What does it mean to remember a past you did not experience personally, but which haunts the place where you live and the people with whom you share this place?
I’ve been grappling with this question as an ally of the P4W Memorial Collective, a group of women who did time at the Kingston Prison for Women (P4W). The Collective is creating a memorial garden and outdoor gallery in honor of those who died in the prison before it closed in 2000, and those who continue to live and die in prisons across Canada. P4W is now being turned into condos, a retirement home, and a hotel—and it’s not the only women’s prison to be flipped for capitalist redevelopment. The first prisons for women in England and Australia have met a similar fate.
So much is at risk of being lost when a place of punishment, suffering, and death is gutted for the enjoyment and profit of others. Some memories of P4W are intensely personal; they’re not meant to be shared with the public. But other memories need to be shared, both so the people who lived and died there are not forgotten, and also so the community does not repeat the violence that took their lives.
But why should those who have already been forced to pay a ‘debt to society’ share their memories with a public that continues to punish them long after they’ve done their time? Why re-open memories of the past if there’s no guarantee they will have an impact on the present and future? And what are the conditions under which the painful memories of some move others who do not share their experience to acknowledge and redress harm, not as an act of ‘charity,’ but as a collective desire for a world where no one will ever again lose their life in the name of justice?
I don’t have answers to these questions. But as a philosopher on the advisory board for the P4W Memorial Collective, I’ve been trying to ‘think what we are doing’ (to paraphrase Hannah Arendt) in supporting the creation of a memorial garden on P4W grounds. It seems to me that this collective memory work unfolds in at least four dimensions: ontological, social, ethical, and political. These dimensions overlap in some ways and conflict in others. Collective memory work is hard because not everyone remembers the same things, in the same ways, with the same ideas about what should be done in response to the past. But as the P4W Memorial Collective has taught me, conflict can be generative if you don’t run away from it.
At the most basic level of collective memory—what I’m calling the ontological level, or the level of being—the place where something happened bears traces of the past in the present. Some of these marks are deliberate. Women who did time at P4W created murals, graffiti, and other marks on the walls that continue to mark them. The one remaining prison wall is stained by the traces of graffiti we added last Prisoners’ Justice Day, then removed on the insistence of the developer. While archeological assessments have cleared the former prison grounds for development, the land itself holds memories that may or may not be revealed in city council reports or heritage easement agreements. And yet, even when cell walls are torn down to make room for more commodious floor plans, these secret traces will remain.
But that’s not enough for people to remember what happened at P4W. There’s also a social dimension of collective memory, which is structured around an antagonism between hegemonic public memory and insurgent counter-memory. By public memory, I mean the stories that communities and nation states tell about themselves, stories of “peace, order, and good government” in a “nation of immigrants.” These stories are repeated and amplified to the point of drowning out the counter-memories of marginalized subjects: Indigenous peoples, racialized people, women, the poor, the mad and disabled. This is why it’s a radical act for criminalized people to tell their own stories, in their own voices, on their own terms—and it’s also why it can be hard to find these stories in public archives. But the counter-memory of marginalized groups has an insurgent power that refuses to be silenced, in spite of having fewer resources to make itself heard.
This is where the ethical dimension of collective memory comes in. We all have a social interest in remembering some aspects of the past and forgetting others in the fight to authorize and amplify our own version of history. But if collective memory were exhausted by this agonistic struggle, it’s not clear why anyone would want to remember a past that hinders or undermines their interests. If that’s not possible—if we’re stuck in weaponized representations of the past—then the only way for a counter-hegemonic force to win is by erasing or replacing other collective memories: namely, by becoming hegemonic itself. And perhaps this is just what collective memory boils down to: a fight to control dominant narratives.
But the Levinasian in me believes that counter-hegemonic collective memory also has an ethical force that commands others to responsibility, even if we don’t share these memories or identify with them. This ethical dimension of collective memory does not just implicate those of us who are ‘responsible’ in the sense of directly causing or benefiting from the marginalization of counter-memories. It speaks to anyone whatsoever, and it commands us to listen and respond. It does not offer us a recipe for righting wrongs; its power lies in the capacity to be affected beyond identity, beyond the assumption that what happened to you only impacts me if we’re on the same team. The ethical dimension of collective memory thrives on alterity, cutting across the opposition between ‘us’ and ‘them.’
But it’s one thing to be moved by the counter-hegemonic memories of others, and quite another thing to be motivated to act. This is the threshold between ethics and politics. The political dimension of collective memory requires someone—ideally, everyone—to commit to a plan of action for building a world that refuses to repeat past oppression. This, in turn, calls for improvisation, invention, and experimentation, since we don’t already know how to make such a world. As a praxis of world-building, the political dimension of collective memory goes beyond identity formation, even though it is often rooted in the social identity of a group that refuses to be forgotten. But it takes more than antagonism to make and remake a world.
You might object: Isn’t politics agonistic—and doesn’t the move from identity-based struggles to collaborative world-building risk sweeping conflict, difference, and power under the rug? This is a risk, to be sure. But this is why it’s important to understand collective memory in terms of dimensions rather than stages of a dialectical progression. The political doesn’t supersede the social; the ethical interrupts at any moment, and the ontological hums through all of these dimensions. These terms may need revision and nuance, but what I’m calling the political dimension of collective memory is a creative, experimental praxis that exceeds the scope of memory, conventionally understood as the representation of past experience. And this, I want to argue, is the beating heart of collective memory, understood as a social, political, ethical, and ontological relation to the experience of others.
In this sense, collective memory is not just about the past; it’s a collective articulation of the world we want, both beyond and through a refusal of the world as we know it. The labor of collective memory can neither fall on the shoulders of a specific social group nor remain indeterminate and open-ended like an ethical command to anyone whatsoever; someone has to take action to stop the repetition of past violence and to commit to building a world where such violence is not tolerated. As such, collective memory calls forth a sense of the we based on a shared commitment to abolish oppression and to build otherwise worlds, creating new possibilities by remembering those who went before us.
The P4W Memorial Collective is committed to this imaginative memory work. To learn more about the Collective, visit their website at https://p4wmemorialcollective.com/.
Lisa Guenther
Lisa Guenther is Queen’s National Scholar in Political Philosophy and Critical Prison Studies. She is the author of Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives (2013) and The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction (2007), and co-editor of Death and Other Penalties: Philosophy in a Time of Mass Incarceration (2015) with Geoffrey Adelsberg and Scott Zeman. Recent publications include “Seeing Like a Cop: A Critical Phenomenology of Whiteness as Property” (in Race as Phenomena, 2019) and “Police, Drones, and the Politics of Perception” (in The Ethics of Policing, forthcoming). As a public philosopher, Guenther’s work has appeared in The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, Aeon, and CBC’s Ideas. She was a member of the P4W Memorial Collective from 2018-21, and she worked with REACH Coalition in Nashville, Tennessee, from 2012-17. She is currently working on the relation between prison abolition and decolonization in the context of Canada and the United States.
