The Discursive Formation of Cultural Memory: Transformations of Meaning and Cultural Efficacy

Abstract

This paper reconsiders the relationship between language and cultural memory in light of the observation that foundational scholarship on cultural memory has largely focused on explaining the mechanisms of preservation and recollection, whereas the question of how social experiences acquire the capacity to become culturally effective frames of reference remains underexplored from a linguistic perspective. To address this question, the paper shifts the analytical focus from cultural memory as a repository of cultural experience to language-in-use as the site where social experience is discursively reconstructed and endowed with enduring cultural efficacy. The paper proceeds from the premise that social experience does not become an active component of cultural memory automatically. Rather, it undergoes a process of discursive formation through two principal modes: selection and reframing, before its cultural efficacy is tested through use in pragmatic and social contexts. Through this process, certain elements acquire the capacity to perform interpretive, symbolic, and normative functions within society, thereby becoming part of the cultural frame of reference that discourse continually invokes and recontextualizes in response to present circumstances. The paper argues that the elements of cultural memory should not be understood as fixed givens. Rather, they are culturally effective elements produced through ongoing discursive and social processes, characterized by relative stability rather than permanence. It further argues that the sustainability of cultural memory is achieved not merely through the preservation or recollection of its elements, but through the continued cultural efficacy of those elements in social use. In this sense, language, through discursive formation, constitutes one of the fundamental linguistic conditions for reconstructing cultural frames of reference and sustaining their presence within society. Accordingly, the paper proposes a linguistic perspective that broadens existing understandings of cultural memory by shifting the analytical focus from the mechanisms of preservation and recollection to the production and sustainability of cultural efficacy.