“Remember When…?” Joint Reminiscing and Phatic Communication
Johannes Mahr (York University)
It is a curious fact about human relationships that they are strongly past-oriented: when we consider the value and strength of our social relationships, we often think about their history rather than their future. This orientation to the past comes through particularly strongly in the phenomenon of joint reminiscing – the mutual sharing of memories of joint experiences.
From early childhood onwards, joint reminiscing functions as a form of ‘social glue’ – maintaining and strengthening social bonds. But why do we feel closer to each other after we’ve reminisced together than we did before?
In this post, I will try to provide an answer to this question. Importantly, most treatments of joint reminiscing have viewed it primarily as a form of memory. In contrast, I will treat joint reminiscing as first and foremost a communicative phenomenon.
The puzzle of joint reminiscing
What is puzzling about joint reminiscing is that it is not obvious what information is exchanged between conversation partners. When I ask you “Remember when we got lost and had to wait for two hours at that rainy bus stop in London?” I expect you to say something along the lines of “Yes, of course! And you didn’t even have a jacket with you!”
My reminding you and your response to me reminding you do not seem to be geared towards the provision of new information: I expect you to remember the bus stop episode just as you expect me to remember that I hadn’t brought a jacket.
More than that: if it should turn out that you couldn’t recall what I intended to remind you of, I would be irritated – which hints at the fact that I wasn’t necessarily trying to do remind you at all. But what was I trying to do then?
Here is one suggestion by the developmental psychologist Robyn Fivush and colleagues:
“Joint remembering, or reminiscing, serves a very special purpose, that of creating interpersonal bonds based on a sense of shared history. In the process of recounting, interpreting, and evaluating our experiences together, we are creating a shared understanding and representation of our world and the ways in which our lives are intertwined.”
There is no doubt something true about the first part of this statement: drawing attention to our joint past signals that we have a joint history and that this history is valued. Yet, rather than explaining the relational effects of joint reminiscing, this observation merely restates what is to be explained: why jointly reminiscing about a specific joint experience strengthens interpersonal bonds.
Beyond that, however, Fivush and colleagues emphasize the epistemic character of joint reminiscing. On their view, it creates a “shared understanding and representation of our world”. Along similar lines, others have emphasized that the appeal of memory sharing can be explained through people’s need to create a sense of ‘shared reality’ with each other.
This ‘epistemic’ perspective on joint reminiscing might well capture some aspects of it appropriately: we do often like to reassure ourselves of the sharedness of our beliefs and values. But this perspective does not, I think, fully account for the distinctively relational effects of joint reminiscing: my “Remember when…?” does not seem to be geared towards an explicit exchange of new information.
How ‘phatic’ is joint reminiscing?
In this respect, joint reminiscing shares some features with what the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski called ‘phatic communion’ (and what linguists since then have come to term ‘phatic communication’): “A type of speech in which ties of union are created by a mere exchange of words”. Phatic communication “serves to establish bonds of personal union between people brought together by the mere need of companionship and does not serve any purpose of communicating ideas”.
When I approach the grocery store clerk and say: “Nice weather today, isn’t it?”, what I’m saying is far less important to what I intend to convey than the fact that I’m saying something directly addressed at the clerk.
Drawing a parallel between phatic communication and joint reminiscing might strike you as surprising. After all, the prototypical example of phatic communication is small talk – which is in many ways the polar opposite of joint reminiscing. Small talk serves to establish the first vestiges of a relationship where there is no pre-existing affiliation. It signals that one is willing to at least invest the minimal amount of attention and time needed to communicate specifically with the other person.
Joint reminiscing is clearly different from small talk. In joint reminiscing it still matters what one is communicating about: a – likely emotional – jointly experienced past event. As linguists have pointed out, however, whether a given communicative act is phatic is not an all or nothing affair.
For example, take the perspective of Relevance Theory, which tries to explain how overtly communicative behaviors get their meaning. From this perspective, a communicative act is phatic to the extent that its main communicative effects are carried by the speaker’s intention to communicate rather than what they are trying to communicate. Since every overt communicative act signals a communicative intention, on this view, every communicative act is minimally phatic.
Rather than asking whether joint reminiscing is phatic, maybe we should therefore ask how phatic it is. My claim, then, is that joint reminiscing is ‘phatic’ at least in so far as important aspects of its relational effects are carried by the fact that it is about an emotional joint past experience – while it is secondary which exact experience that is.
Whether we reminisce about our joint experience at a London bus stop or our encounter with a beached whale on the Atlantic coast might not matter to whether it makes us feel closer to each other. But saying that joint reminiscing is phatic in this sense does not yet tell us what meaning is ultimately conveyed and how it creates its affiliative effects.
The relational meaning of joint reminiscing
The correct analysis of what is communicated in any given instance of joint reminiscing will depend on the specific context in which it occurs. Nonetheless, a few things seem to be germane to joint reminiscing in general. First, it’s clear, when initiating an episode of joint reminiscing (“Remember when…?”), a speaker intends to convey that they remember a jointly shared experience. Second, the speaker conveys that they intend to share in the recollection of that episode together with their conversation partner.
But why would this have distinctive relational effects? For these effects to occur, some mutual acknowledgment of affiliation – of valuing the other and their relationship – has to enter the picture. How does this happen?
A few things can be pointed out here: first, that some of the relational information conveyed in joint reminiscing seems to rely on the assumption that whatever one remembers carries information about what one values. Conveying that I remember an episode specifically involving us can be taken as evidence that I value us.
Second, re-experiencing together (through shared recollection) a past event in which we bonded might cause us to experience this bond again in the present. This also means that by signaling that I intend to bring to your mind an emotional, jointly experienced past episode, I convey that I would like to re-affirm my bond to you in the present.
Finally, much of our conception of social reality is historical (learn more about that here). All manner of entitlements, commitments, etc. depend for their perceived reality on a shared conception of history. And this is true for how we perceive the reality of social relationships, too. Drawing attention to the history of a relationship, then, can be read as intending to reaffirm the enduring reality of that relationship.
The relational character of communication
As mentioned above, joint reminiscing is often analyzed in epistemic terms – as an activity in which we are interested in acquiring or exchanging shared knowledge about the world. While the view I’ve presented is not in contradiction with this perspective, it shows that any epistemic motives involved in joint reminiscing are likely only secondary to its underlying relational motivators and effects. This is true in spite of the fact that nothing in an episode of joint reminiscing is explicitly about the present relationship.
Such implicit relational dynamics are, of course, not unique to joint reminiscing. Many other conversational behaviors seem at first blush to be ‘epistemic’ exchanges – directed at the world and our knowledge of it – while ‘implicitly’ concerning issues of mutual (dis)affiliation. Joint reminiscing is merely a particularly clear example in which affiliative motives and signals underlie communicative behaviors that might otherwise be easily mistaken as primarily oriented towards epistemic ends. So, the next time someone strikes up a conversation, remember that it might be a stronger gesture of care than you think.
