In the news accounts on graduation ceremonies, the speeches of public figures are highlighted. This is not a bad thing. Important matters, more deliberately considered, are put on the public agenda. Thus, to take a key example, President Obama has used commencement addresses to present his deep assessment of the state of the union, as a recent report by NPR reveals. Obama, as the ceremonial speaker seriously reflects on the gap between past and future, assessing American promise and problems, using his full intelligence, free, or at least somewhat free, of the inside the beltway logic of official Washington and the popular media. A good thing, no doubt.

Yet, for me, significant oratory by Obama, and lesser public speakers, is not where the real action is on graduation day. Rather, I focus on the achievements of the graduates, our students and their promise, what they have said and done already, and where they may bring us. They help me understand the personal and the political, and all that lies in between. It is with this in mind that I am leaving my house this morning for The New School’s commencement, thinking once again about the relationship between promise and practice at The New School, specifically as it is revealed in the work of three new Ph.Ds.

Julie Tel Rav, a trained architect, turned sociologist, and a rabbi’s wife, used her broad creative and intellectual interests, and her communal experience to examine how the material environment influences ritual and everyday life of a religious community. In Set in Stone: The Influence of Architecture on the Progressive Amercan Jewish Community, she explores Jewish synagogues and community centers across the country, and how the built environment supports and undermines the goals of congregations. Particularly interesting is her thesis that the makers of the buildings seek to use physical space as a key support for Jewish ritual communal life, substituting space for time. This was her unanticipated finding, which emerged as her research proceeded. It was her discovery, which I found particularly interesting, as I have been exploring the relationship between the material world and the human world, and the way the human condition is specified in the social condition. I chaired Tel Rav’s committee, and have had, therefore, a great opportunity to learn from her.

I proudly served as an adviser on Lindsey Freeman’s dissertation committee (Vera Zolberg was the chair). I hope that Lindsey has benefited from my advice. I know I have learned a great deal from her scholarship and creativity in her dissertation: a study of the collective memory of the making of the atomic bomb in the (at first) secret utopian project in Oakridge, Tennessee, her hometown. Her study is to be published next year by the University of North Carolina Press as Longing for the Bomb: Atomic Nostalgia in Post-Nuclear Landscape. She analyzes the rise and fall of an atomic city: from top – secret war project, to post WWII memory center of patriotic heroism, to the ambiguities of the present day. This is a special kind of community study: focusing on the creation of the modern mythology about the bomb, moving on to nuclear nostalgia, and then to the struggle for meaning as myth and nostalgia fade.

One of the great interdisciplinary events at The New School for Social Research in the past decade has been an annual conference on memory. Freeman has been an important organizer. In her dissertation, she makes her unique contribution to “memory studies,” showing how imagination and memory shape ordinary everyday practice in an extraordinary place. The locals and the nation did indeed learn to build, live with and love the bomb, until the passion cooled.

Ana Mallen in her dissertation, Participatory Democracy and Social Polarization in the Times of Hugo Chavez, shows how the move from a corrupt liberal democracy to a promised participatory democracy, led to a rethinking of popular sovereignty, and the emergence of two mutually exclusive, antagonistic publics. Daily interactions, media representations, key political actors and the media combined to create a deeply polarized society. It is a dissertation in historical studies and sociology. The focus is on key turning points in the recent past and the way significant actions pushed forward polarization. Mallen concludes, surprisingly, with a community study of a district of Caracas that seemed to move against the polarizing trend (with an opposition leader using the ideology of Chavez to prevail over a Chavez supported candidate). Her account of the way the media wars and the civil strife interacted, leading to social polarization is without heroes and villains. She illuminated a complex story from multiple angles in a way that really informs.

Mallen’s committee included my New School sociology department colleague Carlos Forment, an eminent historical sociologist of civil society in Latin America, and María Pilar García-Guadilla, of the Universidad Simon Bolivar, Venezuela, with whom Mallen had studied and worked with in Caracas on the Chavez phenomenon. As a non-expert, I was a little embarrassed to be the supervisor. Although Ana assures me that my approach to politics and media were a key to her work, my colleagues obviously had the historical knowledge to judge Mallen’s work that I lacked. That said, I realized at the defense that I actually have been understanding political developments in “the times of Chavez” quite well. This, of course, is thanks to talking to and reading Mallen over the years, as she has been developing her project. She has been my teacher as I have been hers. This is also true of Freeman and Tel Rav. That in fact is what advanced study and research is all about, what it ideally is, and where it quite often does lead.

The special mark of The New School: critical insight, careful social, political and historical investigation, and theoretical sophistication, beyond parochial clichés, worldly, socially and politically consequential: Tel Rav, Freeman and Mallen, along with many other New School students, have kept it alive in their work. I am grateful, and off to celebrate them for making an ideal, real.

A few years ago, I had a couple of opportunities to present publicly my thoughts on collective memory: at the annual memory conference at The New School and at an interdisciplinary conference on resistance and creativity in Cerisy, France. Collective memory was then an emergent major concern internationally, and it has been a long term interest of mine, starting with my analysis of the way collective memory served as a base for independent public expression and action in Communist societies (published in my one and only piece in the premier sociology journal, The American Journal of Sociology). There was a kind of vindication for me in these developments.

While collective memory is now hot, I have long been interested in a topic (by the way informed by the work I did with Edward Shils, which indicates how I have learned from a conservative thinker as I have suggested in earlier posts). Yet, I am ambivalent about this development. I have become increasingly uncomfortable with the memory’s emergent academic and public popularity, concerning two problems. I see a disturbing trend, people turning to memory as they lose political imagination (this shows that I am not a conservative). Also, a too simple identification of memory with enlightenment concerns me (a conservative concern perhaps). By underscoring the importance not only of memory, but also of forgetting, I wanted to highlight these issues in my talks in 2008. And I am posting a version of the talks here today because I think the problems remain, though many academics including some of my students and colleagues are now addressing them. In a couple of weeks, I am off to Berlin to take part in a discussion on the topic of memory and civil society, where I hope these issues will be discussed.

I should add that at that time I was composing my presentation on memory, I was working with two students, Irit Dekel and Yifat Gutman, who were addressing the problems of memory in creative ways. I was learning a lot about the promise and problems of memory studies from them. Dekel’s strikingly sober and anti-sentimental ethnography of a memory site, the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, was revealing the unsteadiness of memory as a series of discreet social activities in the present, creating understandings and misunderstandings, and Gutman was showing how memory activists in Israel, particularly concerned with Israeli Palestinian relations, were creating domains of contemporary political conflict, making them more complex and unsettled, constituting spaces of contemporary possibility. She was moving from memory to the study of social movements and global politics and publics. Learning from one’s students is one of the great pleasures of the academic profession. This was the case in the work I did with Yifat and Irit and quite a few others students studying the topic of memory, Rafael Narvaez, Amy Sodaro, Lindsey Freeman, working with my colleague Vera Zolberg and me. I still am learning from them in their work. Indeed, the discussion I will have in Berlin about memory and civil society is being organized and coordinated by Dekel.

My presentation on memory and forgetting is a critical response to an idea formulated by Adam Michnik at the moment of radical transformation in Poland, “amnesty without amnesia.” His was a wise political judgment presented at a critical moment in the struggle to constitute a democratic polity in Poland. Don’t engage in revolutionary justice, but also don’t forget the horrors of the recent past. This is a topic that is quite relevant today in North Africa and the Middle East. Indeed, the problem lingers in Poland and among its neighbors as reported in The New York Times today. Mine is an appreciation of Michnik’s political position, the subtleties of which are missing in the Times report. I think he makes crucial distinctions. Yet, I also think that careful  sociological analysis highlights the empirical difficulties of of realizing Michnik’s key proposition.  I seek to show in the presentation posted here that at critical moments of social change, creative political action works to erase memories of the relevant past, while “re-remembering” (to use Toni Morrison’s formulation). Three cases will be compared, Michnik’s, after the fall of the communist regime in East Central Europe, and cases drawn from the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and the American presidential campaign of 2008.

I am posting the paper I presented in Cerisy because I think it is still relevant. This is the first time it is being published in English. Keep in mind, the piece was written in the Spring of 2008. Therefore, the report on the American campaign was written before the outcome of the election was decided. I think the reader will note that the issues raised are as important now as they were then and have been underscored by the way memories of race and racism have played a persistent role in the elections and during the first term of the Obama presidency.

To read the full In-Depth Analysis of “For and Against Memory: Poland, Israel-Palestine and the United States” click here.