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actual status of collective and individual memory
in modernity that is connected with the emer-
gence of nostalgia as a typical modern illness.
First and foremost, I need to explain the
characteristics of modern society that I intend to
focus on (Giddens, 1990; Luhmann, 1997).
Modern society is characterized by the high
degree of contingency not only of its forms, but
also of all of its events, relationships and identi-
ties (Luhmann, 1992). Contingency means that
each phenomenon in modern society is neither
necessary nor impossible: there are no longer
profound ties and each selective process in soci-
ety could well be a different one; the society is
open to other possibilities that could be actual-
ized in the future. Individuals who are best
suited to a highly contingent society are there-
fore fl exible, adaptable and open to new ideas
and circumstances.
The relationship that modern society has
with memories is itself in turn highly contingent:
what is remembered or forgotten could be
otherwise, and the ties to founding narratives
upon which identities are grounded are becom-
ing weaker and weaker.
2
As a result, social
memory in modernity is characterized by its
contingency, as well as by its digital nature, in
the sense that everything that modern society
remembers or forgets - be it events, meanings,
or ideas - is no longer part of an organic whole,
of something whole that melds its identity, but is
instead something that lends itself to being dis-
mantled, taken apart and separated before
being reassembled without any particular limi-
tations. In other words, the relationships between
what is remembered and what is forgotten as
part of social memory are becoming ever more
based on a general sense of their equivalence.
When using the term 'collective memory',
we traditionally refer to the typically modern
meaning of the word given by Maurice Hal-
bwachs (1980, 1992). The collective memory
he described in the early decades of the 20th
century was already a form of modern memory
in that it was no longer unitary nor prescriptive.
Indeed, modern collective memory is multi-
faceted and fragmented, contingent and weakly
rooted in individual living memory. It is, there-
fore, a weak version of the traditional collective
memory, characteristic of a community, which
was once binding and had deep and prescrip-
tive signifi cance for the groups and individuals
involved. A wider-ranging idea of collective
memory is that described for example by Jan
Assmann (1992): by collective memory, he
intends a set of memories that together meld to
create the identity and specifi city of a group as
'a community which together remembers' (the
collectivité-mémoire
of Pierre Nora, 2001, is
very close to this idea). The past that the com-
munity together remembers is a mythical past,
in other words a founding narrative.
3
Halb-
wachs observed the fact that these founding
memories were undergoing a clear crisis as early
as the dawning of the 20th century.
Herein lies the radical difference between
the memory of modern society (the social mem-
ory) and both the collective memory, character-
istic of the traditional communities, and the
memory of individuals themselves, which are
instead specifi c and organic, in other words
holistic. The memory of individuals resists con-
tingency, in that it contributes to forming per-
sonal narratives and identities that are unique
and could not be otherwise, and it is this speci-
fi city that gives sense and meaning to individual
lives and to the world around them.
Within this framework, I believe that nostal-
gia can be considered a symptom of the dissocia-
tion between the contingent, digital memory of
modern society and the individual memory,
which has retained its holistic and prescriptive
nature. From this perspective, nostalgia appears
as a typically modern form of individual feeling.
More precisely, nostalgia appeared for the
fi rst time in Europe as an illness. Indeed, the
word was coined by a Swiss medical doctor by
the name of Johannes Hofer, in 1688, to indicate
a new form of malaise, which appeared to be
striking ever-greater numbers of his countrymen.
Dr Hofer defi ned nostalgia as 'the sad mood
originating from the desire for return to one's
native land' (Boym, 2001, p. 3). The word nos-
talgia derives from two Greek roots:
nostos,
2
The term memory is used to indicate a selective structure that functions by means of the dual operations of
remembering and forgetting.
3
See also Anderson (1991) and Hobsbawm and Range (1983) in relation to national memory.
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