuart. 2017. The Fateful Triangle. Race, Ethnicity, Nation . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hall, Stuart, and Paul du Gay, eds. 1995. Questions of Cultural Identity . London: Sage. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446221907  . Hirsch, Marianne. 2023. Memory for the Future: Response to Serguey Ehrlich, “Memory, Identity, Imagination: The Structure of Behaviour from the Perspective of Memory Studies” . Available at: https://www.istorex.org/en/post/26-07-2023-marianne-hirsch Mignolo, Walter. 2011. “Epistemic Disobedience and the Decolonial Option: A Manifesto.” In T RANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1 . No. 2.  https://doi.org/10.5070/T412011807 . Misztal, Barbara A. 2004. “The Sacralization of Memory” in European Journal of Social Theory . Vol. 7 (1). Pp. 67-84. Rigney, Ann. 2023. Memory as Resource in the Making of a Sustainable Future. Response to Serguey Ehrlich’s Memory, Identity, and Imagination: The Structure of Behavior from the Perspective of Memory Studies . Available at: https://www.istorex.org/en/post/11-08-2023-ann-rigney Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory. Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization.  Redwood City: Stanford University Press. Wawrzyniak, Joanna, and Małgorzata Pakier. 2013. “Memory Studies in Eastern Europe: Key Issues and Future Perspectives.” in Polish Sociological Review. N o. 183. Pp. 257–79.   Dr. Milica Popović (Sciences Po CERI) is a political scientist, specializing in Memory Studies, Political Sociology and Higher Education Studies. She obtained a PhD in Comparative Political Sociology at Sciences Po Paris and in Balkan studies at the University of Ljubljana. Currently, she is working as an independent researcher and consultant. Popović is also an affiliated researcher at the Institut Jacques Delors in Paris, on issues regarding the Western Balkans and the European Union enlargement. She has been Postdoctoral Fellow and Project Lead at the Global Observatory on Academic Freedom at Central European University in Vienna from 2021 to 2023, and for her work at CEU she is a recipient of DAAD Fundamental Academic Values Award for Early Career Scientists. Popović also worked as a lecturer at Sciences Po Paris. She has been a visiting fellow at the University of Warwick and the Institute for Contemporary History in Ljubljana. While finalizing her monograph on Yugonostalgia and the memory narratives of the generation of the last pioneers in the (post)Yugoslav space, she is currently developing a new research project on the memory narratives of deserters in Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.

6.04.2023 Natalija Majsova is an associate professor of cultural studies at the University of Ljubljana. Her research cuts across memory studies, film and media studies, heritage interpretation, and (post-)socialist popular cultures. Her current research projects focus on the transmediality of memory work in popular culture. Her publications include Memorable futures: Soviet science fiction cinema and the space age (Lexington books, 2021) and Faith in a Beam of Light: Magic Lantern and Belief in Western Europe, 1830-1940 (co-edited with S. Lenk, Brepols, 2022). She is the co-editor-in-chief of the journal Social Science Forum (with T. O. Črnič) and an occasional film critic. Serguey Ehrlich’s essay “Memory, Identity, and Imagination: The Structure of Behaviour from the Perspective of Memory Studies” is a passionately articulated blueprint for a future-oriented memory, and for a sustainable academic agenda in the interdisciplinary domain of memory studies. Ehrlich unpacks the triad of memory, identity, and imagination as “guidance and control subsystems of behaviour”, relying on the premise that all these three agenda-setting time-spaces are underpinned by narratives. According to the author, and echoing scholars like Astrid Erll, these narratives are neither random nor countless, but consist in individual and collective reinterpretations of “cultural schemata” (Erll, 2011a: 108). Following foundational narratological insights ranging from Vladimir Propp to Joseph Campbell’s analysis of the hero and their quest, Ehrlich posits that, from the perspective of ethics, these narratives can be distinguished according to three distinct orientations: the primal and, to my mind somewhat petty, obstacle-ridden quest for material reward; the dreadfully uncomfortable quest for collective unity based on sacrifice of someone, who is not us; and the noble route of self-sacrifice for the better of the planet (and humanity, by consequence). Ehrlich explores the significance of these three mythical quests (in other words, the fairy tale; the heroic myth; the myth of self-sacrifice) in a variety of historical, economic, cultural, and technological contexts. This results in a rich, intriguing, and dense reading, as the author conscientiously repackages and elaborates his ideas to address inquisitive readers from various fields, from memory studies and narratology to history, critical theory, and history of anthropology, seemingly effortlessly polemicizing with founding figures in the fields in the process. “Memory, Identity, and Imagination” is an inspirational text, a manifesto, in the most laudable sense of the term, and clearly the product of a great passion for intellectual thought. In the context of increasing specialization and compartmentalization in academia, Ehrlich audaciously returns to the tradition of socially engaged, stylistically emancipated, and somewhat utopian reasoning, especially characteristic of the social sciences and humanities in the context of Slavic cultures. The result is a dynamic and fascinating text that echoes the author’s intention both in content and in form. In a somewhat disruptive gesture, Ehrlich expands the current preoccupation of the social sciences and humanities with inter- and transdisciplinarity, demonstrating that these agendas may not and should not be a dry substitute for systematic and relentless engagement with sociocultural and political reality; and that academic discourse can never be clearly separated from narratives that encourage and discourage individual and collective conduct. Thus, Ehrlich’s blueprint for an ethical stance reflecting the challenges and possibilities of the information age (as a social formation structurally distinct from the earlier modern and pre-modern ages) draws on sweeping, yet illuminating and analytical overviews of changes in the human condition, initiated by transformation in the spheres of economics, industry, and communication technologies. As if recalling Karl Marx’s 1859 observation that humanity “always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the task itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation”, Ehrlich stresses that today’s conditions of existence (and therefore of possibility) differ remarkably from those of the modern age. Namely, the modern age did not offer technologies for the seamless kind of global connectivity that characterizes contemporary experience; nor did it provide nearly as many means of self- actualization, self-reflection or aesthetic, political, and social individualization. Has the time come for new formative narratives to take the lead in scholarship, activism, and everyday life? Ehrlich’s response is emphatically positive. Activating the impactful premise that memory of the past, identification grounded in the present, and future-oriented imagination work with the same materials, Ehrlich’s essay calls for a programmatic link between future scenarios and memory studies, harnessing an important insight from utopia and science-fiction scholarship. The author acknowledges his utopianist inclination, but does so in a modest way, almost under-emphasizing the idea that futurological utopias are known to go hand in hand with nostalgias for an idealized past, conjoining technological advances with traditional social organization. Additionally, in the 21st century, new utopias are often marked by nostalgias for that past’s mediatized (for example, popular-cultural) versions of the future. In other words: there is little spontaneity to how we think about the future; just like other speculations, these, too, draw on mnemonic imaginaries. The question is, then, what our mnemonic imaginaries have in store; what kind of styles, forms, and arguments are at our disposal, and which narratives are the ones we tend to rely on. Ehrlich stipulates that there is of course no one single narrative available to a society in a certain historical moment. Writing about regimes of art, Jacques Rancière (2009) has convincingly demonstrated that art may be talked, understood, and handled by different social formations to various effects (e.g., as ethical guidance, craftsmanship-based pleasure, or an invitation to perceive the world from an unprecedented perspective). All three options (and for Rancière, this is a non-exhaustive list) coexist; however, they do not co-exist with equal visibility, as societal consensus tends to privilege one distinct regime for a distinct period. Similarly, Ehrlich argues that, throughout history, all societies have the capacity to produce and work with the three basic narratives of material reward, exclusionary collectivity, and self-sacrifice; at the same time, one of these narratives appears to become privileged under certain circumstances, marking the prevalent ethical inclinations of an era. In other words, while institutions such as monarchies, nation-states, heritage identification, preservation, and interpretation mechanisms, funding bodies, and the culture and creative industries work with some mnemonic narratives but not others, a distortion necessarily occurs, as the modes of conduct that are promoted and celebrated in the media, textbooks, and museums no longer necessarily correspond to contemporary challenges. Indeed, Ehrlich identifies many instances of such distortion, pointing to specific steps that policymakers in countries from Russia to the UK and India can and perhaps should implement to reorganize national memory cultures to better respond to the demands of the globally connected and interactive world. Even more compellingly, Ehrlich identifies contemporary volunteer movements as the flagships of a new ethics, concerned with the future of humanity (and the planet, it seems fitting to additionally emphasize). Ehrlich’s contemplation on the invaluable contribution of volunteer activist movements to the proliferation of an ethics concerned with the well-being of globally connected individuals, all inhabitants of planet Earth, may easily be extrapolated to other activist groups concerned with issues that cut across the exclusionary nation- or ethnicity-based frameworks. In fact, it seems that this expansion be the logical outcome of Ehrlich’s utopian (and therefore especially enlightening) manifesto. Contemporary movements that envision change on the scales of humanity, nature, and the planet require rich mnemonic resources. Therefore, the task of memory-studies scholarship is, to paraphrase Ehrlich, certainly to “work through the primal trauma of cannibalism”. One of the ways of doing this is to work on systematically uncovering the constant ethical diversity of memory narratives, in the nascent tradition of recent scholarship, focusing on memories of hope, joy, and activism, as they are pre- and remediated, archived, and preserved in different technocultural contexts. Another promising line of research is the reinterpretation of well-known future-oriented texts, with the aim of offering new perspectives on their ethics and on their mnemonic impact. Ehrlich’s potent observation on the ethical dimension of these narratives as the tenants of memory, identity, and future-oriented imagination is a welcome addition to such research, due to its capacity to open up new questions for narratologists, memory scholars, and media scholars, to name several disciplines that I am personally most at home in. In equal measure, and partly due to its intriguing plot, “Memory, Identity, and Imagination” also has promising applicative potential in spheres such as policymaking, education, heritage interpretation, and cultural and creative industries. References Erll, Astrid. (2011) Travelling Memory. Parallax 17, no. 4: 4–18. Marx, Karl. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977. Preface. Rancière, Jacques. The aesthetic unconscious . Polity, 2009.

Evgeny Blinov (b. 1979). Graduated from Philosophical faculty of Russian State University of Humanities (Moscow), MA (Erasmus Mundus Europhilosophie), Candidate of Philosophical Sciences (Institute of Philosophy, Russian Academy of Sciences), PhD University of Toulouse 2 (France). Professor of the Department of History and World Politics, Tyumen State University. His interests include Western philosophy XVIII century, history of political thought, language policy, social anthropology and contemporary French Philosophy. He is the author of the book “By Pen and Bayonet: Introduction into Revolutionary Policy of Language” (Moscow: HSE, 2022).  Email: e.n.blinov@utmn.ru     Sergei Ehrlich’s bold and thought-provoking essay aims to provide nothing less than a new discourse on the methods used in memory studies. This field of research is multidisciplinary by definition, and the author doesn’t hesitate to cross the borders of various disciplines, far from limiting himself by historical, sociological, or psychological narratives. The latter term is one of his favorite methodological tools for his critical tasks and a positive program that is supposed to be the prolegomena to the “the New Golden Age” of humanity. If I understand his intentions correctly, he intends to create a new global community liberated from the bonds of national narratives and heroic myths of the bloody past. The main objects of his criticism are two fundamental approaches used by both professional historians and representatives of any given memory community. In the narrow professional sense, he is defying the spatial turn in the memory studies proclaimed in 1980’s by renowned French historian Pierre Nora (Nora 1989). In the broader sense, Ehrlich aims to deconstruct the “heroic myths” of the long memory of a nation. To those two fundamental tasks, we can add his admonishment of abusing the postmodernist focus on the traumatic events often seen as a universal remedy for conflicting and strictly national heroic mythology. Ehrlich champions time over space and globality over locality. These methodological choices are happily married to his political project, which he proudly designates as “utopian” (Ehrlich 2023,  57 ). Far from being a specialist in memory studies, the author of these lines is not in the position to evaluate or criticize Ehrlich’s historiographical generalizations or his analysis of current or forthcoming trends in this domain. Although the interdisciplinary and, more broadly, ideological appeal of his work inspired me to make some critical comments on this impressive piece of research. Considering myself a historian of thought or, in more foucauldian terms, specialist in the history of “systems of thought” [1] , I agree with Ehrlich’s idea that memory studies are interconnected in a myriad of ways with group identities and all the possible “behavior patterns” associated with them. Variously shaped and selected collective memories are always used as a reason for what we say, feel, or do as members of a social or political community. Furthermore, the author’s theory seems to be quite consistent as a system of explanation, although I am not totally convinced by some of its core arguments. First, I’d question his rather metaphysical argument that “There is no lieu de mémoire  without its own narrative unfolded in time. Time is primary in relation to space” (Ehrlich 2023, 16 ). Even without diving deep into philosophical discussion about the primacy of time over space, one could ask how something like “primal time” (if we do not consider it in religious terms) could exits for an “honest historian”. Historians deal with the history of a particular region, institution, domain, or concept that cannot be excluded from its locality. What is supposed to be a “historical fact” cannot be identified as such without its material dimension. In this case, I will refer to Bruno Latour’s conception; the “production of facts” that is, to me, as valid in historical science as it is in physics or chemistry (Latour 2004, 117). A historical text can be referred to as a trustful source only if it is associated with a material medium such as the oldest possible manuscript and later compared to the various archeological data that could require all sorts of material analysis (from the visual comparison to the radionuclide or genetic tests). So, we can produce something called “historical facts” or, at least, a plausible hypothesis about them, only after putting them to the test in our laboratory. While in the case of the “raw materials” that could later become “historical facts,” they are first and foremost spatial and material phenomena, and only after professional processing become “temporal” in the strict sense. An artefact like an ancient helmet found during an excavation can be classified only according to provenance at first. I.e., it is primarily a spatial object, and the task of a historian is to put it on a chronological line after the long and detailed process of attribution. Even if we can use some narrative sources to localize a historical place, like Schliemann used Iliad to find Troya, we can do so only if we consider this source as an authentic Greek literary text and not an invention of a Greek nationalist living in the XIX-th century. In its turn, the authenticity of the text could only be attested to through the material analysis and so forth. Space first, time second. Otherwise, we will be doomed to tailor our task to the ready answer. Manipulation like this is very typical in many national narratives. Another Ehrlich maxim states that “the Earth of lieux de mémoire circulates around the sun of narration, but not vice versa. Therefore, the narrative approach should play the leading role in memory studies” (Ehrlich 2023, 16). This argument seems to contain a reference to the idea of a certain “helix of history”, which, I hope, didn’t refer to the One-and-Only-Objective-Universal-Narrative but something like a continuum of various narratives. Although even those narratives could only be distinguished if localized, not to mention that the very idea of big narrative is a product of Western European and more particular XX-th century French thought (Lyotard 1984) as the idea of “objective history” was largely a product of XIX-th century German thought. In this sense, I found the author’s appeal to “look at the world from the entire humankind perspective” rather confusing and contradictory (Ehrlich 2023, 13). As Marx and Engels put it in their early chef d’oeuvre,  German Ideology  criticizing Feurebach idealistic “man” instead of “real historical man.” “`Man` is really `the German` (Marx, Engels 1976, 39 ). The “entire humankind‘s” point of view is not a “point of view from nowhere,” its’s the point of view of Western Europe. According to Ehrlich, the “anti-spatial turn” in memory studies will allow him not only to get rid of the tenets of narrow nationalistic narratives and adopt “humankind’s perspective,” but also to dive deep into the depts of the human soul. It’s no wonder that he salutes the psychological aspect of the narrative turn associated with the works of James Wertsch, psychologist by his primary background. Ehrlich believes that the psychologism of the narrative turn in memory studies could provide us with new tools for the “molecular” analysis of the human behavior. Here, he intrudes into a completely new domain, proposing his own anthropological perspective on the general evolution of human society. Ehrlich’s humans are gregarious and political animals with historically determined patterns of behavior that could become an object of scientific analysis. These patterns are organized around temporal structures called “subsystems,” where memory belongs to the past, “identity” to the present, and imagination to the future. Memory is not simply “remembered”, but lived through, it’s very essence is performative, and the process of the collective mnemonic experience could be studied through the different “narratives”. The narratives for Ehrlich and for Wertsch are collective phenomena, or more precisely, in a narrative one could find “essential temporal interplay of its collective and individual forms” (Ehrlich 2023, 14). It’s important to note that Ehrlich goes beyond flat “psychological” conceptions that oppose individual and collective memories, although he clearly formulates his distaste for the “identities” produced by national states. For him, there are no “wrong” collective memories imposed to the individuals, although narratives themselves could be wrong or right from the point of view of a professional historian. He mentions Orlando Figes’ research on the case of memory aberration, when many Gulag prisoners discovered that, after reading Solzhenitsyn’ s magnum opus, their own “confused and non-organized” memories were somehow “erased” by the writer’s coherent and organized narratives and became more vivid than their actual memories (Figes 2007, 636). I suggest that this curious phenomenon deserved much better attention but, unfortunately, it’s only briefly mentioned in a footnote. Otherwise, it would be interesting to observe the implementation of this theory to something like “false memories” in the vein of the classical Marxist notion of false consciousness (that should be based on the “false” or rather “confused” memories turned into the behavioral patterns by the means of ideology). The pivotal role of narratives turns them into the bricks on which our social world is composed as they permanently shape group identities. The collective is constantly changing itself (i.e. its views on the past, present and plans for the future) through the various narratives. In this sense, the author’s ambitions are well beyond the reflection on the collective memory and its complex relationship with what he calls “professional history”. From this perspective, narratives are not only histories of the plural voices that could merge into a common “mnemonic community,” but a part of the fundamental structure that Foucault called the “historical ontology of ourselves” (Foucault 1984). The very tissue of this ontology is woven from the narratives presented through something like an autonomous and self-moving spindle. Narrative naturans, narrative naturata. This sort of “hyper-narrativism” leads the author to the criticism of the heroical myth and the ideology of self-sacrifice, tied with the ideology of the national state and apparently considered as the main reason for the wars that struck Europe in the XX-th century. Ehrlich was referring to the famous pamphlet of the interwar period: Julien Bendas’ Betrayal Of The Clerks  (Benda 2011), in which he blamed the European intellectuals on both sides of the front line for betraying the universalists’ ideals of Enlightenment and falling into nationalist rage during World War 1. The very fact that many of those societies were already democratic at the time encouraged the warmongers who instrumentalized or created the narratives of a unified nation. Here, Ehrlich seems to accept Michael Mann’s arguments from the Dark Side of Democracy  (Mann, 2005), about the belliсouse nature of democratic societies and severely criticizes the renaissance of the archaic “same blood” ideology. That becomes far more powerful as it is provided with the modern instruments of mobilization and mind control, which while belonging to the same “memory community” appears to be one of the most efficient. I have to admit that I do not agree with Ehrlich’s central opposition on the ideas of “national” memory and universal values. This opposition was believed to be crucial in the particular periods of European history. It had its moment of glory in the early interwar period, as attested to by the popularity of Bendas’ book, and was reestablished in the early nineties as part of the globalist ideology of the “end of history” (Fukuyama 1992), and similar theories. Although, from a larger historical perspective, universalism was the essential part of nationalist big narratives. In his scrupulous study of the genesis of French nationalism in the XVIII-th century, David Avram Bell analyzed numerous intersections between nationalist and universalist narratives (Bell 2001). Even in the age of Pax America, French intellectuals were constantly referring to the idea of France as a “Universal Nation” (Latour 2004).  The nationalist narratives contemporary to the French revolutionary project pretended to be universalist in one way or another as is attested to by the original project, American Empire, as “City upon the Hill” (Anderson 2006) or German nationalism that was opposed to its French adversary. Even secondary nationalism, fashioned upon French, German, or American models constantly justify themselves with various references to the universalist arguments. These newer nationalistic perspectives are often confused with their old-fashioned nationalist narratives that treacherously resemble that of WWII, a period which they tend to present as a part of European civilization as opposed to the various incidences of “barbarism” and “totalitarianism.” There is no need to argue that the clash between two “universalists” perspectives as in the Cold War era could be much more dangerous than a war between some nation states for a disputed territory. Not to mention the fact that universalist perspective doesn’t exclude the support of the local nationalism for a “higher” purpose: Soviet project was branded by Stalin as “national in form, proletarian in content” and was seen externally as a true “Empire of Nations”, to put it in Francine Hirsch’s terms (Hirsch 2004). The ongoing European project was equally built upon the explicit or implicit support of the Eastern European nationalism, even if it was perceived by some as a temporary instrument necessary for their later reintegration into the “European family”. In one way or another, modern nationalism referred to the universalists arguments and reshaped the collective memory by the standards of what they believed to be “objective history”. It is so much easier to be a nationalist proud of your history when your own nation is supposed to be on “the right side” of its general course and progress. Or, at least, of what one believes to be progressive and right. French and Germans (at least their elites), were no less convinced that they represent an authentic comprehension of universal values than Catholics and Protestants centuries ago and did their best to persuade their fellow-citizens that they were fighting on the right side of history by joining the “union sacrée” or defending Kultur (Hanna 1996, 129). I was even less convinced by the author’s surprisingly optimistic final part that dissents with the generally pessimistic description of the dominance of national narratives throughout his essay. His proposal to elaborate some sort of “global memory” was supposed to replace various national memory narratives with their heroic mythology does not represent something new from the point of narrative construction. He states that “The first step to solve the problems that the nation-state and capitalism are incapable of solving is to imagine post-state and post-capitalist forms of memory and identity, which would correspond to our global epoch of information civilization” (Ehrlich 2023, 41). But is there something new about the idea of global memory? If we take the classical account of the mnemonic aspect of national genealogies suggested by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities, it does not seem to be very different from the old good “scientific nationalism” that was trying to expulse the ghosts of the ancient hostilities by introducing what he called “Reassuring Fratricide” (Anderson 2006, 199-200). According to Anderson, this concept helped to reshape the local memories by presenting the bloody conflicts of the past as “family feud”: “We become aware of a systematic historiographical campaign deployed by the state mainly through the it’s school systems, to ‘remind’ every young Frenchwoman and Frenchman of a series of antique slaughters which are now inscribed as ‘family history.’ Needing to ‘have already forgotten’ tragedies of which one needs unceasingly to be ‘reminded’ turns out to be a characteristic device in the later construction of national genealogies” (Anderson 2006, 201). The national genealogies, which were intended to create a nation as a unified mnemonic community, already had complex and hybrid systems using sophisticated narrative techniques that allowed members of hostile local communities to transform into “Frenchmen”, “Italians”, “Germans” et cit. From the point of view of a new European mnemonic community, Germans, French, or Italians were becoming the equivalent to the “Parisians”, “Gascons” or “Basque”, or even Catholics and Protestants from the earlier stages of global development. Germans and Frenchmen “should have forgotten” the fratricidal wars of the past to protect the beautiful European “garden” from the intrusion of the barbarians living in their Jungle. Moreover, all the references to the “same blood” ideology should be placed among many narrative techniques used by nation builders. Although the old metaphor of “genetic memory” could be reevaluated with the progress of paleogenetic history, this possibility does not seem to interest the author, who focused on the “narrative turn”. We could suppose that, in the near future, one could evaluate the perceptibility of the individuals or groups for the particular narratives based on their genetic heredity, as we have growing evidence that PTSD could be inherited (Nievergelt et al. 2018). In this case, we could guess that, if a large percentage of the population of the former Soviet Union are descendants of the WWII soldiers who survived after heavy wounds and thus inherited the PTSD, they could be much more perceptible to the certain forms of heroical narratives. Often used sarcastically, the post-Soviet slogan “The grandfathers fought” could be possibly seen in a completely new light with the future research on genetic memory, considered in the most literal sense of the term. Going back to the metaphors, I would like to quote Gilles Deleuze’s favorite poem, which was written by Joë Busquet, a half-paralyzed WWI veteran: “My wound existed before me, I was born to embody it” (Deleuze, 1990, 143). We were born to embody our ancestors’ wounds, both literally and figuratively. However, the way we deal with these wounds may vary. My last objection concerns Ehrlich’s rather implicit idea that the “behavioral patterns” produced by various mnemonic communities should be considered as the products of some sort of cynical manipulation performed by the creators of national narratives. Although French Jacobines or Russian Bolsheviks were certainly working on a new version of collective memory that could replace ancient “prejudices”, they never imagined creating them ex nihilo : on the contrary, they should have been based on what they believed to be real sufferings and the urgent need of the people. French historian of political thought Pierre Rosanvallon pointed out that the Rousseauoist revolutionary paradigm presupposed something like a “sentimental contract” in addition to strictly rational “social contract” (Rosanvallon 2004, 41). Even if the revolutions, including the revolutions in memory, are usually led “from above” they cannot succeed without massive popular support, and when the “revolutionary situation” emerges, it’s often hard to tell who is leading whom. For instance, Staline and everyone else in his place, had previously refused to become the new Russian emperor, but the “lieu de memoire” gradually transformed him into one. Like Sergei Eisenstein’, Ivan the Terrible swore to rule not only on the land controlled by the “Great Duchy of Moscow”, but also to rule equally on “maritime lands that belonged to our forefathers” [2] . He recognized the importance of the mission to unify lost Russian lands. If we take apart the divine mission or Marxist ideas of historical progress, there will be nothing left aside from a gravitation of collective memories. Nation or empire builders are much more of the prisoners of collective memories than creators and cynical manipulators of the masses. As the wise an ancient quote goes, “ ducunt volentem fata, nolentum trahunt” – “Fate leads but the unwilling drags along” (Seneca 1925, 228-229). I believe that we can trace these transformations, which often take grotesque and monstrous forms, to previous periods and observe how they grew out of the various traumatic memories. I found the term “patriotism of despair”, introduced by anthropologist Sergey Alex Oushakine, very elucidating. He researched this term in the Barnaul region in the 1990s and 2000s and came to the following conclusions: “New forms of social kinship emerged through a vocabulary of shared pain: the memory of blood and the memory of suffering seemed to merge in these forms of connectedness. It was this `patriotism of despair` that brought the country, the nation, and the traumatic experience together. A wounded attachment, the patriotism of despair deflected rather than healed pain. It was a promise of a community bound by the solidarity of grief. A community of loss, no doubt, but a community, nonetheless” (Oushakine 2009, 262). For this very reason I found it more probable that a “sentimental contract” based on this sort of shared memory is much more powerful than any official “narrative” in which the governmental manipulators tried to combine elements that can hardy fit together. The despair intensified by shared memory will always produce “patterns of behavior” that will terrify political technologists, professional historians, and the Holy Vatican. To paraphrase Nietzsche, any global memory is only a thin apple peel over a glowing collective memory brazed by shared pain.   P.S .: While working on this essay, I made a discovery about my family history on the archival site Podvig Naroda ( https://podvignaroda.ru/?#tab=navHome ). Apart from the entry concerning my grandfather, the medal for courage achieved during the battle that took place on 12 January 1943, I suddenly discovered another entry in the “Irretrievable losses” section. A long list of the soldiers killed in the same battle included my grandfather’s data, his hometown Gzhatsk, the year of his birth, and his elder sister’s address in Moscow. Fortunately, it was a common mistake, as he had been heavily wounded and spent many months in the hospital. In some alternative world my father was never born and in the real world my aunt received a death notification stating that her brother died a heroic death on 12 January 1943 and was buried in the common grave on the board of Chernaya Rechka, in the outskirts of city of Leningrad. Their birthplace was a village near the small town of Gzhatsk in the Smolensk region, where Yuri Gagarin was born, 18 years after my grandfather. Gzhatsk was renamed Gagarin after his premature death but for me Gagarin’s exploit could hardly be separated from what one may call “Soviet Heroic myth”. No matter how huge this leap was for humanity and the professed “global memory”, the fact is that the falling of a small soldier from the town of Gagarin has existential value for me. And this sort of the document will always be more powerful and mind shaking than any history lesson “from the point of view of humanity”. By this I don’t mean my strictly subjective perspective or the existential fear of being never born, but the common value of the shared memories which have pivotal value for the whole “mnemonic community”. It’s no wonder that all the attempts to replace them with some sort of “nobody’s memory” are considered as an existential threat. Whether we wish it or not, we will certainly find ways to deal with this threat. As a poet put it, “Across the peaks of ages, over the heads of governments and poets”   Literature   Anderson, Benedict. (2006) Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London; New York: Verso. Benda, Julien. (2011) The Treason of the Intellectuals . Translated by R. Aldington. New Brunswick; London: Transaction Publishers. Bell, David A. (2001). The Cult of Nation in France. Inventing Nationalism. 1680-1800. Cambridge, Mas.: Harvard University Press.   Deleuze, Gilles. (1990).  The Logic of Sense. New York: Columbia University Press. Ehrlich, Sergey (2023). Memory, Identity, and Imagination. The Structure of Behaviour from the Perspective of Memory Studies   Figes, Orlando. (2007). The whisperers: private life in Stalin's Russia. London: Allen Lane. Foucault, Michel (1984) What is Enlightenment? In Paul Rabinow(ed)  .T h e Foucault Rader , New York ,Pantheon Books , pp . 32-50. Fukuyama, Francis (1992) The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press Hanna, Martha (1996). The Mobilization of Intellect. French Scholars and Writers during the Great War. Cambridge, Mas.: Harvard University Press.   Latour, Bruno. (2004) Politics of Nature. Cambridge, Mas.: Harvard University Press.   Lyotard, François. (1984) The Postmodern Condition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.   Nievergelt Caroline M. et al. (2018) Genomic Approaches to Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: the Psychiatric Genomic Consortium Initiative. Biol Psychiatry. 2018 May 15;83(10):831-839 [1]  The original French name of the chair founded and held by Michel Foucault in College de France was “Histoire des Systems de Pensée”. [2]  About the explanations that Staline gave to Eisenstein see Neuberger 2019.